Fazlur Rahman Khan, also called the “Einstein of Civil Engineering” and the “Greatest Civil Engineer of the 20th Century”, was a Bangladeshi-American civil engineer and architect. He is known for his innovations in structural systems for skyscrapers. He is also a pioneer of computer-aided design.
This brilliant engineer was born on 3rd April 1929 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He hailed from and grew up in Khan Bari of Bhandarikandi in Madaripur, Faridpur. His father, Khan Bahadur Abdur Rahman Khan, was a high school mathematics teacher and textbook author who eventually became the director of public instruction in Bengal and served as the first principal of Jagannath College after his retirement. His mother, Khadijah Khatun, was the daughter of Abdul Basit Chowdhury, Zamindar of Dulai in Pabna.
He attended Armanitola Government High School in Dhaka. He then studied civil engineering at Bengal Engineering and Science University, Shibpur (now Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur) India. He then earned a Bachelor of Civil Engineering degree from Ahsanullah Engineering College (now Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology). He received a Fulbright scholarship and a government scholarship that enabled him to travel to the United States in 1952. There he studied at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. In three years, Khan earned two master’s degrees—one in civil engineering and one in theoretical and applied mechanics—and a doctorate in civil engineering.
His hometown in Dhaka had no buildings higher than three stories. He didn’t see his first skyscraper in person until he was 21, and didn’t step inside the mid-rise until he moved to the United States for graduate school. In spite of this, the environment of his hometown in Dhaka later influenced his concept of pipeline construction, which was inspired by the bamboo that sprouted around Dhaka. He found that a hollow tube, like the bamboo in Dhaka, imparts high vertical resistance.
In 1955, employed by the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), he began working in Chicago. He became a partner in 1966. He worked side by side with fellow architect Bruce Graham for the rest of his life. Khan presented design methods and concepts for efficient use of material in building architecture. His first building to use tube construction was the Chestnut De-Witt apartment building During the 1960s and 1970s, he became famous for his designs of Chicago’s 100-story John Hancock Center and the 110-story Sears Tower, renamed the Willis Tower, the tallest building in the world from 1973 to 1998.
He believed that engineers needed a broader view of life and said, “The technical man must not lose himself in his own technology; he must be able to appreciate life, and life is art, drama, music and, above all, people.”
Khan’s personal papers, most of which were in his office at the time of his death, are held by the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Fazlur Khan Collection includes manuscripts, sketches, audio tapes, slides and other materials related to his work.
Khan’s central innovation in skyscraper design and construction was the idea of a “tube” construction system for tall buildings, including frame tube, truss tube and compound tube variants. His “tube concept”, using the entire perimeter structure of a building’s exterior wall to simulate a thin-walled tube, revolutionized the design of tall buildings. Most buildings over 40 stories built since the 1960s now use a tube design derived from Khan’s building principles. Besides, Onterie Center, McMath–Pierce Solar Telescope, Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome etc are the innovations by Fazlur Rahman Khan. The modern buildings are also the outcome of the structural designs by Khan.
Khan died of a heart attack on 27 March 1982 during a trip in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, at the age of 52, at which time he was a general partner of SOM. His contribution is and will always be remembered around the world.
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K M Jahin
Intern,
Content Writing Department,
YSSE