The Modern Concrete Skyscraper: One Shell Plaza, Houston

The Skyscraper Museum continues its lecture series “In Situ: The Modern Concrete Skyscraper,” which examines key experiments in concrete construction and the range of paradigmatic concrete skyscrapers throughout history, in preparation for our Fall 2024 exhibition of the same name.

At the time of its completion in 1971, One Shell Plaza in Houston was the tallest reinforced concrete structure in the world. Designed by SOM’s extraordinary collaborators, architect Bruce Graham and engineer Fazlur Khan, working for the developer Gerald D. Hines, the 50-story skyscraper continued the evolution of Khan’s “tube-in-tube” structure they had pioneered in Chicago in the mid-1960s. Joseph Colaco, who as a young engineer worked directly with Khan on One Shell Plaza and other projects, will discuss the engineering principles and refinements that make this skyscraper so expressive as both form and structure.

Dr. Joseph Colaco received his Ph.D. in structural engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1965, the same year he began to work in the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill under the firm’s lead engineering partner Fazlur Khan. He joined the team designing the 100-story John Hancock Centre in Chicago, researching and drawing many of the details of the innovative trussed steel tube design. He served as SOM’s project engineer on One Shell Plaza in Houston. In 1969, Colaco moved to Houston and in 1975 launched his own firm, CBM Engineers, and continued working on tall buildings in many American cities and also other countries. He opened an office in Dubai and worked on many tall buildings in the Middle East.