Minoru Yamasaki

Minoru Yamasaki (山崎 實) was a Japanese-American architect, best known for designing the original World Trade Center in New York City and several other large-scale projects.

Yamasaki was one of the most prominent architects of the 20th century.

He and fellow architect Edward Durell Stone are generally considered to be the two master practitioners of "New Formalism".

During his three-decade career, he and his firm designed over 250 buildings.

Yamasaki was born on December 1, 1912, in Seattle, Washington, the son of John Tsunejiro Yamasaki and Hana Yamasaki, issei Japanese immigrants.

The family later moved to Auburn, Washington, and he graduated from Garfield Senior High School in Seattle.

He enrolled in the University of Washington program in architecture in 1929, and graduated with a Bachelor of Architecture (BArch) in 1934.

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.

In part to escape anti-Japanese prejudice, he moved to Manhattan in 1934, with $40 and no job prospects.

He wrapped dishes for an importing company until he found work as a draftsman and engineer.

He enrolled at New York University for a master's degree in architecture and got a job with 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 watercolors painter, moonlighted teaching drawing at Columbia University.

In 1945, Yamasaki moved to Detroit, where he secured a position with Smith, Hinchman & Grylls as the chief designer.

At the time, Smith and associates 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.

Yamasaki left the firm in 1949, and started his own partnership.

He worked from Birmingham and Troy, Michigan.

One of the first projects he designed at his own firm was Ruhl's Bakery at 7 Mile Road and Monica Street in Detroit.

In the 1950s, Yamasaki was commissioned by the Reynolds Company to design an aluminum-wrapped building in Southfield, Michigan, which would "symbolize the auto industry's past and future progress with aluminum."

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.

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.

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.

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.

The buildings at Wayne State University incorporated many architectural motifs that would become characteristic elements in Yamasaki's designs.

Yamasaki was a member of the Pennsylvania Avenue Commission, created in 1961 to restore the grand avenue in Washington, D.C., but he resigned after disagreements and disillusionment with the design by committee approach.

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.

It was constructed by the City of Seattle for the 1962 Seattle World's Fair.

The building raised his public profile so much that he was featured on the cover of Time magazine.

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).

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.

His firm, Yamasaki & Associates, closed on December 31, 2009.