
How an Immigrant from Bangladesh Became America's Master Builder - miraj
http://hackaday.com/2016/02/09/fazlur-khan-americas-master-builder/
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rayiner
> No building style better represented America’s industriousness, monomaniacal
> greed, disregard of tradition, and eagerness to attempt feats that more
> established cultures considered obscene. And while those indelicate traits
> prompted Americans to develop the skyscraper, it was our openness and
> multiculturalism that brought us our greatest skyscraper builder: a
> Bangladeshi Muslim immigrant named Fazlur Rahman Khan.

What an offensive article. Highlight the characteristic ("Muslim immigrant")
that have nothing to do with why Khan is famous, while ragging on what was his
life's work. There is a great, possibly apocryphal, story about Khan. He was
in Bangladesh and someone asked him "why don't you come back here now that
you're successful?" He replied: "I build skyscrapers for a living, what am I
going to do here?"

That aside, taking the Chicago architecture tour and visiting the Sears Tower
is a quasi-religious experience for an engineer. This guy built a skyscraper
that was the tallest in the world for more than two decades. He practiced
architecture in a city where people just did stuff like that: reverse the
course of a river, raise all of downtown a couple of stories, build
skyscrapers with floating foundations in soft soil, hang a building from a
truss because they only bought the air rights over some rail tracks, etc. You
leave with the overwhelming sense that these are people who built a high-
density skyscraper city in a midwestern state with cheap land as far as the
eye can see just because they could.

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bcrotan
Uh the article seems pretty effusive in its praise for tall buildings. It also
had two words about his faith and 2500 about his engineering abilities. It's
fine if you didn't read it.

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surlyadopter
"He eventually convinced the owner to leave the braces in place by using an
engineer’s most powerful rhetorical device: purposefully indecipherable
technical jargon intended to confuse the other party into submission. Khan got
his way, and the top tier diagonals were built."

I love it.

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SilasX
Why is that something to be proud of? If that works for a good idea, it would
work for a scummy, fly-by-night idea too. And in my hell, there's a special
place for deliberately obscure their own field.

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jxramos
I'm not entirely sure he approves of it but its comedic nonetheless and
certainly happens.

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JBReefer
>No building style better represented America’s industriousness, monomaniacal
greed, disregard of tradition, and eagerness to attempt feats that more
established cultures considered obscene. And while those indelicate traits
prompted Americans to develop the skyscraper...

The article is good, but that tainted my view. Cheap edginess is
intellectually lazy, not to mention those "cultural traits" have nothing to do
with why the first very tall buildings were in the US.

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Flammy
> Wframeshen wind pushes up against the side of a building, the structure will
> have a tendency to bend. In order to resist this bending, the building must
> have a certain rigidity or it would flop over like an Italian soccer player.

Randomly... shots fired

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jamaly
The single biggest reason why America has been such a great nation, comes down
to its openness and its willingness to embrace change.

If these two values are hampered in any way, then America's decline is
inevitable.

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danharaj
> The single biggest reason why America has been such a great nation, comes
> down to its openness and its willingness to embrace change.

Like that one time they abolished slavery peacefully instead of fighting a
bloody civil war.

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aadilmaan
And they say immigrants have no value...

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USANEEDSHELP
Legal immigrants

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krapp
An immigrant's value has no relationship to their legal status.

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mc32
On average the ones without proper docs are lower educated and obviously take
bottom tier jobs.

Legal immigrants tend to be college/uni educated and are able to enter higher
paying jobs and some contribute to R&D. Many countries have some EDU
requirements or some monetary requirements for fast track legal immigration.
It's not unusual.

Now, back when the while world was mostly physical labor, things were
different.

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peejaybee
Oh, man, the comments section on that article is a dog's breakfast.

