A partner in the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in Chicago, Khan, more than any other individual, ushered in a renaissance in skyscraper construction during the second half of the 20th century.

[4][10] In his honor, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat established the Fazlur Khan Lifetime Achievement Medal, as one of their CTBUH Skyscraper Awards.

[11][12] Fazlur Rahman Khan was born on 3 April 1929 to a Bengali Muslim family in Dhaka, Bengal Presidency (present-day Bangladesh).

[13] His mother, Khadijah Khatun, was the daughter of Abdul Basit Chowdhury, the Zamindar (aristocratic landowner) of Dulai in Pabna who traced his ancestry to a migrant from Samarkand in Turkestan.

He did not view his first skyscraper in person until the age of 21 years old, and he had not stepped inside a mid-rise building until he moved to the United States for graduate school.

"[13] Khan's personal papers, most of which were in his office at the time of his death, are held by the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Fazlur Khan Collection includes manuscripts, sketches, audio cassette tapes, slides and other materials regarding his work.

Tubular systems allow greater interior space and further enable buildings to take on various shapes, offering added freedom to architects.

[30][31] These new designs opened an economic door for contractors, engineers, architects, and investors, providing vast amounts of real estate space on minimal plots of land.

[33] Another important feature of the tubular systems is that buildings can be constructed using steel or reinforced concrete, or a composite of the two, to reach greater heights.

[35] Most of Khan's designs were conceived considering pre-fabrication and repetition of components so projects could be quickly built with minimal errors.

[36] The population explosion, starting with the baby boom of the 1950s, created widespread concern about the amount of available living space, which Khan solved by building upward.

The structural system also allows the interior columns to be smaller and the core of the building to be free of braced frames or shear walls that use valuable floor space.

Where larger openings like garage doors are required, the tube frame must be interrupted, with transfer girders used to maintain structural integrity.

The bundled tube design was not only the most efficient in economic terms, but it was also "innovative in its potential for versatile formulation of architectural space.

[27] The strong influence of tube structure design is also evident in the world's current tallest skyscraper, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

Khan's amazing insight – he was name-checked by Obama in his Cairo University speech last year – changed both the economics and the morphology of supertall buildings.

[50]Khan and Mark Fintel conceived ideas of shock absorbing soft-stories, for protecting structures from abnormal loading, particularly strong earthquakes, over a long period of time.

Examples include the Hajj terminal of King Abdulaziz International Airport, completed in 1981, which consists of tent-like roofs that are folded up when not in use.

[55] Khan also designed the King Abdulaziz University, the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs and the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis.

[56] With Bruce Graham, Khan developed a cable-stayed roof system for the Baxter Travenol Laboratories in Deerfield, Illinois.

Graham and Khan lobbied SOM partners to purchase a mainframe computer, a risky investment at a time, when new technologies were just starting to form.

The partners agreed, and Khan began programming the system to calculate structural engineering equations, and later, to develop architectural drawings.

[59] Khan was cited five times by Engineering News-Record as among those who served the best interests of the construction industry, and in 1972 he was honored with ENR's Man of the Year award.

[60] Khan was mentioned by President Obama in 2009 in his speech in Cairo, Egypt when he cited the achievements of America's Muslim citizens.

Khan was heavily involved with creating public opinion and garnering emergency funding for Bengali people during the war.

[63][64] Khan died of a heart attack on 27 March 1982 while on a trip in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, at the age of 52, at which time he was a general partner in SOM.