Fazlur Khan - Pushing the Limits: New Adventures in Engineering - page 107

the thirty-three pounds per square foot of steel that was used. Indeed, had the bundled tubular con-
figuration not been employed in the Sears Tower, he estimated that ten million dollars' worth of
additional steel would have been necessary to stiffen the $150 million structure.
By the early 1970s, other engineers had adopted Khan's tubular principle, and it was used in four
of the five then-tallest buildings in the world, which included, in addition to Khan's two Chicago
skyscrapers, the conventionally framed Empire State Building, the Standard Oil Building in Chica-
go, and the World Trade Center in New York, the two towers of which were then under construc-
tion. More recent applications of a modified tubular principle include the Bank of China Building
in Hong Kong and the record-setting Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
The economic expansion that brought some of the tallest skyscrapers to the Far East might have
surprised Fazlur Khan, who like many of his contemporaries and predecessors found opportunities
in the United States that did not exist in their native countries at the time. In a story on foreign-born
engineers that appeared in Civil Engineering in 1980, both Khan and the bridge engineer T. Y. Lin
were quoted as saying that they settled in America because it gave them the opportunity to work in
a context of high technology and theory rather than relying primarily on experience to design and
build structures.
The subjects of the article were also asked to what they attributed the success of foreign-born
engineers in America. Khan, no doubt thinking of his own experience, thought it had to do with the
fact that many of the more successful ones came from “fairly aggressive, educationally privileged
backgrounds,” had already endured tough competition in their own countries, and had had the ambi-
tion to come to America in the first place. He likened them to “pioneers who opened the American
West” and thought that “here their competitive and innovative inclinations flower—they have more
freedom to achieve what they want to do.” Lin speculated that there might be a high number of
successful Asian civil engineers in the United States because “in the developing nations, the more
challenging conditions force them to think creatively, to apply new theories to ancient materials and
methods.” The structural engineer Anton Tedesko, who was educated in Austria, believed that in the
years before World War II, at least, civil-engineering education was simply better in Europe than in
America, with the exception of a few schools, such as those in Berkeley and Urbana.
The years since the war have seen a change in engineering education in America, however, and a
graduate degree from an American institution is widely considered to have become the world stand-
ard. Indeed, it is often American-born and American-educated structural engineers who now take
leading roles in building some of the most innovative skyscrapers in the Far East. The New York
engineer Leslie Robertson is credited with the structural engineering of the twin towers of the World
Trade Center and of the Bank of China Building, and Charles Thornton, of the New York firm of
Thornton-Tomasetti Engineers, is the engineer credited with the structural concept of the Petronas
Towers, which introduced innovative high-strength concrete technology into Malaysia.
But Chicago remains one of the premier cities in the world for structurally significant architec-
ture, and much of that distinction is the legacy of Fazlur Khan. Chicago is also a city noted for its
monumental outdoor sculpture, with downtown plazas dominated by works of Picasso, Calder, and
Miró. Shortly after Khan's untimely death, the Structural Engineers Association of Illinois initiated
an effort to have a sculpture erected to honor his memory, and it commissioned the Spanish sculptor