Engineering Architecture: The Vision of Fazlur R. Khan (review)

Yasmin Sabina Khan has written an engaging intellectual biography of her father, the acclaimed civil engineer Fazlur Rahman Khan (1929–82). As a structural engineer herself, she is well able to discuss F. R. Khan's important contributions to skyscraper design for nearly thirty years, from his student days in the 1950s at the University of Illinois through his long association with the architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM). She concludes that Khan's engineering and mathematical brilliance was matched by his social sensitivity and love of the arts, elevating his structural solutions to systems that shaped "the overall design of the buildings in which they were implemented—and they were worthy of doing so" (p. 379.)

This lengthy book is rich with ideas relevant to historians of technology. Best known for his inventive solutions for tall and super-tall buildings, such as Chicago's Sears Tower (SOM, 1974), F. R. Khan's innovations are treated in considerable detail: the framed tube, the trussed tube, the tube-in-tube, the bundled tube, and other awkwardly phrased solutions, such as the "split diagonalized framed tube" (p. 348). The author provides some context for most of these skyscraper projects, although the technical fine points often obscure the broader perspective of urban and technological histories. While the engineering discussions are beyond the level of an undergraduate structures major at my institution, Khan's writing outside of those analyses is lucid and fascinating.

Fazlur Khan's career demonstrated the productive possibilities of collaboration, within the same firm, between academics and practitioners and building clients and engineers, and among professional associations, trade groups, computers, contractors, and designers. Many of the projects with which Khan was involved were experimental in terms of height, new materials, and/or cultural expectations. The author amply demonstrates, for example, the risk-taking of client Gerald D. Hines in underwriting testing, construction, and evaluation of the novel methods used for his real estate investments. In 1966, Khan recommended to Hines a tube-in-tube structural design in reinforced lightweight concrete for One Shell Plaza in Houston (SOM, 1969), even though the guidelines for this type of concrete were not available until the following year. Soil and structure interactions in foundation design were also not well-understood, and Khan and his colleagues persuaded Hines to fund "a research-oriented endeavor that would be useful to future . . . design" by installing measuring devices in and under the foundation (p. 156).

Another of this book's themes concerns the ways in which creative ideas are generated and developed. By teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), Fazlur Khan was able to "examin[e] concepts in detail, removed from the pressure of a design practice," with his students (p. 55). In devising the solution that became the braced tubular cantilever, Khan imagined the entire structure, saying: "I put myself in the place of a whole building, feeling every part" (p. 90). Khan's 1975 participation in the hajj, which was followed by consultations on the Hajj Airport Terminal in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (SOM, 1980), underscores the importance of sensitive religious and cultural investigations in arriving at appropriate and compelling designs.

Y. S. Khan began work on this book in 1996. She chose an excellent variety of illustrations and drew extensively on interviews, archival material, and published works. (She lists Fazlur Khan's published work on pp. 404–7.) Oddly, though, she only mentions in her preface the other monograph on Khan, Mir M. Ali's Art of the Skyscraper: The Genius of Fazlur Khan (Rizzoli, 2001), leaving it out of her otherwise thorough bibliography. This oversight aside, Khan's carefully researched work contributes substantially to the literature on mid-twentieth-century large-scale building. She furthers what her father identified as a necessary critique: "[N]ot until a broader reassessment of the urban environment and of architecture's role in providing for human needs . . . was undertaken would 'the evolution of tall structures achieve its right place...