Fazlur Khan
Fazlur Rahman Khan ( Bengali: ফজলুর রহমান খান Phajalur Rahaman Khān; born April 3, 1929 in Faridpur, † 27 March 1982) was a Bengali -American civil engineer and architect. He worked as an engineer and structural engineer in the Chicago architectural firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM ). Its structural concepts influenced not only high-rise construction, but in the U.S. the architecture of the 20th century.
Life
Khan was born in Faridpur near Dhaka in what is now Bangladesh. He studied Civil Engineering at Ahsanullah Engineering College. After completing his bachelor's degree in 1950 as valedictorian, he taught for two years at the University of Dhaka. He then went on a Fulbright scholarship in the U.S. to attain at the University of Illinois at Urbana -Champaign in mechanics and constructive civil engineering master's degree. In 1955 he acquired there also the PhD. It was followed by two years as a clerk at SOM in Chicago, the largest architecture and engineering firm in the U.S., before he returned to his home and there was about three years freelance. 1960 Kakan began to work in Chicago for SOM and made in the office career. After ten years of collaboration 1970 he was the "General Partner". Over forty projects he supervised and taught the way at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Khan was honored among other honorary doctorate from Northwestern University, Lehigh University and the ETH Zurich and in 1982 with the Award of Merit in Structural Engineering.
Khan was married and had a daughter and a stepson. He died in 1982 at the age of 52 years to a heart attack he suffered in Saudi Arabia. There, he handled in Jeddah the tent roof construction of the Haj terminals, with 40.5 hectares total, the largest roof structure in the world.
Services
Khan developed particular structural systems for high-rise buildings, such as the perforated tubes. The load-bearing facade of high-rise buildings will be used for the removal of the wind loads, while the inner columns are only designed for vertical loads. This allowed the cost of materials reduced and the land is increased. Together with the architect Bruce Graham of SOM he designed among other things, the John Hancock Center with a tapered steel truss tube and the Sears Tower, at a height of nine different graded bundled tubes consisting.