Fazlur Rahman Khan big lego skyscraper3/16/2024 ![]() ![]() This innovation made Fazlur Khan one of the most influential structural engineers of the 20 th century, and it continues to this day. Khan from SOM, and these nine tubes formed the skyscraper’s basic structure. The “bundled-tube” configuration was innovated by engineer Fazlur R. The different heights allow for the building to step back, meeting setback regulations and creating the iconic staggering effect that the building is known for. SOM proposed a superstructure of nine interlocking tubes of varying heights, divided in 75′ x 75′ squares that are separate buildings joined together as one. The company analyzed their current spacial needs, as well as the space needed for growth up to the year 2003 being as meticulous as determining the number of desks for personnel. The height of the building is due to spacial needs. The building is 108 stories tall, rising 1,450 feet above the city. The design also had to incorporate extra office space for the anticipated future growth of the company. Architect Bruce Graham led the team alongside structural engineer Fazlur Rehman Khan. Sears, Roebuck, & Company commissioned the architecture firm Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill to design an office building that would house their headquarters and the many offices they had scattered around Chicago in one building. Beyond these records, the tower is also notable for its tube frame structural design which has revolutionized skyscraper design and made possible the structures we see today. Known as the Sears Tower for most of its existence, it held the record for the world’s tallest building from 1974 to 1998, almost 25 years, and held the record for the tallest building in the western hemisphere for about 41 years. Some argue it was these very multitudes that allowed Khan to ultimately make his mark - to see what others couldn’t see - on design and architecture that persists to this day, far after his untimely death at age 52 in 1982.Willis tower is today the most iconic presence in Chicago’s famous skyline. He identified as Bengali, Bangladeshi, of the Indian subcontinent, Muslim, American, a dad, a husband, a son, a friend, a teacher. “I visualize the stresses and twisting a building undergoes.” For Khan, design and engineering were intrinsically human- and culture-focused. “I put myself in the place of a whole building, feeling every part,” Khan once said. “He became the building,” one of his friends wrote in memoriam. On the other hand, for Khan, aesthetic design and structural engineering were as easy as breathing. In fact, whenever Fazlur went to spend vacation with some of his relatives, his father would always send along a letter with exact instructions on how to deal with him.” As a child, Khan “often displayed his temper and stubbornness. Close friends described him as a “man who had no enemies,” and his wife lovingly shared that his warm temperament was something that he had to work on. He was born to a mathematics teacher and went to nearby colleges in Dhaka and Calcutta, before earning a Fulbright to study in the U.S., where he earned two masters, in structural engineering as well as theoretical and applied mathematics. Khan was born in a village near Dhaka, in present-day Bangladesh, but which was then part of undivided Bengal, India in 1929. The man behind it? Fazlur Rahman Khan, a Bangladeshi American structural engineer who changed architecture and design across the world, forever. The building’s innovative steel tubular frame paved the way for the modern, mixed-use, and very tall skyscrapers we know today. It wasn’t until 1970, nearly 40 years later, that someone would engineer the second building in the world to reach 100 stories that was light, strong, and elegant: the John Hancock Center in Chicago. ![]() Architects had used 210 concrete and steel beams, which had also made the building prohibitively expensive. The Empire State Building, built in 1931, was 102 stories tall - the tallest building in the world at the time - but dense. In the construction of gravity-defying tall buildings, efficiency matters. ![]()
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