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.