The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat honored two prominent structural steel designers with one of its annual awards.
Santiago Calatrava, a renowned architect, structural engineer, sculptor, and painter, earned the 2024 Lynn S. Beedle Lifetime Achievement Award. John Zils, a retired engineer who spent more than 40 years at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), earned the 2024 Fazlur R. Khan Lifetime Achievement Award.
“Santiago Calatrava has seamlessly blended art and engineering to create iconic structures that redefine skylines and urban spaces across the globe,” Council CEO Javier Quintana de Una said. “John Zils has significantly advanced the structural design of skyscrapers and helped make them more efficient and enduring. We are thrilled to honor these individuals’ exceptional contributions to livable vertical urbanism.”
Calatrava is celebrated for his visionary designs harmonizing architecture, engineering, art, and nature that appear all over the world. He has received a multitude of awards and accolades for his innovative approaches and aesthetic brilliance. He was the architect of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge in Dallas and the World Trade Center Transportation Hub in New York. The latter won a 2018 AISC IDEAS² Award.
Zils worked closely with the namesake of the award he earned. He and Khan helped pioneer the bundled-tube design and the other structural engineering pieces of the Willis Tower in Chicago. He was also responsible for designing Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park. He has led numerous projects worldwide that range widely in scope and scale. He has earned multiple individual honors from the American Society of Civil Engineers Lifetime Achievement Award and the Structural Engineers Association of Illinois.
The Lynn S. Beedle Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes an individual who has made extraordinary contributions to advancing tall buildings and the urban environment. These contributions significantly enhance cities and the lives of their inhabitants and may take any form, including completed buildings, research, technology, methods, ideas, or industry leadership.
The Fazlur R. Khan Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes an individual for proven excellence in technical design and/or research that significantly contributes to the design of tall buildings and the built urban environment. These contributions may be demonstrated as specific technical advances, innovations, design breakthroughs, building systems integration, or innovative engineering systems.