> 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.
Uh the article seems pretty effusive in its praise for tall buildings. It also had two words about his faith and 2500 about his engineering abilities. It's fine if you didn't read it.
"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."
Why is that something to be proud of? If that works for a good idea, it would work for a scummy, fly-by-night idea too. And in my hell, there's a special place for deliberately obscure their own field.
>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.
"Today, foreign-born residents account for only 13% of the U.S. population but hold nearly a third of all patents and a quarter of all Nobel Prizes awarded to Americans."
[+] [-] rayiner|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bcrotan|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] surlyadopter|10 years ago|reply
I love it.
[+] [-] SilasX|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JBReefer|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Flammy|10 years ago|reply
Randomly... shots fired
[+] [-] jamaly|10 years ago|reply
If these two values are hampered in any way, then America's decline is inevitable.
[+] [-] danharaj|10 years ago|reply
Like that one time they abolished slavery peacefully instead of fighting a bloody civil war.
[+] [-] aadilmaan|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamcreasy|10 years ago|reply
Source : http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-secret-of-immigrant-genius-1...
[+] [-] shah_s|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] USANEEDSHELP|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peejaybee|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pj_mukh|10 years ago|reply
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