Fazlur Rahman Khan
person · earth · Chicago, Illinois
Bangladeshi-American structural engineer at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in Chicago whose tubular structural systems are the intellectual bridge between the 19th-century steel frame and the modern supertall tower. Khan's insight was that a tall building resists wind most efficiently if its entire perimeter acts as a single hollow cantilever - a tube - rather than as a set of independent braced frames, and he developed the framed tube, the trussed tube and the bundled tube from that idea. The John Hancock Center and the Sears (now Willis) Tower in Chicago are the built demonstrations. He also argued explicitly for choosing a structural system by height band rather than applying one system at every scale, which is the reasoning behind later systems including the buttressed core used at Burj Khalifa by the same firm. He died in 1982, long before the supertall era his work made possible.
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Timeline
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Connections · 1
- Burj Khalifainfluenced
Assembled narrative · 1
Assembled from 15 blocks · 1 evidence · 15 related
- Story
- Bangladeshi-American structural engineer at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in Chicago whose tubular structural systems are the intellectual bridge between the 19th-century steel frame and the modern supertall tower. Khan's insight was that a tall building resists wind most efficiently if its entire perimeter acts as a single hollow cantilever - a tube - rather than as a set of independent braced frames, and he developed the framed tube, the trussed tube and the bundled tube from that idea. The John Hancock Center and the Sears (now Willis) Tower in Chicago are the built demonstrations. He also argued explicitly for choosing a structural system by height band rather than applying one system at every scale, which is the reasoning behind later systems including the buttressed core used at Burj Khalifa by the same firm. He died in 1982, long before the supertall era his work made possible.
- Knowledge
- Burj Khalifa
- Fazlur Rahman Khan
- Connections
- Burj Khalifa
- Great Pyramid of Giza (Pyramid of Khufu)
- Load path
- The safety elevator
- Reinforced concrete
- Fazlur Rahman Khan
- Burj Khalifa opens at 828 m
- Evidence
- Standard structural history of Chicago commercial building, including the composition of the Home Insurance Building frame as established when the building was demolished in 1931, and the qualifications attached to the "first skyscraper" claim. V55 verification basis: real and standard, not consulted in this session.
Observed changes · 0
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