Review of Engineering Architecture: The Vision of Fazlur R. Khan by Yasmin Sabina Khan: 2004; W.W. Norton and Co., New York; 416 pp.; 200 illustrations; $55

Here is a book that will make you proud to be a part of the design/construction community. Engineering Architecture is an inspiring biography—the life story of Fazlur R. Khan, one of the most talented and innovative structural engineers of the twentieth century (Fig. 1).

Much has been written about Fazlur Khan’s technical contributions, but this book is uniquely illuminating. It is written by Khan’s daughter, Yasmin Sabina Khan (Fig. 2), herself an accomplished structural engineer. The author’s technical qualifications, thoughtful research, and skilled writing should, by themselves, establish Engineering Architecture as an essential volume in the library of every architect and structural engineer. What makes this book such compelling reading, however, is the underlying motivation for the author’s work—a special relationship between a warm, attentive father and an admiring daughter. More than simply an account of professional accomplishments, this book is a tribute to human relationships, as represented by a most extraordinary man.

Over the course of the next decade Khan’s accomplishments in high-rise design and his keen understanding of structures earned him regard in the engineering and architecture professions as one of the most influential structural engineers of the twentieth century. In 1965, a time when buildings of 40 stories drew attention even in the largest urban areas, he introduced a bold trussed-tube scheme for a 100-story tower, Chicago’s John Hancock Center. Five years later, he developed another advanced building system, the bundled tube, for the 110-story Sears Tower, which would seize the title of “world’s tallest building” in 1974 and retain it for the next 22 years.

 Progressive in their day, the structural systems that Khan developed and initiated in his design projects are today counted among the conventional structural types available to design professionals. Each new structural type responded to the program requirements of a particular design project; yet, by addressing fundamental problems and adhering to basic structural principles, Khan conceived solutions of broad application that now seem inevitable. He strove for judicious use of structural materials, employing them in such a way as to achieve the strength and stiffness required for supertall building construction without requiring premium for height. In contrast, the skyscrapers built during the previous building boom, in the 1920s and early 1930s, had depended upon a “skeleton” framing system that necessitated disproportionately high construction costs as building heights rose. As a consequence, it had become an understood fact of design—accepted among the general public as well as in the engineering profession—that buildings inevitably cost more per unit floor area with increasing height. In the 1960s and 1970s, the tubular structural systems that Khan developed would disprove this misconception with dramatically improved frameworks for supertall building construction.

Khan was fortunate to find himself in a time and place receptive to his personal philosophy regarding design collaboration. Chicago architecture had a proud tradition of reconciled structure and building architecture, of architectural expression of structure, and of pragmatism, as opposed to formal academic tradition. Though a dichotomy between the disciplines of architecture and engineering had prevailed in the 1920s and 1930s, by the 1950s their integration was gaining stature—in theory, at least—in large part due to the influence of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who practiced architecture in Chicago and taught at IIT.

From the start, Khan set about engendering an office environment at SOM that promoted both innovation in the engineering group and collaboration between the engineering and architecture departments. His appreciation of the needs and ambitions of architecture facilitated meaningful dialogue with colleagues, a dialogue that was essential to informing his own intellectual investigations. Within a short time he gained both architects’ and engineers’ confidence through his knowledge of engineering matters and the relevance of his ideas on architecture. As his aesthetic and contextual sensibilities strengthened, he came to fully participate in architectural discourse, while bringing to it a fresh perspective with broadening influence. With Bruce J. Graham, a partner in SOM and chief design architect in the Chicago office, he established a level of communication that evolved into a fruitful and enduring partnership. Graham perceived vitality in building forms expressive of their structural character, and his openness to structure as the organizing theme for building architecture inspired Khan to strive for structural systems that were not only structurally efficient but also worthy of becoming the core idea on which architectural design could center.

Fazlur Rahman Khan was, without question, one of a kind. He was utterly brilliant but without artifice, and as far as I am concerned, he was the conscience of SOM. His morality was beyond reproach, and there was absolutely no soapbox oratory to it. He was as self-effacing as I am not, and our friendship—odd couple that it was—always made me feel better (actually, I think he had that effect on everyone with whom he came in contact).

In a career of forward movement, Khan was continually driven to search out further improvement and to develop greater insight into structural behavior. His explorations were not limited to any one structural material. Following an early concentration in prestressed concrete, he designed his first high rise in conventional reinforced concrete; he then turned to structural steel for the John Hancock Center. In the 1970s, he borrowed from bridge design to develop a cable-stayed roof structure; created a sophisticated tensile structure for the Hajj Terminal at the airport in Jeddah; and investigated vernacular construction for a university campus in the desert climate of Saudi Arabia. As an adjunct professor and master’s thesis advisor at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) he studied precast concrete and masonry for application in tall building construction…

When Khan began work on high-rise design in 1961, engineers relied on a handful of structural systems that were ill equipped to resist wind load and control sway in buildings over 25 to 30 stories. A decade later, the design profession possessed an array of structural systems, the majority of which Khan had developed; systems such as the framed tube, the tube-in-tube, the optimum column-diagonal-truss tube and the diagonalized framed tube, the belt truss interaction system, and the bundled tube. In his affirmation of the logic of combining structural steel and reinforced concrete in a composite system, the range of structural organization for efficient and economical tall building design gained yet greater breadth. By the 1980s the notion of a composite system was fully accepted and widely implemented in supertall building construction. His consistent insight and intellectual vigor would undoubtedly have led him to develop structural systems to meet the evolving needs of building construction, had he lived to see the resumption of development activity in the 1980s.

As a child growing up, I never realized how distracting my father’s life outside our home might have been; that is, if he had allowed it to be so. Instead, I felt that he was consistently attentive, affectionate, and good-natured… My friends (one of whom still refers to him as “dad”) felt his warmth as well…

I knew that my father had designed the John Hancock Center and the Sears Tower, buildings that I saw often. And occasionally, when I was out with him, a stranger would approach and thank him for a talk he had given somewhere. I had heard him speak to groups myself. Yet none of this changed my view of him. He was my father, and he had always been everything that I wanted from a father.