Fazlur Rahman Khan

Fazlur Rahman Khan (3 April 1929 – 27 March 1982) was a Bangladeshi-American structural engineer, regarded as the founding figure of modern skyscraper engineering through his tubular structural systems, which earned him the names "father of tubular designs", "the Einstein of structural engineering" and "the greatest structural engineer of the 20th century". ^{1 2}

His systems carried towers that reshaped city skylines: the 100-storey John Hancock Center in Chicago, the Sears Tower — the world's tallest building from 1973 to 1998 — and the Hajj terminal at King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah, roofed with giant tent-like tensile structures. ¹

Khan was born in Dhaka and grew up in the village of Bhandarikandi in Faridpur District, in a Bengali Muslim family. His father, Khan Bahadur Abdur Rahman Khan, was a mathematics teacher and textbook author who became Director of Public Instruction in Bengal and, after retirement, the first principal of Jagannath College in Dhaka; his mother was Khadijah Khatun. ^{1 2}

He attended Armanitola Government High School in Dhaka, studied civil engineering at Bengal Engineering and Science University in Shibpur, and took his Bachelor of Civil Engineering at Ahsanullah Engineering College (now the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology). ¹

In 1952 he travelled to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship and a government scholarship, and at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign he completed two master's degrees — in structural engineering and in theoretical and applied mechanics — and a PhD in structural engineering within three years, with a thesis on rectangular prestressed concrete beams. ¹

He joined the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) in 1955, became a partner in 1966, worked closely alongside the architect Bruce Graham, and spent his whole career at the firm, rising to general partner. ¹

He was also a pioneer of computer-aided design: he lobbied the SOM partners to buy a mainframe computer at an early date, making the firm one of the first engineering practices to bring computing into structural design. ¹

His guiding image came from the bamboo of Dhaka: just as a hollow bamboo stem resists the wind through its walls, a tall building can carry its loads in hollow perimeter walls rather than dense internal columns. The first building to apply his framed tube was the DeWitt-Chestnut Apartments in Chicago in 1963; the same concept underlay the World Trade Center in New York. ¹

For the John Hancock Center (engineered in 1965) he used the trussed tube with X-bracing, bringing steel consumption down to 145 kg per square metre, against 206 for the Empire State Building and 275 for One Chase Manhattan Plaza. For the Sears Tower he used the bundled tube — nine tubes locked together — making its 110 storeys the tallest building in the world from 1973 to 1998. ¹

His other systems include the tube-in-tube, first used in One Shell Plaza (the concept later used in the Petronas Towers), the outrigger and belt truss at BHP House and then the First Wisconsin Center in Milwaukee, and shear-wall frame interaction in the Brunswick Building (1965), then the tallest reinforced-concrete structure of its time. ¹

Beyond skyscrapers he designed the Hajj terminal at King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah (completed 1981), whose tent-like tensile roofs won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture as an "outstanding contribution to architecture for Muslims"; the McMath–Pierce solar telescope; King Abdulaziz University; the US Air Force Academy; the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome; and, with Graham, the Baxter Travenol cable-stayed roof. ^{1 2}

When the Bangladesh Liberation War broke out in 1971, Khan worked to shape public opinion and raise emergency funding for Bengali people, founding the Chicago-based Bangladesh Emergency Welfare Appeal. ¹

This section reports descriptions and judgements carried by the sources; they are not the museum's verdict.

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat credited Khan, more than any other individual, with announcing a renaissance in skyscraper construction in the second half of the twentieth century, and named its lifetime achievement medal the Fazlur Khan Lifetime Achievement Medal after him. ^{1 2}

President Barack Obama named him in his 2009 Cairo speech among examples of Muslim American achievement, and Google marked his 88th birthday with a Doodle on 3 April 2017. ¹

He was Engineering News-Record's Man of the Year in 1972 and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1973. His awards include the Wason Medal (1971), the Thomas Middlebrooks Award (1972), the Kimbrough Medal (1973), the Oscar Faber Medal (1973), the Ernest Howard Award (1977), the IABSE International Award of Merit (1983), the AIA Institute Honor (1983), the John Parmer Award (1987, posthumous) and induction into the Illinois Engineering Hall of Fame (2006). ¹

He received honorary doctorates from Northwestern University, Lehigh University and ETH Zürich; Lehigh endowed a chair in his name; a life-cycle civil engineering medal bears his name; and his personal papers are held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries of the Art Institute of Chicago as the Fazlur Khan Collection. ¹

He married Liselotte, an immigrant from Austria; their daughter was born in 1960. He became a United States citizen in 1967, and he loved singing Rabindranath Tagore's songs in Bengali. ¹

He died of a heart attack in Jeddah on 27 March 1982, aged 52, while on a work trip as a general partner of SOM; his body was returned to the United States and buried in Graceland Cemetery, Chicago. ¹

The tubular systems Khan invented remain the basis of most tall-building design worldwide, and his life is studied in engineering schools; among the books on him is Mir M. Ali's Art of the Skyscraper: The Genius of Fazlur Khan (Rizzoli, 2001), and a documentary on his life, Reaching New Heights, has been in production since 2021. ^{1 3}

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