About The Documentary
Known as the ‘father of the modern skyscrapers,’ Dr. Fazlur Rahman Khan was the structural engineer who designed the Sears (now Willis) Tower and the John Hancock Center in Chicago. In the process, he developed a series of tubular frame structural systems that paved the way for modern supertall skyscrapers.
Dr. Fazlur Rahman Khan on the far left, with architect Bruce Graham next to him, at the SOM office in Chicago, with a model of the John Hancock Center, 1960s. Photo Courtesy Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM).
“Someone with great knowledge can change the world.”
View of Sears (Willis) Tower under construction, Chicago, Illinois, 1972. Photo Courtesy SOM.
In 1955, America was experiencing a post-World War II economic boom. There was a flurry of new construction. In Chicago, commonly known as the birthplace of the high-rise, Mies van der Rohe was teaching at IIT and his modernist ideas had led to the emergence of the Second Chicago School of architecture. A young engineering graduate, Fazlur Rahman Khan, a Muslim immigrant from Bangladesh (then East Pakistan), arrived in Chicago after earning two master’s degrees and a PhD in just three years as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He soon found himself employed at one of the world’s top architecture firms, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). He had simply walked into the firm’s office off the street, requested an interview, and left with a job offer in hand. There, he would go on to overcome challenges and design America’s tallest building at the time—the Sears Tower (now Willis Tower)—and develop a series of structural systems that would change the course of the skyscraper, allowing builders to go higher than ever before possible.
“It meant that now the sky was the limit [in regard to building height],” said John Zils, structural engineer and former colleague of Fazlur Rahman Khan at SOM.
Before coming to the US, Fazlur R Khan lived through the bloody partition of India in 1947. Three years later, while in his last year of undergraduate school at the university in Calcutta (Kolkata), Khan and other Muslim students escaped back to Dhaka out of fear for their safety amidst post-partition riots. Two years later, he came to the United States after being awarded a Fulbright Scholarship. Prior to leaving Dhaka in 1952, Khan had never seen anything close to the tall buildings that he would later pioneer.
“Khan considered tall building structure a work of art,” says Dr. Mir M. Ali, author of Art of the Skyscraper: The Genius of Fazlur Khan. At the same time, he was highly concerned with the social and practical aspects of buildings as places where people lived and worked.
In 1982, while at the peak of his career, Dr. Khan died unexpectedly from a heart attack at the age of 52. He was on a business trip in Saudi Arabia.
This is the untold story of pioneering technical achievements by a man who was curious about the world and loved people, music, and poetry as much as he loved science and engineering.
REACHING NEW HEIGHTS is the first feature-length documentary on the legacy of Fazlur Rahman Khan.
Structural engineer Fazlur Rahman Khan (front row, second from the right), architect Bruce Graham (back row, far right) at the John Hancock Center construction site in Chicago in 1960s. Photo by Jonas Dovydenas, Courtesy SOM.
