He's got a special place in my heart, as an engineer, a Bengali, and as someone who loves Chicago and its architecture. Its worth visiting the Sears Tower if you haven't. Its one of the great wonders of engineering and architecture. They have an exhibit to Khan on the tour.
There is a story about him. He was visiting his native Bangladesh, and someone asked him: "why don't you come back here?" He said: "I build skyscrapers, what am I going to do here?"
I wasn't aware that he also did the Hancock building. While I was a student at NU, I would take the L down and walk along Chicago Avenue to my part-time job at the NU Medical School as the Hancock was being built. I still have some Kodachrome slides of it as it was going up.
There's a great article on the design of the Hancock tower, which goes into the reasons for the (now iconic) diagonal bracing: http://khan.princeton.edu/khanHancock.html. During my time at NU, I lived right next to Onterie, which has architectural diagonal bracing as a nod to Kahn's work on the Hancock tower.
At the time that the Hancock was going up, there were lots of Trib articles about the engineering aspects of the braces.
Chicago does have such a great architectural examples. Matasano has offices in the Monadnock building, at one time on the 18th floor of a 17 story building. Marvelous building.
There is a story about him. He was visiting his native Bangladesh, and someone asked him: "why don't you come back here?" He said: "I build skyscrapers, what am I going to do here?"
What's really great about the Sears Tower is how you can see the bundled tube structure in the exterior architecture: http://www.steelguru.com/uploads/reports/fea1-03-10-2010.jpg
The Burj Kalifa also: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TIxCUNbAei8/T8p_3a2AHoI/AAAAAAAAAB...