Minoru Yamasaki
Minoru Yamasaki, a Japanese American architect, is renowned for his design of the original World Trade Center in New York City and several other large-scale projects. He is regarded as one of the most prominent architects of the 20th century. Yamasaki was born in Seattle, Washington, to Issei Japanese immigrants, and the family later relocated to Auburn, Washington. He graduated from Garfield Senior High School in Seattle. He then enrolled in the University of Washington&#;s architecture program in , which he completed with a Bachelor of Architecture degree in In , he relocated to Manhattan, enrolled at New York University to pursue a master&#;s degree in architecture, and secured employment with the architecture firm Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, the designers of the Empire State Building. This firm played a crucial role in assisting Yamasaki in evading internment as a Japanese American during World War II, and he himself provided refuge for his parents in New York City. Yamasaki&#;s political engagement was evident during his formative years, particularly in the context of efforts to relocate Japanese Americans affected by the internment program in the United Sta
A transformative trip abroad
Yamasaki’s style changed in after he was commissioned to design the US Consulate in Kobe, Japan. While abroad, Yamasaki embarked on an architectural heritage tour of Japan, Italy, and India. It was his first trip outside America and the buildings he saw left a great impression.
Yamasaki was particularly taken by the Japanese temples, hidden amongst the busy city streets. He was drawn to &#;the element of surprise&#; he experienced when going from the city&#;s commotion into the temples&#; peaceful gardens and pools. Whilst in Italy, Yamasaki studied Renaissance architecture in Venice and Rome, admiring their public squares and Gothic cathedrals. He also found himself in awe of the sense of aspiration that the Taj Mahal’s silhouette elicited in him.
From then on Yamasaki avoided designing &#;glass boxes&#;, and instead tried to combine decorative elements with new technology &#; such as his commission to design the Dhahran International Airport in Saudi Arabia.
Dhahran International Airport
Image Credit: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
His first widely-acclaimed design was the Pacific Science Center, with it
Minoru Yamasaki: The Fragility of Architecture
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His work – more than buildings in the span of 30 years – was lauded by critics and colleagues, cited for international design awards, and landed the architect on the cover of Time. But today, even practitioners and aficionados might be challenged to name one of Minoru Yamasaki's buildings beyond his two most infamous creations that no longer exist: the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis and New York’s World Trade Center towers. Paul Kidder explores this complex architect and his work in a new book, Minoru Yamasaki and the Fragility of Architecture (Routledge).
Kidder, a professor of philosophy at Seattle University, provides a fresh, sobering assessment not only of Yamasaki's architecture but the man himself: his challenges, triumphs, and contradictions, as well as the fragility of architectural achievement. The loss of this architect’s most famous buildings suggests the growing scope of architecture’s fragility, especially today, when real-estate investment often augers against preservation of even late-modern works. Yet, paradoxically, Yam
Minoru Yamasaki ()
The architect of Pruitt-Igoe and the World Trade Center survived a life of racial discrimination and blame laid for the demise of the Modernist dream – but did not live to see the revisionist movement that asserts the underfunded Pruitt-Igoe’s fate was predetermined
Minoru Yamasaki illustration by Marianna Gefen
Illustration by Marianna Gefen
Minoru Yamasaki embodied the American dream while feeling the sting of endemic racism. He achieved professional success and international fame as a minority architect, whose ‘otherness’ marked him as a permanent outsider to the East Coast-oriented architectural culture of postwar America. Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, as a poor child of Japanese immigrants, he suffered routine racial discrimination from an early age. Growing up he was taught to accept these episodes passively, with magnanimity. ‘A word that I heard over and over again whenever there would be an incident or a slight was shikataganai, which means “it can’t be helped”’, he told a Time magazine interviewer. In his autobiography, A Life in Architecture, he elaborated ‘I know from personal experience how prejudice and
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