was an American architect, best known for designing the original World Trade Center in New York City and several other large-scale projects. He and fellow architect Edward Durell Stone are generally considered to be the two master practitioners of "New Formalism". His firm, Yamasaki & Associates, closed on December 31, 2009.

Early life and education

Yamasaki was born on December 1, 1912, in Seattle, Washington, the son of John Tsunejiro Yamasaki and Hana Yamasaki, issei Japanese immigrants. During his college years, he was strongly encouraged by faculty member Lionel Pries. He earned money to pay for his tuition by working at a salmon cannery in Alaska, working five summers and earning $50 a month, plus 25 cents an hour in overtime pay. He wrapped dishes for an importing company until he found work as a draftsman and engineer. and subsequently joining the architecture firm Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, designers of the Empire State Building. The firm helped Yamasaki avoid internment as a Japanese-American during World War II, and he himself sheltered his parents in New York City. Yamasaki was politically active during his early years, particularly in efforts to relocate Japanese Americans affected by the internment program in the United States during World War II.

After leaving Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, Yamasaki worked briefly for Harrison & Abramovitz and Raymond Loewy. During his time with Harrison & Abramovitz, Yamasaki, a gifted watercolorist, also taught drawing at Columbia University. At the time, SHG was the oldest as well as one of the largest and most prestigious architectural firms in Detroit and the United States, with recently completed projects including Detroit landmarks such as the Penobscot and Guardian Buildings.

Career

Pruitt–Igoe and other early commissions

thumb|[[Pruitt–Igoe housing project, St. Louis, 1954 (demolished 1972–1976)]]

Yamasaki's first major project was the Pruitt–Igoe public housing project in St. Louis in 1955. Despite his love of traditional Japanese design and ornamentation, the buildings of Pruitt–Igoe were stark, modernist concrete structures, severely constricted by a tight budget. The housing project soon experienced so many problems that it was demolished starting in 1972, less than twenty years after its completion. Its destruction would be considered by architectural historian Charles Jencks to be the symbolic end of modernist architecture. The three-story glass building wrapped in aluminum, known as the Reynolds Metals Company's Great Lakes Sales Headquarters Building, was also supposed to reinforce the company's main product and showcase its admirable characteristics of strength and beauty.

In 1955, he designed the "sleek" terminal at Lambert–St. Louis International Airport, which led to his 1959 commission to design the Dhahran International Airport in Saudi Arabia. The Dhahran International Airport terminal building was especially well received in Saudi Arabia and was featured on the one riyal bank note.

Yamasaki's first widely-acclaimed design was the Pacific Science Center, with its iconic lacy and airy decorative arches. It was constructed by the City of Seattle for the 1962 Seattle World's Fair.

The campus for the University of Regina was designed in tandem with Yamasaki's plan for Wascana Centre, a park built around Wascana Lake in Regina, Saskatchewan. The original campus design was approved in 1962. Yamasaki was awarded contracts to design the first three buildings: the Classroom Building, the Laboratory Building, and the Dr. John Archer Library, which were built between 1963 and 1967.

Yamasaki designed two notable synagogues, North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoe, Illinois (1964), and Temple Beth El, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (1973).

He designed a number of buildings on college campuses, including designs for Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, and a building in Waikiki, in Honolulu, Hawaii, between 1958 and 1968 as well as being commissioned to design buildings on the campus of Wayne State University in the 1950s and 1960s, including the McGregor Memorial Conference Center, the College of Education building and the Prentis Building and DeRoy Auditorium Complex. Internally, each office floor was a vast open space unimpeded by support columns, ready to be subdivided as the tenants might choose.

Other design challenges included anchoring the massively tall towers to the bedrock located about below lower Manhattan's soft soil. Digging a large trench to the bedrock risked flooding from nearby New York Harbor. The solution employed by Yamasaki and his team of engineers was to use a slurry wall; digging very narrow trenches about wide and then filling these with a slurry (a mixture of clay and water) that was dense enough to keep the surrounding water out. Pipes were then lowered into the slurry trench and concrete was pumped in. The concrete, being more dense than the slurry, sank to the bottom of the trenches all the way down to the bedrock displacing the slurry to the surface, where it was drained away. This process was repeated around the entire perimeter of the site and reinforced with steel cables to create a watertight concrete bathtub surrounding the excavation site. This slurry wall system had only been employed a few times prior in the United States and never on such a large project. Many of his buildings feature superficial details inspired by the pointed arches of Gothic architecture, and make use of extremely narrow vertical windows. This narrow-windowed style arose from his own personal fear of heights. After partnering with Emery Roth and Sons on the design of the World Trade Center, the collaboration continued with other projects including new buildings at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C.

Yamasaki designed the BOK Tower in Tulsa, Oklahoma with a similar design to the World Trade Center. It was completed in 1976 and was the tallest building in Oklahoma at the time.

Later years

After criticism of his dramatically cantilevered Rainier Tower (1977) in Seattle, Yamasaki became less adventurous in his designs during the last decade of his career.

Legacy

Despite the many buildings he completed, Yamasaki's reputation faded along with the overall decline of modernism towards the end of the 20th century. Two of his major projects, the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex, and the original World Trade Center, shared the dubious symbolic distinction of being destroyed while recorded by live TV broadcasts. -->

Yamasaki collaborated closely with structural engineers, including John Skilling, Leslie Robertson, Fazlur Rahman Khan, and Jack V. Christiansen, to produce some of his innovative architectural designs. In a 1969 article in The Detroit News about the remarriage, Yamasaki said "I'm just going to be nicer to her".

Yamasaki suffered from health problems for at least three decades, and ulcers caused surgical removal of much of his stomach in 1953.

  • DFA from Bates College, 1964
  • American Institute of Architects' First Honor Award, three times

See also

  • Construction of the World Trade Center
  • List of works by Minoru Yamasaki

References

Further reading

  • GreatBuildings.com listing
  • The Wayne State University Yamasaki Legacy
  • Minoru Yamasaki interview, <nowiki>[ca. 1959 Aug.</nowiki>] - Archives of American Art
  • Images from the Minoru Yamasaki Collection Walter P. Reuther Library
  • Researchers can access archival evidence of Yamasaki's work in The papers of Minoru Yamasaki at the Walter P. Reuther Library. Available materials include correspondence on projects, travel, communications with associates, speaking invitations, and involvement in professional organizations. Early architectural drawings, speeches and writings, photographs, awards and doctoral degrees, scrapbooks detailing the progress of his career, and various publications are also included.