How an Immigrant from Bangladesh Became America's Master Builder

> 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.

"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.

>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.

> 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

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.

And they say immigrants have no value...

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