Fazlur Khan was an Asian American engineer. He designed very tall buildings. His ideas changed the way people build skyscrapers.
Khan was born on April 3, 1929. He was born in what is now Bangladesh. Khan studied engineering. Then he moved to the United States and studied some more. He got a job in Chicago in 1955. His job was designing skyscrapers and other kinds of buildings.
Extra-tall buildings called super skyscrapers were popular. But they cost a lot of money to build. Khan wanted to find a better way to build them. He looked at tubes of bamboo. He thought about how the shape of the tubes made the plant strong. Then he thought of a way to use that shape to help hold up a tall building. Khan believed that using tubes in the building would make it lighter. It would also make the building cost less money to build.
Khan and his team turned his idea into reality. They used a tube structure to build the Sears Tower in Chicago. It had 110 stories. That made it the tallest building in the world when it was finished in 1973. Today it is called the Willis Tower. It is no longer the tallest building in the world, but it’s still the tallest building in Chicago.
What Do You Think? Ask an adult to help you find pictures of some of Khan’s other buildings. Which one do you like best?
Photo Credit: Jonathan Weiss/Alamy Stock Photo
