Minoru Yamasaki

If you've never heard of Minoru Yamasaki, then it's probably because you're not much of a Modernist architecture buff. Shame on you.

Yamasaki was born in Seattle to Japanese-American parents in 1912. After getting a Bachelor's degree in architecture from Washington University he moved to New York, getting a job with Shreve, Lamb and Harmon (who designed the Empire State Building). He started his own partnership in 1949, after which he designed his best known works.

While his love of traditional Japanese design showed up in some of his works (San Francisco's Japan Center stands out), Yamasaki was best known for his Modernist buildings. Judging by the general body of his work, this was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's man through and through.

Minoru Yamasaki, Torre Picasso (Picasso Tower). Madrid, Spain, 1988.

Minoru Yamasaki, One M&T Plaza. Buffalo, New York, 1966.

Minoru Yamasaki, Pruitt-Igoe public housing project (demolition). St. Louis, Missouri, built 1955, demolished 1972.

Yes, Yamasaki built one super avant-garde housing project. And the sad, sad tale of Pruitt-Igoe is as much one for the sociology and economics books as for the architecture annals. The mayor of St. Louis wanted to gut the city's slums and start over, giving the poor of the city a nice, clean and affordable place to live- in the form of a Modernist set of thirty-three eleven story buildings.

Ah, but the devil fools with the best laid plans. Apparently the low-incomers of St. Louis wanted a habitation that they could trash. (This is definitely not speaking for all low-income people, mind you- just those of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project). Eventually Pruitt-Igoe became a monumental symbol of everything that sucks about being poor. To put it in perspective, here's a picture of Yamasaki's vision for Pruitt-Igoe:

And here's how it looked right before being demolished:

And so it came down less than twenty years after it was completed. The saddest thing about it all? The whole Pruitt-Igoe fiasco led to the re-evaluation of Modernism in the 1970s and later to the Post-Modernist movement (ugh!). Some said its failure was based on Modernist architects' inability to accommodate social conditions. Charles Jencks even went as far as to call its demolition "the death of Modernist architecture."

Yamasaki, who died in 1986 at the age of 73, was alive to see his Pruitt-Igoe building be destroyed. I'm not sure how he felt about it, but I imagine he felt a little remorse for having not designed a building that met its occupants' needs better. There's no denying that his intentions were good. But he designed another no longer extant work that was destroyed in a similarly theatrical fashion fifteen years after he died (and eight years ago today).

Minoru Yamasaki, World Trade Center Towers I and II. New York, New York. Completed 1970, destroyed by terrorist attack 2001.

I think the rest of this blog will be more difficult to write than I had thought it would. I am not a sentimental person nor a particularly patriotic one, and I'm fighting back tears as we speak. We all remember what happened, and we all have our own personal stories about what we were doing when it happened, so there's no need to wax poetic about it. The attack that destroyed it resulted in the deaths of at least 2,750 people, including several artists who rented studio space there.

It is interesting that no one has mourned for Yamasaki's masterwork. The buildings survived a three-alarm fire in 1975 and later a basement bombing in 1993. They provided ten million square feet of office space, taking only a tiny footprint on one 16 acre superblock. Thinking about the building occupants' safety he sheathed its facades in an aluminum alloy ; thinking of their personal security he built narrow windows (he was a tad afraid of heights himself). And anyone who's been to New York before 2001 will tell you that you couldn't get a better view of Manhattan than from the WTC's observation tower.

So thank you, Minoru Yamasaki. They were good buildings.