
Fazlur Khan: The engineer who made it possible to live in the sky - DaniFong
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fazlur_Khan
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rayiner
He's got a special place in my heart, as an engineer, a Bengali, and as
someone who loves Chicago and its architecture. Its worth visiting the Sears
Tower if you haven't. Its one of the great wonders of engineering and
architecture. They have an exhibit to Khan on the tour.

There is a story about him. He was visiting his native Bangladesh, and someone
asked him: "why don't you come back here?" He said: "I build skyscrapers, what
am I going to do here?"

What's really great about the Sears Tower is how you can see the bundled tube
structure in the exterior architecture:
[http://www.steelguru.com/uploads/reports/fea1-03-10-2010.jpg](http://www.steelguru.com/uploads/reports/fea1-03-10-2010.jpg)

The Burj Kalifa also:
[http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TIxCUNbAei8/T8p_3a2AHoI/AAAAAAAAAB...](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TIxCUNbAei8/T8p_3a2AHoI/AAAAAAAAABI/cc4iY2O7GVE/s1600/Burj_Khalifa_4.jpg)

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wglb
Turns out he did build one in Bangldesh.

I wasn't aware that he also did the Hancock building. While I was a student at
NU, I would take the L down and walk along Chicago Avenue to my part-time job
at the NU Medical School as the Hancock was being built. I still have some
Kodachrome slides of it as it was going up.

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rayiner
There's a great article on the design of the Hancock tower, which goes into
the reasons for the (now iconic) diagonal bracing:
[http://khan.princeton.edu/khanHancock.html](http://khan.princeton.edu/khanHancock.html).
During my time at NU, I lived right next to Onterie, which has architectural
diagonal bracing as a nod to Kahn's work on the Hancock tower.

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wglb
Nice.

At the time that the Hancock was going up, there were lots of Trib articles
about the engineering aspects of the braces.

Chicago does have such a great architectural examples. Matasano has offices in
the Monadnock building, at one time on the 18th floor of a 17 story building.
Marvelous building.

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andy_herbert
Very interesting, although is there a reason that it's been posted now?

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jmcmahon443
Because sometimes it's nice to see other people's success. It sure keeps me
going.

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andy_herbert
I appreciate the sentiment, and no disrespect for the guy either, but it makes
this site a little less like 'Hacker News' and more like the front page of
Wikipedia.

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adwf
Yeah I know what you mean. I sometimes start flagging the wikipedia articles
when there are too many on the front page. It really does feel odd when
there's too many, as if people are just desperate for karma (a la reddit).

I'm not saying that they shouldn't be on hackernews exactly... but I wish
people would at least write up a blogpost or find a news article about a
subject, rather than just posting wikipedia pages directly.

