Fazlur Rahman Khan

Fazlur Rahman Khan was born April 3, 1929, in Dhaka, then part of British India, the son of a mathematics teacher who later ran public instruction across Bengal and steered his son toward engineering. Khan finished first in his class at Ahsanullah Engineering College, and in 1952 crossed the world on a Fulbright and a Pakistani government scholarship to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he earned two master's degrees and a doctorate in structural engineering within three years. He joined Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in Chicago in 1955, an immigrant engineer at a firm that had never made one a partner, and became a U.S. citizen in 1967.

Steel-frame skyscrapers had traditionally braced themselves with an internal skeleton, using more material as they rose. Khan's insight, developed through the 1960s with architect Bruce Graham, was to let the entire exterior wall act as a hollow tube resisting wind, so floors could be framed with far less steel. The framed tube debuted at Chicago's DeWitt-Chestnut Apartments in 1963, the trussed tube, with its visible diagonal X-bracing, produced the John Hancock Center in 1969, and the bundled tube, a cluster of nine linked structural shafts, produced the Sears Tower in 1973, at the time the tallest building on Earth. Made a general partner at SOM in 1970, the first engineer to hold that title there, Khan also engineered the tensile fabric roof of Jeddah's Hajj Terminal, opened in 1981 to move a million pilgrims a year.

Khan's tube system let engineers build taller for less material and less money, and by his own account that was the point — cheaper structure meant more floors that ordinary tenants, not only the wealthiest firms, could afford. But the buildings his system enabled reshaped cities in ways he did not fully control: office towers using his methods rose across American downtowns just as urban renewal was already emptying those same downtowns of residents and street-level retail, concentrating activity in single, defensible high-rises rather than dispersing it. He also worked past what his body could sustain, still commuting between Chicago and Jeddah on Hajj Terminal business into his fifties despite a known heart condition, a workload that caught up with him mid-project.

Khan died of a heart attack on March 27, 1982, in Jeddah, at fifty-two, while still overseeing the Hajj Terminal, and is buried at Chicago's Graceland Cemetery, near the architects of the earlier Chicago School whose tradition he extended. Most buildings over 40 stories raised since the 1960s use some variant of the tube systems he worked out, from Kuala Lumpur to Shanghai, a debt city skylines owe him more visibly than they credit him. The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat named its highest honor the Fazlur Khan Lifetime Achievement Medal, and in 2009 President Obama cited him, in a speech in Cairo, as an example of Muslim contribution to American life.

Fazlur Rahman Khan's life against the full span of the corpus.

• DeWitt-Chestnut Apartments building
  First application of the framed tube system 1963
• John Hancock Center building
  Trussed tube with exposed diagonal X-bracing 1969
• Sears Tower building
  Bundled tube design — tallest building in the world until 1998 1973
• Hajj Terminal building
  Tensile fabric roof at King Abdulaziz International Airport, Jeddah 1981

• April 3, 1929 aged 0 Born in Dhaka, British India
• 1951 aged ~22 Graduates first in his class from Ahsanullah Engineering College
• 1952 aged ~23 Travels to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship
• 1955 aged ~26 Joins Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in Chicago
• 1963 aged ~34 The framed tube system debuts at DeWitt-Chestnut Apartments
• 1969 aged ~40 John Hancock Center is completed
• 1973 aged ~44 Sears Tower is completed and becomes the world's tallest building
• March 27, 1982 aged 52 Dies of a heart attack in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

• Othmar Ammann 1879–1965
  Swiss-American structural engineer who designed the George Washington Bridge and other major spans. contemporary of
• Louis Sullivan 1856–1924
  Architect whose skyscraper designs and “form follows function” principle helped define modern architecture. extended the tradition of
• Buckminster Fuller 1895–1983
  Popularized the geodesic dome and promoted resource-efficient structural design. paralleled
• I. M. Pei 1917–2019
  Architect whose monumental modern buildings reshaped American civic and cultural architecture. contemporary of