Fazlur Khan

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Fazlur Rahman Khan ( Bengali : ফজলুর রহমান খান Phajalur Rahamān Khān ; born April 3, 1929 in Faridpur ; † March 27, 1982 ) was a Bengali- American civil engineer and architect . He worked as an engineer and structural engineer in the Chicago architecture firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM). His structural concepts not only influenced high-rise construction, but also the architecture of the 20th century in the USA.

Life

Sears Tower completed in 1974

Khan was born in Faridpur near Dhaka in what is now Bangladesh . He studied civil engineering at Ahsanullah Engineering College . After graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1950 as the best in his class, he taught for two years at the University of Dhaka . He then went to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship to obtain a master's degree in mechanics and structural engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . In 1955 he also obtained his PhD there . This was followed by two years as an employee at SOM in Chicago , the largest architecture and engineering office in the USA, before he returned to his home country and worked there for about three years. In 1960, Khan returned to SOM in Chicago and made a career in the office. After working for ten years, he became “General Partner” in 1970. He supervised over forty projects and also taught at the Illinois Institute of Technology . Khan had received honorary doctorates from Northwestern University , Lehigh University and the ETH Zurich, as well as the Award of Merit in Structural Engineering in 1982.

Khan was married with a daughter and a stepson. He died in 1982 at the age of 52 of complications from a heart attack that he suffered in Saudi Arabia . There he was in charge of the tent roof construction of the Hajj Terminal at Jeddah Airport , the largest roof construction in the world with a total area of ​​40.5 hectares.

Services

Khan developed support systems for high-rise buildings in particular, such as the perforated tubes. The load-bearing facade of the high-rise buildings is used to carry the wind loads, while the interior supports are only dimensioned for vertical loads. This reduced the cost of materials and increased the usable area. Together with the architect Bruce J. Graham from SOM, he designed, among other things, the John Hancock Center with a conical steel framework tube and the Sears Tower , consisting of nine bundled tubes of different heights.

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