Minoru Yamasaki and the Fragility of Architecture

Few figures in the American arts have stories richer in irony than does architect Minoru Yamasaki. While his twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center are internationally iconic, few who know the icon recognize its architect’s name or know much about his portfolio of more than 200 buildings. One is tempted to call him America’s most famous forgotten architect. He was classed in the top tier of his profession in the 1950s and ’60s, as he carried modernism in novel directions, yet today he is best known not for buildings that stand but for two projects that were destroyed under tragic circumstances: the twin towers and the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis. This book undertakes a reinterpretation of Yamasaki’s significance that combines architectural history with the study of his intersection with defining moments of American history and culture. The story of the loss and vulnerability of Yamasaki’s legacy illustrates the fragility of all architecture in the face of natural and historical forces, yet in Yamasaki’s view, fragility is also a positive quality in architecture: the source of its refinement, beauty, and humanity. We learn something essential about architecture when we explore this tension of strength and fragility.

In the course of interpreting Yamasaki’s architecture through the wide lens of the book we see the mid-century role of Detroit as an industrial power and architectural mecca; we follow a debate over public housing that entailed the creation and eventual destruction of many thousands of units; we examine competing attempts to embody democratic ideals in architecture and to represent those ideals in foreign lands; we ponder the consequences of anti-Japanese prejudice and the masculism of the architectural profession; we see Yamasaki’s style criticized for its arid minimalism yet equally for its delicacy and charm; we observe Yamasaki making a great name for himself in the Arab world but his twin towers ultimately destroyed by Islamic militants. As this curious tale of ironies unfolds, it invites reflection on the core of modern architecture’s search for meaning and on the creative possibilities its legacy continues to offer.

Beautifully illustrated with over 100 color illustrations of Yamasaki’s buildings, this book will be of interest to students, academics and professionals in a range of disciplines, including architectural history, architectural theory, architectural preservation, and urban design and planning.

Paul Kidder, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University, where he has taught courses on the history of philosophy, existentialism, philosophical hermeneutics, philosophy of art and architecture, and ethics in urban affairs. He is the author of Gadamer for Architects (2012), published by Routledge.

Minoru Yamasaki and the Fragility of Architecture

Paul Kidder

First published 2022

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kidder, Paul, author.

Title: Minoru Yamasaki and the fragility of architecture / Paul Kidder.

Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2021. | Includes

bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021005120 (print) | LCCN 2021005121 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780367625276 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367629526

(paperback) | ISBN 9781003111566 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Yamasaki, Minoru, 1912–1986—Criticism and

interpretation. | Art and society—United States—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC NA737.Y3 K53 2021 (print) | LCC NA737.Y3 (ebook) |

DDC 720.92—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005120

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005121

ISBN: 978-0-367-62527-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-62952-6 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-11156-6 (ebk)

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To the memory of Rev. Perry Eugene Kidder, an ardent enthusiast for this project, who served as pastor to the community of John Cochran Garden Apartments in St. Louis before moving his family to Seattle just in time for the 1962 World’s Fair.

Preface and acknowledgments

In 2010, archivist Tawny Ryan Nelb, examining materials rescued from the shuttered offices of Yamasaki Associates, puzzled over the lack of scholarly writing on the firm’s founder, Minoru Yamasaki. It was not simply that there were no comprehensive studies of the architect in print, but that one would expect, she said, that there would be five or six books on the subject. This was the situation when I began my research for this project, but since then there have appeared John Gallagher’s Yamasaki in Detroit, which shares the fruits of decades of covering the architect’s work for the Detroit Free Press, and architectural historian Dale Allen Gyure’s Minoru Yamasaki: Humanist Architecture for a Modernist World, a meticulously researched and thoroughly comprehensive account of the architect’s career and its critical reception. Yamasaki has also been featured in Michigan Modern: An Architectural Legacy, by Brian Conway and James Haefner. The present study, then, as it explores questions of the significance of Yamasaki’s work and the value of its examination, is offered as an interpretive complement to these works and an endorsement of their labors.

Professor Gyure is to be thanked, first of all, not only for his researches but for the assistance that he personally provided to mine. Thanks go, too, for the invaluable help of Keith Brown and Henry Guthhard, whose dedication was a constant source of inspiration. Grant Hildebrand, Jon Haro, Gyo Obata, and Harold Tsuchya are also among those to whom I am in debt for their generous sharing of their personal knowledge of Yamasaki and his work. Appreciation in this connection must go in memoriam to William Bain, Jr., and Leslie Robertson. On the topic of preservation of Yamasaki’s works I gained insights from Theodore Prudon and John Savo. The project began as a Lonergan Workshop paper at the gracious invitation of Fred and Sue Lawrence. For support throughout the project, both financial and moral, I thank my colleagues at Seattle University’s College of Arts and Sciences, particularly Dean David Powers and Philosophy Department Chair Maria Carl.

Work in archives yields gratitude to many archivists, including, at the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University, Elizabeth Clemens and William Lefevre; at the Archives of Michigan, Mark Harvey, Jessica Miller, Kris Rzepczynski, and Annakathryn Welch; at the Library of Congress, Ryan Brubacher, Courtney Matthews, and Elizabeth Terry Rose; and at the University of Washington Libraries Special Collections, Rebecca Baker, John Bolcer, and Kelly Daviduke.

Work at particular sites also benefitted from generous assistance: at the University of Washington, from Phillip Jacobson, Alan Michelson, Robert Mugerauer, and Jeffrey Ochsner; in St. Louis, from Michael Allen and Marta O’Neill; At Butler University, Sally Childs-Helton and Brandon Signorino; at Carleton College, Baird Jarman and Steven Spehn; at University Liggett School, Jon Neville; at Temple Beth El, Jan Durecki; and at North Shore Congregation Israel, Drew Barkley.

The project has come to fruition through the expert guidance of Francesca Ford, Trudy Varcianna, Alanna Donaldson, and Autumn Spalding. It has received invaluable support from the aid, encouragement, and conversations of Benjamin, Jane, and Paulette Kidder, as well as Katie Galbraith, Caleb Hou, Glenn Hughes, Charles Lawrence, and Mauri Tamarin.

A note on illustrations

Buildings illustrated are by Minoru Yamasaki unless otherwise indicated. Photographs are by the author unless otherwise credited. Complete credits and licensing information may be found at the back of the book.

A note on references

To facilitate reader access to chapters individually, works cited in each chapter appear at the chapter’s end.

Chapter 1
Rethinking Yamasaki

Yamasaki known and unknown

There is one respect in which one could say that Minoru Yamasaki (1912–1986) is America’s most intimately known architect; yet at the same time, it is also true that he is relatively ignored. Shall we say, then, that he is America’s most famous forgotten architect? The situation is, in any case, a curious one. Yamasaki is intimately known in one sense, for he was the lead architect of the original World Trade Center in New York City, which, when it was destroyed by terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, became permanently etched on the heart of every conscious American citizen and people throughout the world. “Disasters,” as one writer has put it, “are public events that feel personal,” and this disaster, along with its economic and military reverberations, could not help but feel deeply, achingly personal (Gabbert 2018). It changed innumerable lives forever. When the towers were attacked, nearly every citizen of the nation felt attacked. Watching, with horror, as the buildings burned and collapsed, with the senseless loss of 2,977 human lives and many thousands of injuries, Americans knew that each of us had been violated by the monstrous events. Part of the impact on us was sheer, imponderable grief for our fellow citizens. Part of it was the effect that terrorism most intently seeks: to slaughter so unexpectedly and horrifically that the death of some destroys the security of all. Amid these feelings – of victimization, of shock and grief, of confusion – over the depth of the hatred directed against American citizens, the center’s twin towers became through tragedy what they had never been in prosperity: a symbol of the whole of America for all Americans. These outsized buildings that had seemed to be part of the elite and uncommon Wall Street way of life now drew the sympathy and loyalty of the nation, as if they had been two grand figureheads on the prow of the continent.

National September 11 Memorial by Michael Arad

The tragedy of September 11 brought the name of Minoru Yamasaki, 15 years after his death, into an intense public conversation. As the whole “biography” of the towers became a subject of newspaper articles and books, intriguing accounts could be read of the seemingly unlikely selection of Yamasaki’s firm for the project. Much attention was given to Yamasaki’s debates with the Port Authority, the inspirations of his design, the extraordinary innovations of the engineers, and the controversies surrounding the project’s public and critical reception. In all of this, Yamasaki’s architectural ideals were granted a rare hearing. Yet in the telling of the story the architect seemed to be pulled suddenly from offstage and then thrust back there with equal haste. It was hard to find more than a quick survey of his overall body of work in the accounts of his role in the World Trade Center.

The contemporary fame of Yamasaki, then, is not due directly to the architectural merits of his work but to its intersection with an earth-shaking historical moment. His relative obscurity results, in part, from the mere fact that architecture, in our time, is not a subject of widespread interest. In reporting on the events following the 9/11 attacks, when one of the most heated debates in public discourse was over how to rebuild at “Ground Zero,” Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New Yorker magazine (and before that the New York Times), found himself in an uncanny situation: “As someone who has written about architecture for his entire life and often felt like a sports writer who is assigned to the lacrosse beat, I was suddenly covering the Super Bowl. It was a most remarkable thing” (2003). Public indifference to the field of architecture, however, does not explain the relative neglect of Yamasaki within that field. Books pour forth on every sort of architect, but the scholarly attention that one might expect for such a prominent figure as Yamasaki has only recently begun to stir. Could association with a great American catastrophe have caused, among its countless other damages, a blow to the architect’s legacy?

Yamasaki’s name is associated with another disaster in the nation’s history – a less-well-known disaster, yet one with a permanent place in the story of American urban development, and a subject of ongoing interpretation and debate. The Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, Missouri (1950–6), for which he served as designer, represented a whole new direction in America’s approach to housing the poor, one that incorporated award-winning design innovations by which Yamasaki sought to make low-income high-rise dwellings more functional and pleasing than they had ever been. For many residents who first moved into them from decrepit and unsanitary tenement buildings it was like leaving the slums to dwell in luxury apartments. But within a very short time a host of problems emerged. Patterns of conflict and crime that had been present in the old tenements found their way into the new projects. The anticipated housing demand that led planners to build 2,870 units never materialized, and in the unoccupied portions of the project problems of crime became exacerbated. Funding that had been obtained for construction could not be used to maintain the buildings or to provide social services, and the common areas became victims of neglect and vandalism. As life in the projects became increasingly nightmarish, more residents departed, adding to the neglected spaces where the criminal element could congregate, accelerating a downward spiral. Eventually the only conceivable solution seemed to require the demolition of these abandoned buildings, a process that began in 1972 and ultimately ended in the destruction of all 33 of the project’s concrete slabs (Bristol 1991; Meehan 1975; Montgomery 1985).

One can call this story a tragedy in American social history, for it was an amazingly ambitious effort to turn the embarrassment of tenement squalor in a great American city into something decent and good, yet it ended as a crushing failure, symbolized permanently, now, by the images of the first buildings being demolished – a moment that architecture critic Charles Jencks famously deemed the day that “Modern Architecture died” (1991, 9–10). This symbolic calamity of the dashing of lofty social dreams is compounded by the unfathomable degree of misery, shame, abuse, violence, death, and grief that accompanied the decline of life in Pruitt-Igoe. And to this legion of despair we may add the fact that the story was repeated in other St. Louis projects and in projects of similar scale in other American cities, augmenting the sum of suffering to a level that confounds the mind and crushes the heart. As early as 1960, the great writer on the life of American cities, Jane Jacobs, was convincing a wide body of readers that the whole concept of high-rise public housing was hopelessly naïve about the way that city life functions. She demanded that the billions being spent on the grand program of urban renewal be halted in light of the evidence (fully apparent to her even before the declines of the 1960s) that the ostensibly progressive and honorable efforts to renew our cities had become, in fact, the exact opposite: “the sacking of cities” (1993, 6). The debate over the meaning and importance of Pruitt-Igoe is today as vigorous as ever, and Yamasaki’s modernism remains central to that debate.

The fate of a style

It is ironic, indeed, that an architect should be best known for two enormous projects that met with a traumatic early demise. There is further irony in the fact that these buildings for which Yamasaki is best known are by no means the ones most definitive of his architectural style. They are works in which, some might even say, he compromised so much for his clients that the buildings failed to manifest the qualities for which his architecture was most admired. To understand the reasons for this phenomenon requires investigation into his larger body of work, a corpus consisting of scores of buildings scattered across North America (though with prominence in the Detroit area, where he spent the bulk of his career) and also in places as far-flung as Japan, Europe, and the Middle East. In Yamasaki’s most characteristic designs one sees classic features of the modernist architectural ideal: a love of sleek and soaring towers fashioned around reinforced concrete skeletons and clad in glass, metal, concrete, and stone; a belief that there is greater elegance in simplicity and the pure surfaces of materials than in extravagant ornamentation; a determination to imagine how schools, airports, offices, and places of worship can be open, elegant, dynamic, engaging, and light-filled even when produced with short timelines and modest budgets.

St. Louis Lambert International Airport

Yet as much as Yamasaki’s buildings may be called classic articulations of the modern ideals of minimalism and structural clarity, they are also known for their distinctive artistry – a characteristic grace and delicacy that informs the overall design and the quality of its details. A Yamasaki-designed space seeks to draw one in and then carry one somewhere – to a place that is separated, to a degree, from the clamor of its surroundings, a place that grants calm and inspires reveries. Yamasaki was a modern, then, but also a distinctive figure within the modern movement, for although he embraced wholeheartedly the principles that had been developed in the minds of Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, and his particular hero, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, he was not convinced that these geniuses had adequately realized certain features of architecture that allow the people who dwell within and among their productions to form meaningful relationships with them. The founders of modernism had not, in Yamasaki’s view, appreciated fully the

McGregor Memorial Conference Center

importance of maintaining a connection with the architecture of the past, the value of adapting and transforming the symbolisms of traditional architecture rather than simply erasing them. The founders of modernism did not, in other words, show sufficient patience with the world’s inability to become modern overnight. A truly humanistic modernism, he thought, would realize that new designs must include some kind of conduit into the modern – a means for people to find immediate delight in the structure, a delight that then opens the door to an appreciation of what is uniquely novel about the work (Yamasaki 1979, 31). This conduit could draw upon any number of traditions, for one of modernism’s strengths is a cosmopolitan sensibility that can turn the global history of architecture into a treasure trove of design concepts. Yamasaki himself demonstrated this kind of cosmopolitan imagination by drawing upon European forms and imagery but also upon Asian and Arab traditions, opposing the tendency of Eurocentrism in architecture. To be modern, for him, was to be an artistic citizen of the whole world.

Royal Reception Pavilion, King Abdulaziz International Airport

Photo: Balthazar Korab

In his pursuit of this distinctive combination of the traditional and the revolutionary, Yamasaki saw periods of enormous success. At what is arguably the pinnacle of his career – when his designs were drawing international attention, when the astounding new project of the World Trade Center had been put into his hands, when he appeared (as only a handful of architects have done) on the cover of Time magazine – he had something of the opposite reputation to that of the modernists who had inspired him: the public loved his buildings, but his purist peers and many critics saw them as incomplete realizations of the new aesthetic, hampered by a nostalgia for decoration, lacking in the rigorously minimalist modernist’s integrity and gravitas. In some buildings he was thought to have decorated too much to be truly modern; in others he was modern in a way that lacked distinction (Time 1963).

Here, then, we have another reason why Yamasaki has fallen into neglect. Sound bites that linger from prominent critiques of his work during his lifetime seem to serve, for many today, as sufficient grounds for his dismissal. Indeed, for a remarkable number of architects and critics, history has simply closed the book on Yamasaki. One can ask, are such attitudes based on a thorough understanding of the work and its intentions, or might something have been overlooked? Could there be biases nested within the ongoing effort to keep Yamasaki’s artistic and cultural values sidelined? If Yamasaki’s work is to be interpreted today, the endeavor must constitute, in part, a reinterpretation, for the received view would seem to contend that further interpretation is not worth the trouble; his work will not bear the weight. Reopening the book on Yamasaki requires, therefore, a certain amount of pushing back against some of the world’s most prominent architectural critics – not to change minds (for it is doubtful that this is possible) but to justify the very raising of the question and the expenditure of time and ink pursuing it.

Cochran Garden Apartments demolition, 2008

Photo: Michael R. Allen

Questions regarding the value of paying attention to an architect are significant because neglect has consequences. In this time when the fate of so many mid-century modern buildings hangs in the balance, a lack of critical interest leaves activists who seek to preserve those buildings with few resources to use in making the case for preservation. In recent years, parts of Yamasaki’s legacy have met a much quieter end than that of Pruitt-Igoe or the World Trade Center, and others have barely escaped destruction. In 2011 the last building of the St. Louis housing project known as the John Cochran Garden Apartments, a Yamasaki design that preceded Pruitt-Igoe, was demolished. There was little interest in preserving this rare vestige of the high-rise housing movement of the 1950s. In 1993 Robert Campbell, architecture critic for The Boston Globe, cheered the razing of Yamasaki’s Eastern Airlines Terminal at Boston’s Logan Airport, welcoming the end of the 1960s version of the airport, with its “unworkable World’s Fair of individual show-off buildings that fail to gel into a usable whole” (1993). The Quo Vadis Theater, a fanciful 1966 movie emporium fashioned by Yamasaki in Westland, Michigan, with an interior originally done in a Roman theme, was demolished in 2011. Video clips of its bright gold-colored metal cladding being ripped out by a backhoe could be viewed on the Internet. More recently, the building that the architect designed in Troy, Michigan, for his firm’s offices and studios, the building in which some of his most famous creations took shape, was demolished without ceremony to make room for the expansion of the Children’s Hospital of Michigan.

Eastern Airlines Terminal, Logan Airport

Photo: Balthazar Korab

Offices of Minoru Yamasaki and Associates

Photo: Balthazar Korab

Along with these stories of destruction there are the close calls. Yamasaki’s Century Plaza Hotel, in Century City, California, was targeted for replacement by its owners in 2009. This classically modern structure, with the sweeping curve of its layout and its façade of balconies bearing delicate railings, had a long history as the preferred lodging for a host of celebrities and political luminaries. Partly because of this storied past, a grassroots effort to save the building was mounted, ultimately negotiating its survival. But for some who observed the battle, there would be something incomprehensible about the preservationists’ attachment to such a typical edifice (Groves 2009). Isn’t the Century Plaza, they might have wondered, just like countless modern hotel buildings strewn across contemporary cities everywhere? Wouldn’t a new building simply replace the old with more of the same? What difference does it make whether one preserves or starts over in such a case?

Century Plaza Hotel

These sorts of questions exemplify the way that thinking about the continued value of Yamasaki’s architecture can serve as a lens through which to view the debate over the meaning and purpose of architectural modernism generally, a way to reconsider the question of its relation to architecture’s past, its strategies for combining design and engineering, its approaches to the use of modern materials and technologies, and its conception of its place in modern culture. Such questions are scholarly, but again, they are far from merely academic, for the time has come when all of the works of mid-century modernism are showing their age and their functional shortcomings. Practical decisions must be made as to whether they should be preserved, altered, or replaced. In the battles that rage over particular cases, the larger question of the meaning and value of modern architecture inevitably rises to the surface.

Even as such dilemmas focus attention specifically on modernism, they open out onto a larger set of questions that are persistently asked about all kinds of architecture, no matter what style or period. What is it that makes architecture something more than just a practical tool for living, working, and playing? What is it that creates a human connection to built environments, that makes them significant, meaningful, valuable, and loved? When we board airplanes to see the architecture of the world, what exactly is it that we want to see, and why do we want to see it? What is it that we bring back from these experiences that we did not have at home? What do these buildings symbolize for us? Such are some of the most basic questions about architecture, and whatever one’s views regarding the products of Yamasaki’s invention, it is worth recognizing that his designs were born of serious reflection on these same perennial questions.

It is questions such as these, along with concerns about the general phenomenon of neglect, that inspire the thesis that is at work in the following study, which is simply this: that there is a unique significance to Yamasaki’s work that makes it worth trying to understand. It is a straightforward thesis, but the explanation and defense of it are necessarily complicated. For again, Yamasaki’s significance does not derive simply from the world of architectural design, nor simply from his fame or his influence on later architects, nor from the reception of his buildings in his day or ours. It has to do with all of these, but also with the fate of his creations in the course of history – the stories that must forever be associated with them. The examination of Yamasaki that occurs here, then, is not a historical survey or a biography, though it includes elements of these; it is an approach to the man and his works that centers on questions about architecture and culture that seem worth pondering. It adds to a recently renewed attention to Yamasaki that is informed by the comprehensive study of his work (and its critical reception) by the architectural historian Dale Allen Gyure (2017) and the more limited surveys in books such as John Gallagher’s Yamasaki in Detroit (2015) and Brian Conway and James Haefner’s Michigan Modern (2018). It responds to the urgency voiced by modernist preservation organizations, such as Documentation and Conservation of the Modern Movement (Docomomo), which currently keeps a sharp eye on the status of Yamasaki buildings. It draws on archival materials, particularly those at Wayne State University, that help to give glimmers into Yamasaki’s own complex self-understanding. It is informed by accounts, oral and written, from essential Yamasaki collaborators such as Gyo Obata, Henry Guthard, Keith Brown, William Bain, Jr., and Leslie Robertson.

To these efforts the defense of my thesis will add a kind of rethinking that is focused on fundamental questions, questions that draw upon architectural theory as much as architectural history. My theoretical approach is informed by existential-phenomenological philosophies of architecture and an interpretive orientation known as philosophical hermeneutics. These are technical labels by which I simply mean to indicate that I seek to understand architectural solutions as responses to fundamental questions, including broad cultural questions and ultimate questions of meaning and meaning-symbolization. I believe that understanding architecture requires us to not only identify those questions but to ask them ourselves.

The fragility of architecture

The disparate set of questions and narratives to be found in the story of Yamasaki can be brought into thematic connection when we reflect on architect Steven Holl’s oft-repeated claim that architecture is “the most fragile of arts” (e.g. 2009, 287). The statement takes one by surprise, for what sort of artifacts could be more permanent than edifices of concrete, steel, and stone? Surely paintings and books, at least, are far more ephemeral. But Holl’s claim makes sense in several ways. For one, it can be said that the art is especially fragile in architecture, because the artistic vision of the project labors under the constraints of the program, the budget, the availability of materials, and a host of related conditions. Artistic intentions may come into conflict with the pragmatic mindset of developers and other overseers of the project. There may be clashes of tastes. Those who have invested large sums in the project have every right to push back against a design that seems odd, extravagant, impractical, or costly, yet the art within the architecture easily suffers in the process.

The fragility of architecture also becomes evident when we reflect on the fact that, unlike many other arts, works of architecture must stand against the elements. If books and manuscripts survive the centuries, it is because they have been housed in buildings such as libraries and archives. If paintings are preserved, it is by the grace of galleries, museums, and storage facilities. Plays and musical performances are sheltered by the walls and roofs of their theaters and concert halls. All of these structures must daily confront the impulsive forces of nature and slow wastage by the elements over time. Again, if no one sees fit to come to their aid, the buildings eventually succumb to the ravages of these forces. Architecture is the most fragile of arts, in part, because of the daunting nature of the duties to which it is necessarily pledged.

The case of Yamasaki brings other kinds of fragility into stark relief. There is the fact that architectural projects, in both their inception and their maintenance, are at the mercy of the larger dynamics of the cities or regions that they inhabit. Pruitt-Igoe has much to teach about this phenomenon. There is also the fact that buildings are popular targets in war and the campaigns of terrorists. Indeed, every war is, among other things, a war on architecture. The attacks of September 11 provide as dramatic an illustration of this fact as any that one could imagine. Then there is the fragility of an architect’s legacy, so clearly observable in the uncertain future that Yamasaki’s surviving works face.

All of these ways of hearing and applying the word “fragility” are, of course, negative in connotation: fragility as weakness, vulnerability, mortality. But there is also a highly affirmative sense to the word, and it is this sense that makes the idea most intriguing and illuminating when applied to Yamasaki’s case. Arguably the most definitive feature of his style was its embrace of fragility. From very early in his career Yamasaki formed an aversion to what he perceived as brutality in architecture. He reacted to this quality as it appeared in the architecture of former ages, remarking on how much of it – the fortresses, the walls, the battlements – betokened a world of violence, and how many buildings – the great estates, the palaces, the cathedrals – seemed determined to overwhelm the public with the force of their scale and grandeur. Such architecture of power and intimidation seemed, to Yamasaki, to belong to another age. Modernity, he thought, should represent everything that humankind has done to move in the opposite direction. The force of modernism must be a civilizing and humanizing agent in the world, in accordance with the ideals of the Enlightenment and the progressive spirit of the United States in the twentieth century (1956). To be a modern nation, for him, was to forsake authoritarianism for the virtues of democratic culture, embodying democratic values in everything that one imagines and creates. Civilization, humanism, democracy – it need hardly be said that these are fragile things. They are the fruit of the gentle arts of study, discussion, insight, and innovation. They fare ill in times of violent conflict and develop best along lines of least anxiety. To embrace their value is to embrace the worth of a fragile human community.

If such attitudes attest to a love of humanity as inspiration for Yamasaki, other features of his work manifest a love of the creativity of nature, and in this there lies another positive sense of the notion of fragility. The delicacy of the flower resting on its stem is the result of nature’s uncanny sense of structural economy: what is the minimum of support needed to thrust the flower into the air and hold it at this particular height? How large and alluring a blossom can be managed with the resources available? Somehow, in nature, aesthetics and pragmatics are inseparable; the engineering is blended with the artistry to a degree that makes human efforts at stable design seem like clumsy, disjointed affairs. It is this quality of nature, above all, that inspired Yamasaki. Looking at a thin stalk of bamboo, one may be surprised to see just how firm and strong it is; looking at the banister on a Yamasaki staircase, with its thin, decoratively patterned uprights and the narrow strip of wood that forms the handrail, one may be surprised to find that it feels as sturdy as structures of twice its width and weight. The architect thought constantly about the new possibilities for refinement of form that twentieth-century progress in engineering made possible, and he was in constant dialogue with outstanding engineers. In such a dialogue one comes closer to emulating nature’s seamless way of realizing artistry and structure with a single stroke.

Irwin Library, Butler University

In the specific form of fragility that I am describing one may discern qualities of a Japanese aesthetic. Although, on the one hand, Yamasaki frequently insisted on his identity as an American architect, with an American’s melting-pot conglomeration of cultural influences, his identity as a first-generation Japanese-American is difficult to remove from the explanation of most aspects of his life and work. In the heyday of the 1950s and ’60s, when America seemed to fall in love with bigness and ostentation for their own sake, Yamasaki’s love of the simple and the spare swam against the mainstream in what would seem to be a characteristically Japanese manner. His Nisei identity, as we shall see in more detail, was not something he could leave behind even had he fully wanted to.

In his embrace of fragility Yamasaki made a particular sort of wager with his legacy. He was wagering that his buildings would not derive their power of lasting from brute force – from their sheer ability to weather the elements or the difficulty of tearing them down and replacing them. The structures, with their floating platforms that carry one to a contemplative place, with their evocative figures against the sky, with their airy corridors and rhythms of repeated shapes, would survive because their combination of genuineness and charm would engender a desire to preserve them. That this strategy has been successful in certain cases is undeniable. Whether it has, all in all, been a winning gamble when compared with other strategies is a matter that will require our larger consideration of Yamasaki’s work in depth.

Course of the study

Because this study is interpretive and theoretical in its approach it will be organized somewhat thematically rather than simply chronologically, as a biography would be, or according to categories of projects, as a survey would be. The second chapter will highlight relevant biographical points drawn from across Yamasaki’s career. Subsequent chapters will explore the quality of fragility as it becomes evident in the dynamics of urban development, in the establishment of Yamasaki’s design style, and in the vision of democratic humanism that inspired his work at many levels. Three further chapters consider questions of architectural structure, scale, and symbolism, showing how Yamasaki’s story repeatedly illustrates debates over the meaning of “strength” in architecture, how the concentration of functions in massive projects creates unique forms of vulnerability, and how the ambiguity of cultural symbols leaves architects with limited control over how their works are interpreted.

The last major task will be to reflect on Yamasaki in light of connections to what came to be called “postmodernism” in architecture and other fields. The goal in doing so will not be to suggest that postmodernism is an established worldview from which one may normatively assess the successes and failures of modernism. For that there exists too much controversy over what postmodernism means or what, exactly, it has delivered. The goal, rather, will be to explore ways in which both the stylistic and the ideological elements of what has been called postmodernism in architecture, architectural theory, and philosophy can be read as being in a kind of dialogue and debate with Yamasaki. Stylistically, the freedom of form and historical reference in some strains of postmodern architecture can be seen to be prefigured, to a certain extent, in Yamasaki. The themes of disruption, violence, loss, absence, and mourning that have appeared in the work of some practitioners of what is called postmodern “deconstructivist” architecture have another kind of relevance to Yamasaki, historically proximate though stylistically and theoretically distant. Themes such as this – disruption, violence, loss – are themes that will always haunt the memory of Yamasaki’s legacy, themes that turn the mind, inevitably, to questions of fragility.

References

Bristol, Katherine G. 1991. “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.” Journal of Architectural Education 44, no. 3 (May): 163–71.

Campbell, Robert. 1993. “An Act of Architectural Hubris Meets Its End.” Boston Globe, August 13.

Conway, Brian D. and Haefner, James. 2018. Michigan Modern: An Architectural Legacy. New York: Visual Profile Books.

Gabbert, Elisa. 2018. “Crash Course.” The New York Times Magazine, April 15.

Gallagher, John. 2015. Yamasaki in Detroit: A Search for Serenity. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Goldberger, Paul. 2003. “Architecture Criticism: Does It Matter?” Lecture at Butler University, November 12. www.paulgoldberger.com/lectures/architecture-criticism-does-it-matter/.

Groves, Martha. 2009. “Saving Century Plaza Hotel Takes a Whole Village.” Los Angeles Times, November 21.

Gyure, Dale Allen. 2017. Minoru Yamasaki: Humanist Architecture for a Modernist World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Holl, Steven. 2009. Urbanisms: Working with Doubt. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press.

Jacobs, Jane. 1993. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: The Modern Library.

Jencks, Charles. 1991. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. New York: Rizzoli.

Meehan, Eugene I. 1975. Public Housing Policy: Convention versus Reality. New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers University.

Montgomery, Roger. 1985. “Pruitt-Igoe: Policy Failure or Societal Symptom.” In The Metropolitan Midwest: Policy Problems and Prospects for Change, edited by B. Checkoway and C.V. Patton, 229–43. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Time. 1963. “The Road to Xanadu.” Time, January 18: 54–64.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1956. “Yamasaki: Morality of Modern Architecture.” The Architectural Forum 104, no. 5 (May): 74, 82, 92, 96.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1979. A Life in Architecture. New York: Weatherhill.

Chapter 2
The fragility of dreams

Photo: Balthazar Korab

The arc of Yamasaki’s career passes through a period in American history characterized by enormous transformation, when the nation underwent the trials of the Great Depression and two world wars to emerge as a global commercial, industrial, and military power, seeking to realize, throughout the nation, visions of the modern city as a place of opportunity and democratic ideals, even as its citizens struggled with boom-and-bust economies and entrenched habits of racism and corruption. The field of architecture was often to be found at the center of this transformation, serving as a vehicle for bringing scores of new technologies into the spaces of human labors and domestic life. Architecture was called upon, as it has been throughout history, to embody and symbolize the significance and accomplishments of a culture, but through modern architecture it was to communicate specifically the power of a whole new way of life, quite possibly a new turn (it was believed in those heady days) in the grand triumphant tale of Western civilization.

Yamasaki’s intensions in life were fused with this role that architecture played in the tumultuous unfolding of this twentieth-century transformation. In the autobiographical sketch that opens his 1979 book, A Life in Architecture, the architect sums up how he wanted his life’s journey to be understood: “For me, architecture is not a way of life, it is my life” (1979, 9). The power of architecture – its appeal, its complexities and puzzles, its functions and significance – churned in his mind at all hours. Nothing else seemed to resonate so deeply in him. It enthralled him, preoccupied him, and consumed him. But this does not mean that Yamasaki’s personality simply disappears into the story of modern American architecture, for what he brought to his profession was a highly personal vision that reflects the unique path of his imaginative formation. What he experienced of America’s lofty ambitions and benighted cruelties as its way of life underwent change shaped a distinctive interpretation of the culture and the place of architecture within it.

During his early years Yamasaki’s family was part of a Japanese community establishing a foothold in the Seattle neighborhood surrounding the original “skid road,” where logs were hauled from forested lands to the sawmills on the shores of Elliot Bay. Yamasaki’s parents were immigrants from Japan. His father, John Tsunejiro Yamasaki, worked as a purchasing agent (also taking on other jobs on the side), and his mother, Hana, as a pianist. The tenement where the family lived was perched on a steep hillside, and although life in the house was primitive and literally precarious, Yamasaki recalled the neighborhood as a fun place to play. Eventually, as their income improved, the family moved to Auburn, a suburb south of Seattle, where Yamasaki enjoyed many bicycle rides through the stunning natural beauty of the region.

When the young man was still in high school, his mother’s older brother, Koken Ito, visited on his way from architecture school in California to a promised job in Chicago. There, before the family, Uncle Ito unrolled some architectural drawings that he had made. The young Yamasaki was struck, as if by lightening, by their astonishing beauty. “I almost exploded with excitement when I saw them,” he writes. It was in this instant, he says, that he formed the determination to become an architect himself (1979, 10–11). It is significant that this early epiphany was of a singular character – a unique experience of intense beauty – for while beauty is just one of the many values that architecture serves, it is the value that most consistently functioned, throughout Yamasaki’s career, as the guiding light. One can trace a theme through the whole of that career of a desire to recapture and to reproduce in others the same kind of aesthetic revelation that he had experienced, a desire pursued in the face of formidable obstacles and hardships.

Inspiration and tribulation

In the archives of the University of Washington’s library are preserved over 1,000 drawings and watercolor renderings created by students of the university’s architecture program from 1914 to 1947. In examining the carefully preserved and documented fruits of the long-lived academic program, one sees the care with which enormous sheets of paper were stretched and prepared with layers of light washes. Countless hours of meticulous labor are represented in the rendering of ornate column capitals and elaborate door friezes. The works give evidence of extraordinary skill with pen and brush demanded of the students.

Among the archives, stamped with the word “Retained” for their success at achieving the aims of the assignment, are several renderings by Minoru Yamasaki, who entered the program in 1929. A project from his sophomore year presents a “Gateway to an Artillery School,” a stone-arched edifice with huge doors bearing carvings of spears and shields, topped with an elaborate stone relief exhibiting symbols of heraldry and a coat of arms. To complete the effect, an equestrian soldier with a tall red feather in his cap rides by the entrance. Other preserved assignments include one of a county courthouse graced with a fountain and appropriate civic statuary, and a design for a gothic-arched building for the university’s own architecture department (which was housed, at the time, in a temporary building affectionately call “the shed”). In a project prepared for a competition in Yamasaki’s senior year, a planetarium and aquarium are imagined on their own promontory jutting into a body of water. The building, done in a variation of the Art Deco style, is dominated by the great dome of the planetarium, flanked by grand staircases and graced with reliefs of fantastic creatures. In a view looking down on the floor surrounding the aquarium, minute brushstrokes render the pattern of tropical fish, crabs, sea stars, and turtles in the floor tiles.

These student productions, along with the hundreds of others in the University of Washington archives, illustrate the extraordinarily imaginative vision of a program solidly rooted the theories and pedagogies of the Parisian École Beaux

University of Washington Special Collections

University of Washington Special Collections

Arts, yet a program that departed from that curriculum in some deliberate ways. Words by the department’s founder, Carl Gould, written in 1925, describe the central elements of the curriculum:

Freehand drawing to train the hand and eye. Descriptive geometry to facilitate visualization. Mathematics and mechanics of materials to attain a structural understanding. History and theory to give background and a thoughtful attitude.

(Ochsner 2007, 135)

In their early courses students would be assigned parts of buildings to design, such as cornices, columns, or single windows, moving on, then, to a complete façade or porch. As they progressed they would be given ever-more-grandly imaginative programs to realize, such as “an archaeological institute in a mountain valley in Syria, including a museum, spa and research center shared by six universities,” or “a carillon tower on an island in a lake, erected as a memorial to a former mayor” (Ochsner 2007, 148–9, 155). These they would render as a plan accompanied by drawings or paintings of the imagined project. Given that it was very much a fine-arts based program, the ability to produce historically inspired visual forms on paper was a crucial skill. Instruction was done by means of individualized critiques as a student’s work on a project progressed. These “crits” might include an instructor taking pen or paintbrush to student renderings to make corrections or indicate alternate ways to realize an assignment’s intent.

Watercolor by Charles Lawrence, 1933

University of Washington Special Collections

One of the most influential and charismatic professors at the time was Lionel Pries, an established architect who joined the program shortly before Yamasaki entered it. Pries was a master draftsman and a superb watercolorist who seemed to perfectly incarnate the blend of artistry and practical skills that the program most wished to inculcate. His course on the history of architectural ornament was one of the most prized by students. Pries was bold in wielding the paint brush during critiques, and students could come to fear him, but he could also be very personable with them, taking a sincere interest in their development and inviting them to his house for conversations. Like many prominent architects schooled at the University of Washington, Yamasaki was powerfully, deeply, permanently influenced by Pries and credited his revered teacher with keeping him in the program at a moment of grave self-doubt. Yamasaki did particularly well in the structural engineering courses, and although he loved the more emotional work with the brush in his design courses, he found the task of designing whole buildings overwhelming, and he struggled. With some trepidation, he approached Pries to share the idea of switching to engineering. But Pries would have none of it. He predicted that Yamasaki would be one of the best students to graduate from the program and, to allay the young man’s disappointment at the state of his skills, the professor took out some of his own student drawings, which were far from the paradigm that the mature master could produce so effortlessly (Yamasaki 1979, 13).

The word “romantic” crops up in a variety of contexts when describing the style of Lionel Pries – from his grandly poetic project ideas to the watercolor additions he would make to the student projects that he was critiquing, where he could create (in the words of Robert Hugh Ross) “the lushest banana palms, gnarled oak trees, and all manner of exotic plant species to best complement anybody’s architecture” (Ochsner 2007, 146). In Pries’s approach to watercolor depiction students learned how the silhouettes of objects allow us to recognize their essence even more than do their surfaces. In his class on ornament the professor would draw on traditions from all over the world while impressing upon students the idea of attention to detail as crucial to architectural design. All of these ideas – the use of many traditions, the legitimacy of ornament, the power of silhouettes, the importance of detail, and a love of the emotional element – appear at various points in Yamasaki’s own pronouncements on architecture – so much so, in fact, that while we may acknowledge a great many influences on Yamasaki, we must recognize as singularly foundational the role of Pries in shaping his architectural imagination. We must take Yamasaki at his word when he writes, in his autobiographical statement, “I owe to Professor Pries a tremendous debt; the intensity and enthusiasm he evoked in me has been a great influence throughout much of my architectural life” (1979, 13). He is not citing Pries as an early influence but as a continual influence throughout his career.

This influence, however, does not appear to be accompanied by contact with his teacher after graduation. Neither Yamasaki nor Pries seems to have pursued such contact, and in 1958 Pries retreated into a much more private lifestyle by virtue of being abruptly forced to resign. The reason for his resignation, kept secret for many years, was that the university had been notified of a “morals charge,” a vice sting targeting gay men in a city park in Los Angeles, in which Pries had been caught – a sufficient reason, in those homophobic days, to force a faculty member out (Ochsner 2007, 288–9). He turned to work in local architectural firms, none of it as satisfying to him as was teaching. In 1962, when the Century 21 World’s Fair opened in Seattle, many of the architects for the fair’s buildings could be counted as former students of his. Yamasaki’s contribution to the fair, the design for the Federal Science Pavilion (now the Pacific Science Center), Pries considered “quite breathtaking” (Ochsner 2007, 304). One wonders to what extent he might have been aware of how much his own teaching had inspired the building.

All architectural schools in this period faced a perplexing challenge: whether to continue instruction on the Beaux-Arts model, with its deep immersion in historical precedents of form and ornament, or to adopt the new vision of education that had emerged from Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus and similar bastions of innovation. The question, in other words, was what to do about modernism. At the University of Washington, the decision was made to stick to the traditional program. The bones of the curriculum, it was felt, were adaptable to any number of styles, and eventually the pedagogy was indeed focusing more and more on the modern styles. Pries, in fact, became a key figure in adapting modernist design principles to the regional ethos of the Pacific Northwest, with many of his students following this path (Ochsner 2007, 134). But Yamasaki, upon graduating in 1934, had not had the opportunity to come to grips with the likes of Gropius, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe. That happened when he made the decision to move to New York, when he entered graduate study at New York University, and when he began working in prominent architectural firms. Through this exposure, Yamasaki developed into a modernist, yet his early immersion in the artistic and humanistic Beaux Arts tradition remains a key to understanding his mature work.

The education that Yamasaki pursued at the University of Washington was achieved at great cost. Having begun his architectural studies at the outset of the Depression, with few opportunities for work in Seattle, the young college student labored for five summers in Alaskan canneries, where he suffered under forms of injustice, oppression, and bigotry that were as routine as they were appalling. The impact of this experience on his life was indelible. Nearly a quarter of the autobiographical statement in A Life of Architecture is devoted to it, perhaps because the occasion of giving an account of his youth released a flood of pent-up emotions. In the canneries he worked 66-hour weeks for 17 cents an hour until the peak of the canning season, when his pay rose to 25 cents – though at these times the number of workhours grew to staggering proportions. Workers were housed in tight quarters and slept on straw mattresses that were sometimes infested with bedbugs. The stench of outhouses was nearby. The diet consisted largely of rice, beans, and poor-quality salmon. Illness and accidents were common among workers, yet there were no medical facilities. And from these exploitative conditions the bosses in the canneries profited handsomely (1979, 13–17).

Certain incidents in his cannery life later stood out in Yamasaki’s memory. His work with jackhammers in the repair of boilers brought, he believed, stomach pains that he saw as the possible beginning of what would become stomach ulcers later in life. (Any potential role of the Helicobacter pylori bacterium had not yet been discovered at the time of his writing.) His hunger and disgust with the bad food led him, once, to steal from the bosses’ food supplies and provide a Fourth of July feast for fellow workers – what he describes as the only act of theft in his life. A moment of rage erupted once when Yamasaki was exhausted from pitching fish into a conveyor and a boss came to drive him harder. Losing his temper, the young worker swung his steel-tipped pick at the boss, causing the latter to fall, dressed in his suit, into the fish slime that covered the floor. Though Yamasaki emphasizes the impossible demands of the job he was doing at the time, feeding a machine that was called the “iron chink” with 10,000 fish an hour, his point in telling such stories is to emphasize how the inhumanity of the workplace brought out things in him that were alien to his character, things that left persistent traces of both sorrow and lingering shame (1979, 14–15).

It is hard to imagine a starker contrast of dimensions in American life than the two that this young man encountered in his college years. The architecture studio was a demanding place of exceptional standards, but one brimming with glorious inspiration and opportunity; the canneries were dungeons of monstrous racial degradation and managerial abuse. In his telling of life in these radical extremes, one can see certain convictions taking shape – above all, a distaste for violence and brutality, a firm opposition to the ego-driven libido dominandi that would put the whole world under its thumb. From here on one can see Yamasaki habitually reacting against anyone or anything that seemed to celebrate power, strength, and domination for their own sake. It is an element in what comes to be called his humanism, one born of intimate experiences of inhumanity.

The vulgar and abusive anti-Asian racism of the canneries was, of course, present in more normalized and veiled forms everywhere in American society. Yamasaki describes attitudes toward Asian-Americans in the Northwest of his youth as equivalent to attitudes toward African-Americans in the South at the time. Families would endure epithets and vandalism, would be barred from shops or segregated, as Yamasaki describes happening to him in a movie theater (1979, 11; see also Lee 2012, 37). All such incidents were clearly hurtful to him, but his response, for the most part, was to get through it all, to push it aside while working hard at the opportunities that were offered. Throughout his life he had a dislike of any personal narrative that would handicap a person’s success with the excuse that he or she had come from behind and faced exceptional obstacles. He didn’t like the egoism in Horatio Alger stories of triumph against improbable odds – this despite eventually winning a Horatio Alger award himself. All kinds of people overcome all kinds of obstacles, he thought; what matters is the worth of the goals to which one’s efforts are pledged. He believed in the power of his art to be a counterweight to the ugliness and inhumanity of the world. To him that is what mattered above all, and this is how he sublimated his reactions to the racism directed against him.

Today more than ever we can see this kind of response to prejudice as a survival strategy in the face of the relentless objectifications, micro-aggressions, threats, and abuses that are unimaginable, in their burdensomeness, to anyone who has not been forced to daily endure them. We can say that things were worse in the ’20s, the ’40s, or the ’60s than they are now, but we should not do so without reminding ourselves that they are also bad now. When Yamasaki brushes aside the matter of racial prejudice, his attitude can lure us into ignoring qualities in his work that were perhaps denigrated – whether maliciously or not, and whether consciously or not – because they derived from his Japanese heritage. As racial prejudice and cultural ignorance distort everything they touch, so there may be ways in which their presence in standard interpretations of Yamasaki, both in the past and the present, has skewed the received view of his significance and value.

The making of a modernist

After college Yamasaki had an opportunity to work with the same uncle, Koken Ito, who had first put architecture into his mind, and who now had his own architectural practice in Japan. But the newly minted architect chose a much riskier path, heading to New York, in part to pursue professional dreams, in part out of exasperation with the racial bigotry of the Northwest. As the young man carried his letters of recommendation to the offices of New York firms, he soon discovered just how little building was taking place under the dismal conditions of the Great Depression. He took a job wrapping and unwrapping dishes with a Japanese importer and, to keep his hand in architecture, enrolled in a master’s program at New York University. At one point, fellow students working with a firm entering the design competition for the Oregon state capitol building invited Yamasaki to help complete the entry. The design won the competition and stands today in Salem. Though Yamasaki’s contribution was peripheral, still it is notable that Francis Keally’s design – with its prominent dome flanked by stately marble “Grecian Moderne” wings and bas-reliefs, and topped by a 22-foot-tall gold-leaf statue of the “Oregon Pioneer” – is the sort of thing one could imagine coming out of Yamasaki’s architecture program at the University of Washington (Willingham 2013, 94–107).

Oregon State Capitol by Trowbridge & Livingston, with Francis Keally

At this point in Yamasaki’s career, the young man’s industriousness and talent suddenly opened three paths for him at once. The importer wanted to send him to Japan to become a manager or designer; the architecture program at NYU had him teaching watercolor classes, and one faculty member was encouraging him to pursue a career in painting; and the firm of Githens and Keally, with whom he had worked on the Oregon project, was ready to take him on as a designer. Given the condition of the economy, the importing job clearly offered the most security. He wrote his father for advice in this difficult decision, but before the elder Yamasaki had a chance to reply, his son had taken the job with the architects (Yamasaki 1979, 19).

Thus began a series of employments at prominent New York firms, over roughly a decade, in which Yamasaki held a variety of positions and worked with a range of mentors and collaborators. He was involved in noteworthy designs such as the Brooklyn Public Library (1935–41) and the massive Parkchester planned community in the Bronx (1939–42), designed to house 12,000 families. He did not only design during this period but prepared working drawings and learned other crucial aspects of the business of architecture (Yamasaki 1941; Gyure 2017, 5–6). His greatest learning experience of this time came at Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, where, in a typically ironic turn of events, just after the Pearl Harbor bombing, when anti-Japanese sentiments were at a fever pitch, this Japanese-American was put in charge of the creation of an entire military facility: the Sampson Naval Station on the shore of Lake Seneca, New York. This was a major project: 50 million dollars (worth 15 times that much today); 2,500 acres; facilities for training 30,000 men; dwellings for 300 families and 250 single men and women; school facilities for 5,000; a 1,500-bed hospital; and a chapel (Navy Bureau of Docks and Yards n.d.). All of it was to be done from scratch and completed in a staggering 270 days. The comprehensiveness of Yamasaki’s role in the creation of Sampson was exceptional: from design, to working drawings, to construction oversight. Every skill that he had ever acquired was put to the test, and he gained a thorough understanding of the building process from beginning to end.

To earn such a role in the project it had been necessary that he be rigorously investigated by the FBI and other agencies. But the process did not prevent some from harboring prejudiced suspicions. In common parlance, and sometimes in the media, he was termed a “loyal Jap” – yet still a “Jap.” When Executive Order 9066 came down, sending West Coast Japanese Americans to the infamous internment camps, Yamasaki and Teruko, the talented pianist he had married, had his family in Seattle come to New York to share their small apartment – a move made possible with the help of his employer and the generous tolerance of the landlord (Yamasaki 1979, 20–1).

By 1945 Yamasaki had spent nearly a decade in formation as a modern architect and was thoroughly skilled in the techniques, styles, and sensibilities of the movement. It is at this time that he was approached by the firm of Smith, Hinchman & Grylls to bring his modernist talents to their design team in the booming industrial city of Detroit. He made the move very successfully, designing for the firm buildings for which he remains known, notably an annex added to the Detroit branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, in which he produced an elegant solution to the problem as to how to create a modern addition to a historic edifice without overpowering it. Yamasaki’s annex is significantly larger than the original, but it is stepped back from the street, reproducing the original building’s geometry but with a muted curtain-wall façade, as if it were holding the smaller building out to the public, showcasing it rather than competing with it (Gyure 2017, 15–16). In the inter vening years the annex has become as well known as its historic companion, and the whole of the complex has been repurposed to house a variety of organizations, including the offices of the Detroit Media Partnership.

Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago Detroit Branch Building Annex

Founding a practice

The frequent shift of positions and employers during the New York period of Yamasaki’s career is due, in part, to circumstances but also to a restless drive to acquire an ever greater range of competences and a deeper grasp of everything that goes into shepherding a project from commission to construction. The trajectory of this growth in abilities had been heading for some time toward founding his own practice, a possibility that he had explored initially in New York with George Nelson and in Detroit with Alexander Girard. But in 1949 he took the leap. A former colleague from Smith, Hinchman & Grylls, George Helmuth, who was located in St. Louis and was friends with the mayor there, invited Yamasaki to join him, along with Joseph Leinweber, to work on a multi-million-dollar public housing project, the John Cochran Garden Apartments. Thus a partnership was formed among these three – Hellmuth, Yamasaki & Leinweber – with an enormous job in hand but no office, no staff, and not even a typewriter (Yamasaki 1957). Yet within months the fledgling firm was going full steam and even opening a second office in Detroit, which was called (by a switch of the names) Leinweber, Yamasaki & Hellmuth. Income for the two practices came from the two massive housing projects in St. Louis – Cochran and Pruitt-Igoe, but also from small projects – notably a variety of school buildings, where modern engineering techniques allowed the architects to create comfortable and light-filled spaces at very modest costs.

Holy Ghost School/Harvest Church, St. Louis, 1951

Prejudice had followed Yamasaki to Detroit. When he and Teruko sought to buy or rent a home in one of the desirable suburbs of Detroit – Grosse Pointe, Birmingham, or Bloomfield Hills – they found that these neighborhoods were severely redlined against Japanese-Americans, and the family settled instead in an old farmhouse on a large property in Troy, Michigan, where they set about raising three children: Carol, Taro, and Kim (Yamasaki 1979, 22–3). The absurdity of this discrimination became increasingly apparent as Yamasaki began designing homes and other buildings in the neighborhoods where he had been barred from living. In 1957 the Birmingham Unitarian Church in Bloomfield Hills chose Yamasaki to design their church building, not only out of an appreciation of his talent but also as a repudiation of the attitudes that had excluded him from the area a decade earlier.

This period is one in which Yamasaki came into his own as a mainstream modernist, producing works with a personal stamp, yet in mainstream styles and with familiar engineering strategies. But it quickly blossomed into a period of innovation that established Yamasaki’s reputation as a distinctive kind of auteur pursuing stylistic experiments potentially opening whole new directions for the designer’s art. His collaboration with the young designer Gyo Obata for the Lambert Air Terminal in St. Louis featured not only striking engineering innovations in sweeping thin-shell concrete vaults, using the pioneering innovations of Anton Tedesko, but it incorporated an artistic goal of producing architectural metaphors for the experience of flight and associative connections to Grand Central Station in New York City, and even the vaults of the Roman baths of Caracalla (Rust 2016, 134–42; Prudon 2008, 95). The project brought a new sense of grandeur to the experience of air travel, evoking the storied legacies of great American train stations, capturing the rhythms of flight in its soaring rooflines, recalling the glow of the evening sky in the lighting of the ceilings after dark (Gyure 2017, 28–37). Here was a new and startlingly evocative imagining of what an airport could be. It was neither traditionally stuffy, as some earlier airports had been, nor merely utilitarian, as most modern airports seemed to be. It was symbolic in a distinctly modern way, drawing its imagery from the same spirit of engineering innovation that was central to aviation’s history.

Photo: Balthazar Korab

St. Louis Lambert International Airport

The success of Lambert brought Yamasaki’s name to prominence, putting him on lists of architects to consider for projects being planned around the country. One such list was that of the United States Office of Foreign Buildings Operations, selecting architects for its ambitious program of establishing embassies and consulates across the globe. Because he was of Japanese ancestry and because an ambition of the program was to connect with the cultures where the offices were to be located, Yamasaki was given the commission for a consulate in Kobe, Japan (Loeffler 2011, 148). Had there been an expectation that this Japanese-American architect would have a familiarity with Japanese architecture it would be mistaken, but he made the project the occasion to dive into that world, with transformative consequences. As few modernists had done at the time, he travelled to Japan, touring buildings both famous and typical. The power of Japanese artistry, the meticulous craftsmanship, the integration of affective and spiritual meaning into every detail introduced new models and standards into Yamasaki’s professional life. It was such an awakening that he sought to extend his encounter with historical architecture, travelling the world to encounter the treasures of Athens, Rome, and Venice. He visited China and India, marveling not only at the Taj Mahal but Le Corbusier’s masterworks of Chandigarh. He found fascination in the great mosques of the Persian and Arab worlds. He came away with a profound sense of the richness of the world’s architectural tradition, as if those watercolor images of his school days had come to life and were dancing before his eyes. He could not help but sense that there was something at the heart of what architecture had always been, a deep wellspring of its meaning and emotional resonance, that was missing from the modern conventions reigning in America (Gyure 2017, 58–60).

U.S. Consulate, Kobe

Photo: Archives of Michigan

The Kobe building, completed in 1955 (and now destroyed), achieved everything the government program might have wished for it, with a design that echoed, in modern materials, features of traditional Japanese buildings. But the commission that first announced Yamasaki’s new orientation to the American public drew more broadly from his travel experiences and remains one of his most highly respected works: the McGregor Memorial Conference Center at Wayne State University in Detroit. This building is clearly modern in its abstract simplicity and clean, open form in glass and steel, yet it stands on a platform like a Greek temple, incorporating complex zig-zag patterns, decorative grilles, and heavy ornamental doors. With a sculpture court featuring pools and platforms added a few years later (and recently restored to pristine brilliance), the site becomes a place of thought and reflection – quiet, meditative, reminiscent of sacred spaces in multiple traditions.

Yamasaki’s designs of this period, then, adapted modern principles to something that was broader and more eclectic than the creations of narrowly doctrinaire modernists, and this combination of elements captured the imagination of clients, critics, and the public. Now, as if he had graduated from secondary school and gone on to college, his educational commissions began to come from institutions of higher education, including, eventually, some of the most prominent institutions in North America. The design for the Lambert Air Terminal established a new standard for what airport designs could express and had a powerful influence on subsequent airport design. For the United States pavilion at the 1959 World Agricultural Fair in New Delhi, India, he designed an enchanting exhibit space combining elements of an American agricultural fair with allusions to the annual Indian harvest fair, the Mela. The popularity of the exhibit helped to earn him the commission to do the Federal Science Pavilion at the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle, the “Century 21 Exposition.” With this Seattle structure, Yamasaki drew the attention of the eyes of the world, and its success – similar to the popularity of the Indian project – stands as a kind of pivotal moment in Yamasaki’s rise to fame, the moment where the most characteristic qualities of his architectural style were on full display before an audience of millions, the public embraced the architecture with great enthusiasm and respect, and the nation’s most influential critics had to reckon with Yamasaki as a major figure in the architectural world. There was a sense of promise in Yamasaki’s innovations, the possibility that he could lead modern architecture to a place that might maintain its principles while enriching its appeal.

McGregor Memorial Conference Center

Success and its costs

The period of skyrocketing success brought with it great burdens of stress, for as the major groundbreaking projects were being realized, the firm continued to do a regular spate of offices, industrial buildings, churches, and synagogues. When Yamasaki writes, in his autobiographical statement, “architecture is my life,” there is a double-edged quality to the claim – a self-assured expression of his singular dedication, but with a tinge of remorse that this complete immersion in the world of his career had taken a regrettable toll on his family and his health. Already in 1953 the stress contributed to bleeding ulcers that put him in mortal danger, requiring surgery that removed two-thirds of his stomach. After his release from the hospital he decided to scale back the scope of his firm, closing the St. Louis office. His partner there, George Helmuth, along with George Kassabaum and the talented designer working on the Lambert Airport project, Gyo Obata, took the firm over and refounded it as Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum, now known as HOK, one of the largest and most accomplished architectural firms in the world.

The restriction of focus to Detroit, however, slowed very little the stream of projects that Yamasaki’s office took on. The company’s project list for the latter half of the 1950s contains more than 70 items, including projects in places as distant as Hawaii, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. It was a period in which the philosophy that would guide the rest of Yamasaki’s career solidified into its more or less permanent form. He was producing some of his most definitive works while capturing the public imagination and enjoying great fame. With his selection as principal designer for New York’s World Trade Center, he seemed to have gained entry into the most exclusive pantheon of American architects. The profile cover story for Time magazine on January 18, 1963, casts the 50-year-old Yamasaki as a captivating innovator at the peak of his powers, pleasing clients with the beauty of his creations and stirring the pot among his fellow preeminent architects by refusing to adhere to International-Style orthodoxy. His personality became a point of interest – a “slight man” of tremendous drive and dedication, visionary and opinionated, yet modest and gracious in his manner, even self-deprecating in his humor.

Meanwhile, there was turmoil in his private life. He had divorced Teruko in 1961, and she and the children had moved out. Yamasaki was living in the farmhouse with his mother and a second wife, Peggy Watty (Time 1963, 64). But even as Time was publishing a photo of Watty filling the home’s Yamasaki-designed Japanese bath, this marriage, too, was falling apart, and ended shortly thereafter. On a trip to Japan Yamasaki met and promptly married a third wife, a Japanese woman, but this marriage ended even more quickly. Friends and colleagues were confused by the instability reflected in these short-lived marriages. And there were comments made about Yamasaki’s drinking – stories of going to lunch with him and ending up eating and drinking on into the evening, stories of celebrations where Yamasaki drank to excess (Glanz and Lipton 2003, 115–16).

With the gargantuan project of the World Trade Center in his hands through much of the 1960s, there should be little surprise that stress levels did not abate, and this, along with a refusal to give priority to his health, found him, at one point late in the decade, once again in mortal danger from seizures that kept him in the hospital for a long stay. Upon his emergence he was full of design ideas for more patient-centered hospital wards and he had fallen in love with one of the nurses, with whom he lived briefly afterward. But to the relief of many, and as if coming to his senses, in 1969 he remarried Teruko. The Detroit News ran a feature, “The Yamasakis: A Love Story” (Detroit News 1969). The architect designed a new residence in Bloomfield Hills, where the two of them lived until his death from stomach cancer in 1986 at the age of 73.

The long shot

The story of Yamasaki’s commissioning for the design of the World Trade Center is the best known chapter in his biography and has been told repeatedly – most definitively, perhaps, by James Glanz and Eric Lipton in their book, City in the Sky (2003). At the heart of the tale is an irony: that New York’s Port Authority, determined to build the biggest and grandest monument to commerce on the New York skyline, should select an architect who had made his name by means of relatively small projects that charmed the public with their human-scaled details and sometimes fanciful ornamentation. But in this irony is also part of the explanation for the choice. Guy Tozzoli, who, in 1962, was overseeing the development of the World Trade Center project, was also, at the time, assisting New York’s Robert Moses in the planning of that city’s 1964 World’s Fair. In the latter capacity Tozzoli visited Seattle’s Century 21 Exposition, where he was utterly captivated by Yamasaki’s Federal Science Pavilion. For Tozzoli, Yamasaki’s ability to create a quiet and enchanting oasis amid the hectic fairgrounds, along with his success in evoking an architectural reverie in a modern idiom, was just the kind of counterbalance that was needed for the gargantuan scale of the Port Authority’s program (2003, 88–90, 96–8).

Federal Science Pavilion/Pacific Science Center

In the selection process for the project, Yamasaki won out against some very prominent architects. When he was invited to apply, an original “genius team” for the project – consisting of Edward Durrell Stone (architect of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.), Gordon Bunshaft (architect of New York’s iconically modern Lever House), and Wallace Harrison (famous for the United Nations Headquarters) – had already been dismissed by Tuzzoli, who felt a single architect was needed to bring a consistent vision to the task. Among the seven firms that competed for this role were Philip Johnson, who later earned the moniker of “Dean of American architecture,” and Walter Gropius’s Architects’ Collaborative. But the evaluation team preferred Yamasaki for the inspiration in his visionary statements, the unique creativity that he brought to his projects, the engineering prowess evident in previous undertakings, and the remarkable integration that he was able to achieve among all of these elements (Robins 2011, 81–91).

The World Trade Center took more than a decade to reach completion. In the course of its development the design underwent many changes. Yamasaki’s original process was a highly collaborative affair within the office. Scores of models were generated, with all kinds of variation in design concept – from groupings of buildings to a single slab. Once the concept of twin towers emerged, there were still questions as to how high they should go and how much of the program they should contain. It was the Port Authority, with its determination to create an icon, that demanded they should be the world’s tallest buildings. Yamasaki, with his distaste for arrogant, overpowering structures, had no interest of his own in pursuing such an inevitably short-lived distinction, but he yielded to the Port Authority’s wishes and the assurances of his engineers that the feat could be accomplished. The trade-off that appealed to him was the possibility that by thrusting the program so far into the air a plaza space could open up that would be an oasis in the thickly tangled urban core of lower Manhattan.

The towers, once completed, were inevitably some of the most talked about features of the New York skyline, and opinions were always mixed. Much of the negative response had to do with the sheer audacity of the project, and this feature, of course, was more the product of the Port Authority than Yamasaki. But if the hope in hiring Yamasaki was that the public would embrace the buildings as they did his most popular creations, the results had to be disappointing. What struck many critics and much of the public was not the elegance of the lines or the openness of the plaza, but the domination of the incredible scale and a feeling of wind-swept barrenness in the spaces around the structures.

But whatever the reaction to the towers might be, the net effect was to deepen respect for Yamasaki – as the man who would take on such a thing, who would see it through, and who would have a distinctive architectural vision for it from beginning to end. He was now “the architect of the World Trade Center,” which remains the only moniker by which he is known throughout the world. The preferred photo opportunity has him standing (in one case, on a ladder) next to the enormous model that his office had created for the project. But the special circumstances of this assignment and the compromises that were necessary to realize it make it a less-than-perfect representative of Yamasaki’s core architectural vision. In a manner that is surely ironic, but by no means unheard of in the world of architecture, the work most definitive of his reputation was far from being his most definitive work.

After the attacks of 9/11, friends and associates of Yamasaki could be heard expressing some relief that he did not live to see his most spectacular achievement mercilessly destroyed. While one may concur with the sentiment, one should also recall that he did endure his share of pain and disappointment. Indeed, his was a generation that breathed calamity, finding its way through the Depression and two world wars, suffering the growing pains and then the decline of intensely industrial cities in a country divided by race and class. It is hard not to see Yamasaki, by the 1980s, as creatively weakened by emotional challenges and bouts of ill health, beaten into modernist conformity by a decades-long string of critiques of his most distinctive innovations. Yet there was never a question among associates that his name would have a lasting meaning in the world of modern architecture.

Photo: Balthazar Korab

The persistence of culture

It can sometimes seem as if Yamasaki pursued two goals with equal passion: on the one hand, to claim his Japanese heritage; on the other, to evade it. If at first these purposes seem simply contradictory, a closer inspection reveals two trajectories that were followed, not in contradiction exactly, but in a complex tension familiar to most nonwhite citizens navigating their way through the American racial landscape. One trajectory seeks respite from the incessant indignities that are ignorantly or maliciously directed at one. A defining moment in this purpose, surely, was the architect’s decision, after completing studies at the University of Washington, to seek his fortune in New York. The great city must have represented, in part, an opportunity to weaken the hold of the Nisei category, to stake his claim at the center of America’s architectural world, with its wide range of cosmopolitan influences and characters. The wisdom of this migration would seem to have been demonstrated once the community he had known as a boy was destroyed by the debacle of internment.

Yet anti-Japanese prejudice did follow him to the east, with such egregious incidents as being redlined out of Parkchester, the planned community that he himself had helped design (Gyure 2017, 266n8). Here there emerges a second strategy in dealing with the prejudice: combatting it through activism. During the war and in the years immediately following it, the young architect was active in trying to improve the treatment of Japanese-Americans, joining the Arts Council of the Japanese American Committee for Democracy, along with sculptor Isamu Noguchi and painter Yasuo Kuniyoshi. As chair of the Resettlement Council of the Japanese Americans Organizations, he helped provide information and advocacy for people relocating from the west (Gyure 2017, 7).

But eventually Yamasaki began to feel that this sort of activism was not the best use of his time. As he accrued successes in the field of architecture, he restricted his scope to the pursuit of professional work. The way he put it was to say that plenty of people are engaged in political causes, but far fewer are devoted to the equally important task of bringing beauty to life. Continuing to experience the sting of prejudice, his strategy, one might say, was to work around it, to pursue the stream of opportunities that were opening for him, creating, along the way, opportunities in his firm for others who had known similar treatment.

Along with this strategy for dealing with prejudice there appeared, at times, another: a distancing, both personally and professionally, from his cultural identity. In the 1950s Minoru and Teruko could be heard pointing out how little connection they had to Japanese culture. They did not speak Japanese; they did not have Japanese friends (Glanz and Lipton 2003, 92). The architect thought it ridiculous when people would assume from his name or face that he would know how to design Japanese houses (Gyure 2017, 166; Nakatani 2016, 363). And, once again, he never cared for the version of his success story, sometimes told by Japanese-American writers, of the Nisei who triumphed over prejudice to thrive in a discriminatory world. There was too much exceptionalism and self-pity, for him, in such an account. All sorts of people succeed against all kinds of odds. Why dwell on the pathos of the struggle when one should be valuing the achievement for its own worth?

That is one trajectory. The other traces an arc of deepening encounter, engagement, and affinity with Japanese architecture and culture over the course of his career. The immersion in Japanese arts that the Kobe Consulate project brought about had permanent effects on his design approach. Of this experience he quipped, “Everyone has a complex. It took the ulcer to show me what mine was – that I am Japanese” (Bourne 1958, 85). The embassy program had made false, naïve assumptions about what a Japanese-American might know about Japanese culture but turned out to be correct in thinking that Yamasaki could use his architecture to express a desire for mutual cultural understanding and friendship. He was put in this position for artificial reasons yet found in it the opportunity to fall genuinely in love with the culture of his roots (Nakatani 2016; Loeffler 2011, 148–9).

In this positive appropriation of identity, too, however, there was a complicated line to walk, requiring various strategies. On the one hand, he allowed himself to become an advocate for Japanese design ideals, arguing for their deeper influence on modern architecture. He openly proclaimed such values to be part of his approach, with the result that more projects with Japanese connections came his way, including the commission for the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center in San Francisco (1960–68), a multi-block hotel and retail complex, and one of his last projects, the massive Founders Hall for the Shinji Shumeikai religious order in Shiga Prefecture, Japan (1978–83).

Japan Center, San Francisco

Yet here Yamasaki had to be careful not to exaggerate his authority, for he could never claim competence in traditional Japanese techniques, nor even a solid grasp of their principles. He prudently described his work as Japanese-influenced, “somewhat Japanese,” or in “the spirit” rather than fully representative of the tradition (Yamasaki 1961; Nakatani 2016, 359, 364). As a cultural ambassador, he was expected to represent Japan for Americans and America for the Japanese, requiring that he finesse the combination of truth and falsity that was inevitably present in that dual role. He had to avoid allowing his enthusiasm for things Japanese to dissociate him, in public and professional perceptions, from mainstream modernism, yet he wished to associate himself with Japanese values sufficiently to add cultural weight to features that distinguished him from other modernists (Nakatani 2016, 363).

It is typical for a Japanese-American, even today, to experience the feeling of being set apart from both Japanese and American culture. In the United States, one is stereotyped by one’s appearance; but visiting Japan, one may be made to feel overly assimilated to American life. The Japanese may express dismay that one does not speak the language or know much about the country. There should be room, one might argue, in the grand scheme of architectural-historical categories, for the one that Yamasaki fills, a specifically Japanese-American approach to modern architecture, assessed not according to criteria of Japanese or European-American authenticity but according to its success at expressing the specific world of experience from which it comes. Call it “Nisei architecture.” Without such a category, an artist like Yamasaki is constantly walked back and forth between two deficiencies: insufficiently American or insufficiently Japanese. Any artist of such a dual heritage is owed something better than this. Things were worse in Yamasaki’s day, in the consistency with which people like him were given such treatment, but things are still bad now, including, perhaps, in the handling of his legacy.

References

Bourne, Russell. 1958. “American Architect Yamasaki.” Architectural Forum 109, no. 2 (August).

Detroit News. 1969. “The Yamasakis: A Love Story.” Detroit News Sunday Magazine, September 7.

Glanz, James and Lipton, Eric. 2003. City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center. New York: Time Books.

Gyure, Dale Allen. 2017. Minoru Yamasaki: Humanist Architecture for a Modernist World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Lee, Shelly Sang-Hee. 2012. Claiming the Oriental Gateway: Prewar Seattle and Japanese America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Loeffler, Jane C. 2011. The Architecture of Diplomacy: Building America’s Embassies. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Nakatani, Sanae. 2016. “Blueprints for New Designs: Japanese American Cultural Ambassadorship during the Cold War.” Journal of Asian American Studies 19, no. 3 (October): 351–74.

Navy Bureau of Docks and Yards. n.d. “Chapter XI: The Training Stations.” Building the Navy’s Bases in World War II: History of the Bureau of Yards and Docks and the Civil Engineer Corps, 1940 – 1946. www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/Building_Bases/bases-11.html.

Ochsner, Jeffrey Karl. 2007. Lionel Pries: Architect, Artist, Educator: From Arts and Crafts to Modern Architecture. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press.

Prudon, Theodore H.M. 2008. Preservation of Modern Architecture. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Robins, Anthony W. 2011. Classics of American Architecture: The World Trade Center. N.p.: Thompson and Columbus.

Rust, Daniel L. 2016. The Aerial Crossroads of America: St. Louis’s Lambert Airport. St. Louis: Missouri History Museum Press.

Time. 1963. “The Road to Xanadu.” Time, January 18: 54–64.

Willingham, William F. 2013. “Architecture of the Oregon State Capitol.” Oregon Historical Quarterly 114, no. 1 (Spring).

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1941. Letter to Harrison, Fouilhoux & Abramovitz, August 5, 1941. Walter P. Reuther Library Minoru Yamasaki Papers, Wayne State University, Box 3, Folder 5.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1957. Questionnaire Responses. Walter P. Reuther Library Minoru Yamasaki Papers, Wayne State University, Box 5, Folder 16.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1961. “A Humanist Architecture for America and Its Relation to the Traditional Architecture of Japan.” Zodiac 8: 141–5.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1979. A Life in Architecture. New York: Weatherhill.

Chapter 3
The fragility of the city

Photo: U.S. Geological Survey

They stood on the landscape like the great monuments of some ancient civilization. Thirty-three massive brick-clad concrete buildings, each rising 11 stories into the air – comprising, all told, nearly 3,000 apartment units – the Pruitt-Igoe housing project possessed a scale unlike anything in the district surrounding it. It is as if the buildings had been dropped into the heart of St. Louis from another time or another world. The impact of this gargantuan size must surely have been seen as symbolic, announcing that the modern solution to the problems of the urban poor was to rewrite all of the rules for city making. Such a project sweeps away every hint of what has gone before and puts in its place a creation that could hardly have been imagined before the twentieth century. Yet if the immensity and ambition of Pruitt-Igoe are staggering, more so is the fact that all of these great monumental structures have themselves been swept away, existing today hardly even as ruins. As modern imagination and technology can conjure such weighty and seemingly permanent edifices, so can modern techniques of demolition, with equally miraculous power, cause them to suddenly vanish. For decades, the simple and obvious question has been: Why did the project fail? Yet this simple question turns out to be devilishly complex, and for that reason has aroused great quantities of scholarly and public debate in the years since the project’s demise. It is a question, too, that gnawed at the project’s designer, Minoru Yamasaki, during the last decades of his life.

Pruitt-Igoe was one among several major housing projects erected in St. Louis in the early 1950s. Originally two projects – the Captain W.O. Pruitt Homes and the William L. Igoe Apartments – they were meant to be segregated, with the Pruitt Homes for African-Americans (the project being named for a Black fighter pilot) and the Igoe Apartments for whites. But in 1956 state legislation ordered the integration of all public housing projects. This integration minimized the original reasons for thinking of them as two projects, leading to their being referred to as one – first “Pruitt and Igoe” and then the hyphenated “Pruitt-Igoe.” The inspiration for this project and similar ones, from a policy point of view, was the possibility of using high-rise construction to make the most efficient use of urban land, which tended to come at a premium cost. One could demolish blighted slum areas and replace them with modern, efficient, and sanitary units. “Decent housing” in the inner city could be a stepping-stone to a decent way of life all around.

Pruitt-Igoe site

As for the design inspiration, it is normally traced back to that foundational document of architectural modernism, the principles of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) and to the visionary drawings and models of Le Corbusier’s book The Radiant City, first published in France in 1933 (1967). As early as the 1920s, the great Swiss-born architect was imagining whole acres of Paris’s thickly woven Left Bank razed and replaced by enormous cruciform skyscrapers and long ribbons of contiguous shorter buildings. These buildings would be linked by highways completely separated from pedestrian traffic, pulling the more intensive uses of the city into the sky so as to give the vast majority of the ground surface over to park-like spaces where pedestrians would make their way amid an idyll of nature in the heart of the city.

Here, then, we have an architect moving beyond the sculpting of particular buildings to envision a radical, comprehensive solution to the very problem of city-making in the modern world. Le Corbusier was aware that the density, cacophony, and industrial grit of European cities was driving residents into the countryside and leaving others wishing that they could follow these ex-urbanites. He was convinced that the appeal of suburban living was chiefly in the beauty and calm of its open spaces and proximity to nature, while rejecting the conviction of Garden-City theorists that cities must be restricted in their size and scale so as to retain a country-living feel amid their full panoply of urban functions. Le Corbusier’s instincts led in the opposite direction: toward an urban gigantism that would, by its concentration of varied uses into high-rise buildings, free up the ground level and bring the most valued aspects of suburban life back into the city, so that the urban pedestrian could, as he said, “walk, run, play, breathe, soak up the air and the sun, revive his body, and even better than that: make his body a thing of magnificence” (1967, 111).

The eternal conundrum of the urban economy is that it succeeds by virtue of a concentration of activities, resources, technologies, workers, and residents, yet the side effects of this very concentration can drive people out of the city to a degree that threatens its revenue base. Le Corbusier was providing a fundamentally design-based solution to this very large and thorny puzzle. The controversy over his solution, then, necessarily concerns much more than architectural aesthetics, or even the particulars of the urban design. It is always also a controversy over the extent to which design has the power to change the way people want to live – the question as to how much and in what ways a city can be thought of as a work of art.

Design on trial

Since the time of Pruitt-Igoe’s destruction, a principal culprit, when explaining the project’s failure, has been its design. The apartments of Pruitt-Igoe were fashioned with specific intentions for how each small room would be used, while an elaborate set of regulations guided oversight of these uses. Yamasaki introduced innovations in the design of common spaces – including galleries and “breezeways” that could serve as gathering places and play spaces for children – which were to stand in for uses that sidewalks would have served for ground-level dwellings. The fact that elevators did not stop on every floor, requiring residents to use stairs for part of their movement through the building, was to contribute to creating contact among residents, thus promoting the development of community, as would the park-like spaces, gardens, and playgrounds that would surround the buildings. But none of these determinations of the use of space worked exactly as intended, and critics interpret these failures as symptoms of the hubris of over-determining designers who believe they know just how people should live and blame the people when they won’t live that way. The point holds for the design of interior spaces but equally for the very concept of a city of rationalized living sorted out on the drawing tables of architects, urban designers, and planners.

In her attack on Radiant-City thinking, the great North American interpreter of urban life, Jane Jacobs, introduced a famous rallying cry: “a city cannot be a work of art” (1993, 485). For her, the visual order and organization of living so cherished by Le Corbusier and modern city planners reflects art’s function of selecting out from life those features that achieve a certain aesthetic ideal, while life itself (one easily forgets) is the seeming chaos out of which the selection is made. Indeed, life seems like chaos largely because one fails to understand, either through impatience or by virtue of the sheer complexity of the phenomena, the systematic functions that are at work in cities. Difference always looks chaotic from the outside, and yet the variety it creates, including unexpected variety, gives cities one of their greatest sources of vitality and appeal. The streets of older neighborhoods in America reflected generations of practical wisdom about how to accommodate strangers and promote safety and contact among neighbors. While she was not a foe of modern architecture per se, Jacobs opposed the modern urban planning mentality that tossed aside all of this embedded wisdom for something far more abstract and demonstrably lacking in both experience and concrete insights (Jacobs 1993, Chs. 19 and 22). The design of Pruitt-Igoe offers a prime example of what Jacobs is talking about. Yamasaki was not as naïve as some designers were – understanding, as he did, that streets serve vital functions, that human beings are essentially ground-dwelling creatures whose street life must somehow find its equivalent in the high-rise structure – yet he brought to the project a modernist mentality that craves rational order, and did so to a point where he seemed to be organizing not only the dwelling spaces but the people who would dwell there.

This design-focused critique of Pruitt-Igoe has been, as I say, a dominant interpretive approach for decades. It was notably voiced by the architecture critic Charles Jencks and repeated by others, including Robert Hughes in his book and television series The Shock of the New, where, in the video version, Jencks’s condemnation of modernist design, accompanied by the roar of collapsing buildings, makes the argument seem, at the emotional level at which television communicates, irrefutable (Jencks 1991; Hughes 1980; Richardson and Pegram 2001). Yet this interpretation has never been the only one available, and its challengers have, since the 1990s, received increased attention through Katherine Bristol’s article “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,” developed into a film documentary by Chad Freidrichs, and the work of urbanologist Robert Fishman, whose arguments figure prominently in the film (Bristol 1991; Friedrichs 2012). The counterclaim of these voices is that an overemphasis on features of architecture

Photo courtesy of Walter P. Reuther Library

and design has obscured other dynamics at work in the decline of the project. The “myth” is that design was a cause sufficient to explain the failure, whereas in fact many other causes contributed. There was a lack of funding for maintenance for the buildings, there were boondoggles in the construction process that yielded low-quality finishes and furnishings, there were biases based on class and race that contributed to making the project a relatively low priority of city government. There was folly in the very idea of taking large numbers of the urban poor and concentrating them in one place and folly in isolating and limiting access to the project. These are problems with program conception and governance rather than design. The project, too, was a victim of demographics: as residents were moving out of the city in ever greater numbers, the social problem that the project was meant to address – the problem that all urban housing projects were meant to address, which is the problem of housing a growing population in the inner city – was becoming (in a manner that yielded a host of new difficulties) moot (Fishman 2004). Early on, Yamasaki was involved in some of these larger debates over the realities of public housing. After the fall of Pruitt-Igoe, they form the context within which one must assess the degree of blame that his name must bear.

High-risers and low-risers

The best argument in favor of high-rise residential development is the simple and obvious fact that ever since multistory elevator buildings became technologically feasible, they have been popular places to dwell. One can point to countless apartments and condominiums in major American cities that attract residents willing to spend large sums in rents or purchase costs. One might notice, moreover, that today high-rise apartments and condominiums continue to grow in number and value in many cities, proving to be particularly attractive to young professionals and retired seniors who enjoy the combination of a culturally vibrant location and the ability to retreat from it to a dwelling space with appealing views. Edward Glaeser, of Harvard University, has argued that there is nothing intrinsically problematic about residential high-rises; what matters is how they are located and related to urban uses at the ground level (2011, 152).

By the early 1950s, Yamasaki had acquired experience with major housing initiatives and had faith in the potential of urban high-rise architecture, yet his contributions to the debate over high-rise versus low-rise public housing are not exactly those of an ardent believer. In a 1952 speech to a conference of the National Association of Housing Officials, Yamasaki acknowledges immediately that in ideal circumstances low-rise buildings are superior for residences: “Man is a ground animal – it’s quite natural for him to live near the earth” (1952, 226). Were Yamasaki working in an ideal world, he proclaims, he would make every home a one-story structure nestled among trees and gardens. But the high-rise housing development is, for him, a necessity resulting from larger values of the city and practical economic constraints. The city must eliminate its slums, he argues, for they are a cancer threatening the very viability of the urban core, “a black mark of shame on our society” (1952, 226).

To Yamasaki’s thinking (as to that of many housing experts of his day) the high-rise offers several beneficial features. It permits densities of dwellings that bring the cost per square foot into an affordable range while creating quantities of shared recreational space that would not be possible with low-rise, row house developments accommodating the same number of residents per acre (1952, 230–1). Here he echoes Le Corbusier in advocating the intrinsic value of parks, green spaces, and playgrounds for making the city attractive and livable. In his speech to the NAHO, he argues that to fail to take advantage of such opportunities is either to seek an absurdly utopian fantasy of garden homes for everyone or to promote the same kind of unrelieved urban density and congestion that had been for years making cities increasingly repellant to their residents. Thus, while beginning with the Radiant-City model as something of a compromise, he ends up promoting it as a necessary compromise, and indeed one that could contribute very positively to an agenda of beneficial socialization (1952, 230–1).

These comments before the housing organization were, in part, a response to a speech delivered by the prominent public housing theorist and low-rise advocate Catherine Bauer (later Catherine Bauer Wurster), who was also given the opportunity to respond in print to Yamasaki. In her rebuttal one sees a prescient anticipation of everything that was to go wrong with Pruitt-Igoe. For Bauer, what the high-risers were doing was creating a “supertenament,” a structure that might look clean and beautiful but would reproduce, and most likely exacerbate, the miseries of tenement life. Bauer believed that the social dynamics that perpetuated poverty could only be broken by distributing rather than concentrating the poor, building public housing on the same vacant and affordable properties that were attracting market-rate development. With this strategy, lower income residents could also be integrated with the privately generated communities that would grow up around them.

Bauer does not accept Yamasaki’s insistence on the priority of slum clearance. To put beautification first is, in her eyes, to value aesthetics over effective housing, and to do so without any promise that the beautification will reverse the draw of the suburbs. Moreover, she says, the “minimum standards” mentality that comes into many project designs often yields something more dreary than beautiful. She considers it naïve to think that low-income residents need to be concentrated near the employment hub of the city center because businesses, like residences, were beginning to spread themselves all over the metropolitan area. She rejects Yamasaki’s assumption that the inflated price of urban land can only be met with a high-rise architectural solution, arguing that federal housing legislation had created subsidies and other financial tools for dealing with just such market obstacles (Bauer 1952; Newbrun and Oberlander 1999, 206).

Bauer takes aim, too, at the most distinguishing feature of the high-rise project: its reliance on technologies, arguing that the calculation of the costs of such structures must include the expense of maintaining the machinery. Here Bauer is particularly prophetic, because some of the greatest consternations in daily life in Pruitt-Igoe had to do with the design and maintenance of equipment. The elevators are often cited as an example. They did not stop at every floor, requiring many residents to walk up or down a flight of stairs after taking the elevator. One can appreciate, perhaps, the potential that this design had to reduce wear and tear on elevators. One may even follow the sociological reasoning in Yamasaki’s design strategy: the necessity of using stairs retains one of the features of low-rise, walk-up buildings – that residents make community contact in walking between floors. But Pruitt-Igoe was a project with many families and hence many children. The child playing on the playground with an urgent need to use the bathroom, who would have to wait for an elevator and then, after that, to take a flight of stairs, could hardly appreciate the communal spirit that was intended in the design, and the value of community was hardly realized when the elevators and stairwells came to perpetually smell of urine. When a building’s equipment was misused or failed – when the elevators were held up or they broke down, when the trash incinerators were overwhelmed or the laundry room was locked for the want of any hope that the machines would be repaired – residents had to improvise in ways that were typical of tenement life, but now in a structure that was even more unforgiving, more dysfunctional without its technologies, than a tenement building would have been (Moore 1969).

The stairwells of Pruitt-Igoe, in which much of the community contact was to occur, were not the kinds of open public places where one might feel safe encountering people that one did not know. Oscar Newman’s now-classic work on the sociology of common spaces in American housing projects, Defensible Space (1972) – published after the flaws of Pruitt-Igoe had become painfully evident – finds, like Bauer before him, something fundamentally unworkable in the very concept of the high-rise housing building. But Newman’s special focus is on designing for safety, a quality that is really the sine qua non for any livable neighborhood. He was intrigued by the fact that he could find situations where crime-ridden high-rises stood on one side of a street and low-rise complexes – occupied by people of similar economic strata and living in similar densities – enjoyed a far more peaceable way of life just across the road. He saw an example of this in the relation of Pruitt-Igoe to its older low-rise neighbor, Carr Square Village (1996, 9–13). To try to explain this difference in levels of safety, Newman observed the organization of spaces and their use, interpreting these observations according to insights that Jane Jacobs had expressed: that streets and open spaces are safer when there are eyes on them, that these eyes are more effective when they belong to people who have a sense of ownership of these spaces, and that those who take on this ownership have an advantage when public and private spaces are clearly defined. In the design of Pruitt-Igoe’s shared spaces, Newman saw no evidence of these considerations having been pondered. The stairways were enclosed and the common areas were located away from apartment units. The sense of ownership, Newman found, rarely developed when common spaces were shared by as many families as they were in Pruitt-Igoe.

The review of Newman’s book for the New York Times in 1972 by famed architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, titled “A Prescription for Disaster,” opened with a reference to the dynamiting of Pruitt-Igoe that year, calling it “a public housing project that had become an obscenity of American life.” Newman’s study, she suggests, tells us that we have “literally built in failure by erecting buildings that are actually designed to exacerbate crime and violence” (1972). Huxtable, a brilliant writer with a penchant for summative metaphors that could stick to a building or an architect’s reputation like epoxy, was the critic to whom Yamasaki perhaps paid the most attention, and one who had done not a little in the early 1960s to bring attention to his work. Here she readily accepts the idea that Yamasaki and his colleagues, seeking to design for better living and healthier communities, had achieved the opposite: they had designed for strife and degradation.

Looking beyond design

Several suspects other than the project’s design problems, or in addition to them, have appeared in the in-depth investigations of its failure that have been undertaken in the decades since its demise. A deeply researched study by Eugene Meehan focuses on a set of policy decisions that created severe problems with funding and maintenance. For example, while federal funds were provided to put the buildings up and tear them down, everyday management and maintenance devolved to state and local housing authorities, who received their funding through income from rents. Under this arrangement, as the buildings and equipment aged and broke down, the only straightforward means of obtaining funds to address the problems was to raise rents, which forced out residents who could no longer carry the cost, which further eroded sources of rental income, accelerating the dismal cycle of decline. It did not help, either, that local authorities had been using rental income to reduce federal debt service costs (1975, 60; 1979, 60–4). Unusually high maintenance costs resulted from regrettable construction compromises that were made to curtail costs up front, which Meehan describes vividly:

the walls were bare and unpainted; the floors were concrete and without covering; pipes ran exposed through living spaces; there were no exhaust fans … the windows, doors, fixtures, etc., were of the poorest quality and badly put together; the sinks were puny; the countertops neither resistant to heat nor soiling; cabinet doors were made of a mere half-inch of plywood; and so on endlessly through the list of contact points between tenant and apartment.

(1975, 64)

Yet for all of this corner-cutting, construction costs for Pruitt-Igoe were some 60 percent above the average for similar housing projects, producing the sad irony that the cost cutting up front, with all of its disastrous consequences, did not, in comparison with other projects, actually save any money (Meehan 1979, 73). As Meehan wryly remarks, the housing authorities robbed Peter to pay Paul and ended up paying the piper, as well (1975, 74).

Catherine Bauer was widely known for objecting to the way that projects like Pruitt-Igoe concentrated the poor while separating them from other urban uses besides housing, advocating what is now called a scattered-site or mixed-income housing strategy. This separation of public housing was part of a broader trend in planning toward a zoning mentality that habitually separated all kinds of urban activities from one another, an approach that Bauer rejected as an essentially feudal practice and Jane Jacobs, with equal venom, likened to the street-gang system of “turf” (Bauer 1945; Jacobs 1993, 60–5). Like Bauer, Jacobs sees foolishness in large-scale superblock projects and regards the very opposite strategy – the integration of low-income housing throughout the city – as the more promising one. By virtue of one statistic (i.e., insufficient income to pay market rates for housing), she argues, citizens become part of a pool that produces guinea pigs for utopian social idealists. Such separation cannot give residents a better urban life if the very vitality of cities derives from urban interactions and fruitful interdependencies (1993, Ch. 17).

Lee Rainwater’s extensive 1970 sociological study of life in Pruitt-Igoe reaches a similar conclusion regarding the creation of a community of the poor. “Decent housing” does not really address the problem of poverty among the populations that the project is meant to serve. When the whole of a community is in similar economic straits, he finds, those who grow up in the community learn the art of exploitation and manipulation of their peers. What must be addressed are larger problems of employment and education, which housing alone cannot affect (1970, 409). The residents of Pruitt-Igoe were almost entirely African-American, with Igoe (the project originally intended for whites) having only 12 percent non-Black heads of households when the buildings opened and less than 1 percent after 1960 (Montgomery 1985, 235). In light of this fact, the separation of the population takes on the stark character of segregation. The bulk of project funding was going to a racial group toward which white prejudice was at a high level of intensity, tempering official and public support for the project, even when not expressed in overtly racist terms. Certainly, to many residents of the project, to be culled into giant complexes and to be provided with social services while denied training and job opportunities formed a mirror in microcosm of the way society as a whole was mishandling problems of both race and class in America.

Many interpreters of the public-housing realities of St. Louis in the 1950s point to the hurricane-force effects of the flight of residents to the suburbs. The ideal of home ownership had become an increasingly symbolic element of the “American dream”; federal support for home mortgage loans had put that ideal within the reach of more Americans; new highways and the regional dispersion of commerce and industry were making cheaper suburban properties fit better into a scheme of work life; and the prospect of dealing with the urban challenges of competition, crime, pollution, racial tension, and a host of other ills by simply escaping them was becoming ever more attractive.

Robert Fishman has been particularly resolute in arguing that few housing projects at this time – whether high-rise or low-rise, big or small – escaped the scourge of economic downturn and depopulation. Fishman agrees with Bauer and Jacobs that there was a critical weakness in the large-scale projects in their concentration of the poor; he agrees with Meehan that the division of maintenance responsibilities turned out to be a fatal flaw in cases such as Pruitt-Igoe; but he also points out that these flaws must be evaluated in light of the disproportionate rise in the numbers of the poor within the city, combined with the unprecedented outmigration of the middle class. The reconsideration of public housing possibilities in central cities must, in his view, follow upon shifts in patterns of settlement and economic development that bring activity and resources back into these areas (2004, 6–8).

Here we see, perhaps, the most striking form of the city’s fragility. With a relatively subtle shift in housing and transportation priorities, with a change of tastes in lifestyles, with businesses moving for economic advantages, millions of individual choices – none terribly significant when taken singly – can coalesce to create a force that brings a great metropolis with a storied legacy to its knees, rendering irrelevant all of the initiatives that were undertaken to best distribute

Photo: Tracie Rozhon

the fruits of its prosperity. Yamasaki never fully realized, perhaps, the extent to which such forces were at work in bringing to the ground his grand projects in St. Louis.

A hard legacy

Just a few years after completing Pruitt-Igoe, Yamasaki seemed to be granting all of Bauer’s points against it. After revisiting the site, he wrote, in 1956,

Under the pressure of public housing economics and bureaucracy and with an over-fascination for a particular site pattern and a novel architectural device, I lost sight of the total purpose, that of building a community. We have designed a housing project, not a community, which is tragically insensitive to the humanist aspects of security and serenity and have multiplied tragedy because of the great number of buildings and extent of the site.

(1956, 92)

The statement illustrates how Yamasaki could become his own harshest critic and how his own negative reaction to the project preceded by years the public outcry against it. As the buildings were condemned, the feelings persisted: “I am perfectly willing to admit,” he wrote in a letter in December 1972, “that of the buildings we have been involved with over the years, I hate this one the most. There are a few others, but I don’t hate them; I just dislike them” (1972). Yet during this period of the early 1970s, as he and his former partner, George Helmuth were being hounded for comments, they sought to steer the debate away from design, concurring that the decline of Pruitt-Igoe was primarily a sociological problem – and a mysterious one – rather than an architectural problem (Yamasaki and Helmuth 1973). Yamasaki put much weight on densities. The powers in charge of the project’s design had ultimately demanded a density of 50 units per acre – absurdly high, from his point of view – and the struggling firm of Hellmuth, Yamasaki, and Leinweber was in no position to be drawing lines in the sand (1972, 1981). But a central argument of Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities denies that there is something intrinsically debilitating about urban densities. She points to San Francisco’s popular North Beach-Telegraph Hill area, standing, at the time she was writing, at 80 to 140 units per acre. The more fashionable parts of midtown Manhattan’s East Side and Greenwich Village were roughly 124 to 174 units per acre, and Boston’s revitalizing North End, which Jacobs examines in detail, was at 275 – in sharp contrast to the declining Roxbury neighborhood’s 21–40 units per acre (Jacobs 1993, 265).

Like the Pruitt-Igoe myth-busters of a later generation, Yamasaki wanted to take the sole blame off of design, and yet at the same time he did not want the conclusion to be that design is impotent as a force for improving city life. He never wavered in his modernist belief that architecture and urban design have the power to transform lived experience and that the power of the imagination can triumph over the constraints of simple programs and tight budgets. But in the case of Pruitt-Igoe, one must either minimize the significance of design considerations, as Meehan and the more recent myth-busters have done, or one must admit, with Newman and Huxtable, that Yamasaki’s design was “indefensible,” naïve, and wrongheaded; or one must grant something to the likes of Jencks and Jacobs about the serious limits to the degree of good that any design can hope to do.

By 1958, long before Pruitt-Igoe was showing signs of failure, Yamasaki claimed to be ignorant of the state of the discussion around the topic of public housing (1958). In a 1959 interview he gave a general indication of the shift that he had made:

as I grow older in life I find that it is really better to concentrate on a smaller area. I’ve been accused of not being interested in the social side of architecture. But I feel that there are plenty of people interested in this – thousands – and there are too few of us trying to create real beauty. And beauty is well worth dedicating a life to.

(1959, 111)

The retreat was a strategic one, and was not as complete as his statement might suggest. He did design high-rise housing in Hawaii in the 1960s – for example, Queen Emma Gardens in 1964 and 1350 Ala Moana Boulevard in 1968, both in Honolulu, defending the former in familiar language:

You can be as sentimental as you want about keeping buildings low, but if you do, the traffic and other problems are tremendous, so you try to provide a really wonderful kind of living in a high-rise building.

(Evinger 1964)

Moreover, Radiant-City thinking on urban redevelopment can be recognized in his explanations and justifications for his urban projects well into the 1970s. But his turn to “real beauty” began immediately after the completion of Pruitt-Igoe, when his style shifted course toward what we now think of as its signature form. His own frustrations with the St. Louis housing projects seem to have prompted a change in direction long before any critics had the chance to do so.

Queen Emma Gardens

Photo: Balthazar Korab

References

Bauer, Catherine. 1945. “Good Neighborhoods.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 242 (November): 104–15.

Bauer, Catherine. 1952. “Low Buildings? Catherine Bauer Questions Mr. Yamasaki’s Arguments.” Journal of Housing 9, no. 7 (July): 227, 232, 246.

Bristol, Katherine G. 1991. “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.” Journal of Architectural Education 44, no. 3 (May): 163–71.

Evinger, Jane. 1964. “Architect Defends Queen Emma.” The Honolulu Advertiser, January 21.

Fishman, Robert. 2004. “Rethinking Public Housing.” Places 16, no. 2: 16–33.

Friedrichs, Chad. 2012. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth. Film. New York: First Run Features. Glaeser, Edward. 2011. Triumph of the City. New York: Penguin Press.

Hughes, Robert. 1980. The Shock of the New. New York: Knopf.

Huxtable, Ada Louise. 1972. “A Prescription for Disaster.” New York Times, November 5.

Jacobs, Jane. 1993. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: The Modern Library.

Jencks, Charles. 1991. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. New York: Rizzoli.

Le Corbusier. 1967. The Radiant City. Translated by P. Knight, E. Levieux, and D. Coltman. London: Faber and Faber.

Meehan, Eugene J. 1975. Public Housing Policy: Convention versus Reality. New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers University.

Meehan, Eugene J. 1979. The Quality of Federal Policymaking: Programmed Failure in Public Housing. Columbus, MO: University of Missouri Press.

Montgomery, Roger. 1985. “Pruitt-Igoe: Policy Failure or Societal Symptom.” In The Metropolitan Midwest: Policy Problems and Prospects for Change, edited by B. Checkoway and C.V. Patton, 229–43. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Moore, William, Jr. 1969. The Vertical Ghetto: Everyday Life in an Urban Project. New York: Random House.

Newbrun, Eva and Oberlander, H. Peter. 1999. Houser: The Life and Work of Catherine Bauer. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

Newman, Oscar. 1972. Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design. New York: Macmillan.

Newman, Oscar. 1996. Creating Defensible Space. n.p.: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, office of Policy Development and Research.

Rainwater, Lee. 1970. Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Families in a Federal Slum. Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co.

Richardson, David Lewis and Pegram, Lorna. 2001. The Shock of the New. Television Series. New York: Ambrose Video Pub.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1952. “High Buildings for Public Housing? A Necessity, Says Architect Minoru Yamasaki.” Journal of Housing 9, no. 7 (July): 226, 229–32.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1956. “Yamasaki: Morality of Modern Architecture.” The Architectural Forum 104, no. 5 (May): 74–5, 92, 96.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1958. Letter to James S. Hornbeck. Walter P. Reuther Library Minoru Yamasaki Papers, Wayne State University, Box 6, Folder 16.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1959. “A Conversation with Yamasaki.” Architectural Forum 111, no. 1 (July): 110–18.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1972. Letter to George Becht. Walter P. Reuther Library Minoru Yamasaki Papers, Wayne State University, Box 12, Folder 6.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1981. Letter to David Lawrence, Jr. Walter P. Reuther Library Minoru Yamasaki Papers, Wayne State University, Box 16, Folder 11.

Yamasaki, Minoru and Helmuth, George. 1973. Exchange of Letters Regarding Pruitt-Igoe. Walter P. Reuther Library Minoru Yamasaki Papers, Wayne State University, Box 12, Folder 12.

Chapter 4
The most fragile of arts

Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe

Photo: Benjamin Lipsman

In a setting just south of Plano, Illinois, where place names like “Fox River,” “Loon Lake,” and “Silver Springs” recall an Arcadian past, resides one of the undisputed icons of American modernism – a modest, one-room retreat designed for the Chicago doctor Edith Farnsworth by Mies van der Rohe. Though it suffered from limitations of the technology of 1951, Farnsworth House remains today a distillation of the fundamental design and structural breakthroughs that made modern architecture possible. The building is minimalist. Like one of the late abstract paintings by Piet Mondrian, it reduces its design to purely rectilinear elements, but the frames are here filled not with painted colors but with spaces for living. The design celebrates the structural genius of the steel beam, which distributes stresses of tension and compression with an unprecedented economy of material. Eight of these beams thrust out of the ground to hold aloft the central dwelling unit, which, by virtue the slenderness of the supports, seems, to the eye, to virtually float above the ground. A few steps below this dwelling space, a large rectangular platform hovers just a few inches above the grass. By the bold exposure of its steel and concrete bones, this building reduces substance to function, one could say; but by the same stroke it manifests something of the creative magic of modernism, for its heavy slabs of concrete seem to levitate impossibly in midair (Vandenberg 2005). The home’s walls of glass have the effect of making one feel emphatically open to the natural surroundings, its strict rectilinear geometries complementing the curvilinear forms of nature. With its opaque surfaces painted white, it stands out like the bride at a wedding, while the greens, golds, and browns, the heavy rise of tree trunks and the sweep of branches, dance around it like a lively ceremonial party.

By the time Farnsworth House was completed, Minoru Yamasaki had accumulated an impressive list of accomplishments while working for a variety of architectural offices, but he had not established himself in his own firm, nor had he solidified his own vision of modernism’s meaning and purpose. To see the house for the first time was a revelation to him. Not only did he grasp immediately the complex set of intentions that Mies had brought to the work, he promptly scrambled under the building to see how the master had accomplished his sleight-of-hand (Yamasaki 1952). More than a mere set of architectural solutions or a style, Mies’s architecture represented for Yamasaki a new range of questions, around which his imagination circled for the rest of his career. Farnsworth House became one of the buildings that seems to have taken up permanent residence in his psyche, along with the twin towers of Mies’s Lakeside Apartments in Chicago and his Seagram Building in New York.

The flower and the deer

Farnsworth House is a formal building, with the word, “form,” applying in multiple senses. “Form” can be used to refer to shapes and textures or to juxtaposed and complementary stylistic features, but in its most classical usage, the one most redolent of the Platonic notion of eidos, it refers to the intelligibility inherent in things, the ordering forces within them that make them appear and behave the way they do. Mies’s architecture realizes form, in this sense, by harnessing the inherent physical principles and powers of his materials, making them fully manifest and letting them speak for themselves. To one who is appreciative of this gesture, the purity of it is breathtaking. James Marston Fitch expresses the feeling in describing Mies’s short-lived German Pavilion for the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition: “here were the noble spaces, unpolluted by any connotation of a discredited feudal past; here were fine materials, freed of decadent motifs and moldy symbols, glowing with their own intrinsic beauties” (2006, 131). The physics of the simple modern elements of glass, steel, stone, and concrete become unexpectedly eloquent when granted full voice. Mies’s buildings are expressions of “less is more,” to be sure, but more precisely they provide examples of how just enough is best. This lesson Yamasaki took profoundly to heart. When he wanted to define the beauty that his architecture sought, he would return again and again to a quote from an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson that identifies natural beauty with an economy of design:

Beauty rests on necessities: the line of beauty is the result of perfect economy. The cell of the beehive is built at the angle which gives the most strength with the least wax. The bone or the quill of the bird gives the most alar strength with the least weight.

There is not a particle to spare in natural structures. There is a compelling reason in the uses of the plant for every novelty of color or form. Our art saves material by more skillful arrangement and reaches beauty by taking every superfluous ounce that can be spared from a wall and keeping its strength in the poetry of the columns.

(Yamasaki 1979, 29; Emerson 1883, 239–40)

In the thinking of Emerson there is certainly more at work than a principle of engineering, for there are two sides of the equation: beauty demands a certain engineering, but the engineering serves the intrinsic worth of beauty. Yamasaki’s equivalent was to point out that people find the deer more beautiful than the hippopotamus (1979, 32). Whether the statement is literally correct is an empirical question, but the way he is imagining the deer is instructive. Its figure can seem so slender and delicate as to hardly be able to support the torso, but when the animal suddenly leaps over a hedge one is struck by the startling power in its frame. What had been perceived as thin legs are suddenly recognized as lean and muscular. Similarly, in the case of human form, the canon of Western sculpture has gravitated toward the lean, athletic body as a paradigm of strength, despite the fact that a bulkier frame might contain more muscle.

In such analogies one is clearly expressing aesthetic preferences, but there is reasoning behind them. Why drink wine out of a wine glass when a coffee mug would be more secure, less likely to spill or break? It is because the delicacy of the wine glass adds to the aesthetic experience. There is something delightful in the way the stem holds the wine aloft, feeling impossibly thin between one’s fingers, something just a little magical in the way the transparent bowl of the glass disappears behind the liquid even as it gathers and shapes the wine’s bouquet. In the refinement of the wine glass and items of similar design toward the minimum degree of materials necessary, a collaboration of engineering and art liberates the aesthetic from unnecessary encumbrances, encouraging the poetry of the moment to speak.

It was in this spirit that Yamasaki appropriated the Miesian dictum of “less is more” – not as a reduction or limitation of architectural ambitions but as an invitation to innovate toward an exceptionally refined ideal of beauty. The flower is a model of engineering precision, but it is equally an extravagant creation, a participant in the magnificent order of nature, the grounds and purposes of which are cause for the most stirring kinds of fascination and reverence. Such a thought is evident in Emerson’s transcendental conception of beauty, its power being not merely aesthetic but also metaphysical, communicating sensually the proximity of creation’s deepest mysteries (Emerson 1883, 235).

The “less” in many Yamasaki buildings is expressed through an openness in the design, the architect sculpting with air and light. From one end of the McGregor Conference Center, for example, one can look right through the building to the other side. Entering the building, one encounters a two-story atrium, topped with skylights that fill the space with patterned daylight. This same openness is evident in many of Yamasaki’s commercial structures, notably in a work that drew significant attention from architects when it was completed in 1959, the Reynolds Metals Regional Sales office in the Detroit suburb of Southfield. Here again, the interior space is defined by a large, multistory atrium flooded with natural light, the office spaces kept to the upper two floors so as to allow a completely open plan on the first floor. “Standing in the lobby,” Dale Allen Gyure writes, “one could see out in all directions, up into the top floors, and through the skylight. The building barely seemed to exist” (2017, 98–9). The office floors feature large panes of glass but are surrounded, on the exterior, by a screen of interlocking gold-anodized aluminum rings (material used to highlight the architectural potential of the company’s signature product). From the exterior, the screen gives the building an impression of bulk, yet from the inside it leaves much of the view outdoors intact and at night disappears against the interior lights, as the building becomes a radiant beacon.

In Mies’s Farnsworth house, one may notice that the steel girders supporting the house and terrace are pulled back from the corners and hide their connecting hardware, seeming to glance the horizontal slabs in an almost incidental way, producing the effect of levitation. Yamasaki appropriated this

McGregor Memorial Conference Center

Reynolds Metals Regional Sales Office

Photo: Balthazar Korab

Reynolds Metals Regional Sales Office

Photo: Balthazar Korab

Federal Science Pavilion

technique, used often by both Mies and Le Corbusier, in the Reynolds building and a number of his office towers, where the upper stories float above thin columns and transparent ground floors. Nowhere is the magic more effective than in the central plaza of the Seattle Federal Science Pavilion. This grand space is dominated by soaring towers that form a unique variation on Gothic vaulting. As the columns soar up from the ground, they attach to a series of upper white-aggregate terraces with a nonchalance similar to that of Farnsworth’s girders and are similarly pulled back from the corners, making the large terraces seem to hover aloft. The lower terraces in the plaza also appear to float, but now over pools of water. Staircases joining the platforms have their structural supports integrated into them so as to seem to rise and descend by some invisible force.

Pacific Science Center

“I believe in thinness,” Yamasaki said in an interview (1959, 113). A structure that rises on thin supports can be light, calm, elegant, personable, buoyant, ascendant, and uplifting. A delicate, unobtrusive building announces to its users that it is there to serve them rather than confront them. A building like this can be a fine thing – admired for its artistry and the care that has been put into its details. It may be appreciated for its delicacy, like fine paintings or crystal. To say this is not for a moment to say that the building should be structurally weak or stylistically ephemeral; but when strength is present in precise sufficiency rather than excess, another kind of strength – a human strength, a spiritual strength – emerges.

In contrast to this vision of the civilizing potential of modern architecture Yamasaki contrasted something he called “monumentalism.” He used the term broadly to refer to buildings that were more about themselves than about their users, that immortalized their patrons or their architects, or that impressed the public with their bulk and power rather than a refined beauty. It is a word he uses to describe what he reacted against in his tours of world architecture: the fact that so much of it had been born of cultures of violence, with their need to intimidate their enemies and the public. Buildings designed to overawe those who look at them were engaged, Yamasaki said, in “muscle flexing,” and this easily leads to crudeness and brutal form (1961, 142). His opposition to such tendencies in traditional architecture carried over into his assessment of modern buildings. There was much that Yamasaki could admire about Le Corbusier, but when he approached the High Court of Chandigarh, with its massive forms in raw concrete, it seemed to him like a pagan temple that one was meant to approach on one’s knees, something inappropriate to an enlightened age (Heyer 1966, 186–7; Yamasaki 1956, 92; 1961, 142).

There is another sense of the word “formal” that suggests a style that draws upon historical prototypes, with their layers of sedimented cultural meaning. Farnsworth House is indeed formal in this sense – a novel structure that is, for all of its innovation, in dialogue with architectural tradition. Something remains, for example, of the stateliness of traditional buildings fashioned with columns; a degree of classical grandeur is echoed in the broad platforms that one mounts with wide staircases; there is a quietness to the design that is reminiscent of many traditional kinds of sacred space. The forms are new, and yet they are “formal” in recalling features through which architecture has communicated meaning throughout its history. Such connections are what keeps this highly mechanical creation from becoming a mere machine. Its roots go deep in perennial architectural intentions.

The experiential dimension

In both of these senses of “form” in Mies, Yamasaki saw, above all, a world of possibilities. He was not to be an epigone of the great innovators of modernism, working to preserve the purity of the masters, but was to experiment with their principles and innovations to a degree that would earn him, on many occasions, the reputation of an apostate. Central to this iconoclasm was an insistence on the experiential dimension of the work. One must think constantly of the user, he thought, how he or she enters imaginatively into the building, moves through it, senses it, and affectively responds. He never stops stressing the point that the conceptual content of the work, however important, must ultimately be made subordinate to the user’s experience of it.

Buildings that met Yamasaki’s user-oriented perspective were unapologetically appealing. They did not overwhelm one with their scale or their ponderous weight but sought to relate themselves to the human scale. They did not dominate their settings but attuned themselves to the course of light through the days and the seasons, forming a figure against the sky and establishing visual connections with the landscape. They appealed to those who used them by creating sensations of color and warmth; by softening the interiors and leaving them uncluttered so as to evoke a sense of elegance and calm; by laying out spaces in ways that would add interest, even intrigue, to one’s movement through them; by connecting insides to outsides so that one could experience a building’s natural setting from within it; by creating spaces that were removed from the bustle of life and evoked a sense of retreat.

The shorthand that eventually came to epitomize these features and a range of related qualities was the phrase, “serenity, surprise, and delight.” “Serenity” was a quality Yamasaki found in traditional sacred spaces and, strikingly, in Japanese gardens, a quality he considered a badly needed counterweight to the frenzy of the modern world. The pressures of life lived at breakneck speed demand refuges of tranquility where a person could recover wholeness. “Surprise” was an element in the processional dimension of architecture, the way the experience unfolds in a kind of narrative. Yamasaki found moments of surprise in Japanese designs and admired the way Frank Lloyd Wright had adapted those strategies to American architecture, varying ceiling heights and making transitions from small, enclosed spaces to large, expansive ones (Yamasaki 1979, 31). The Taj Mahal is another favorite example of Yamasaki’s, where a series of gardens and buildings leads up in stages to the great mausoleum, following a hierarchy of materials that culminates in white marble (Time 1963, 54).

The term, “delight,” has a long lineage, inasmuch as it is a word that can translate the venustas of the Ten Books of Architecture, by the first-century Roman Vitruvius. Vitruvius means by the word the features that constitute the beauty of a building, as opposed to its structural strength (fi rmitas) and its functionality (utilitas) (1960, Book I). Yamasaki similarly uses the term in a broad fashion. In one sense, it can refer to particular features that add to the beauty or significance of a space – the fountains, pools, and gardens; the fine finishes and warm colors; the public plazas and sculptures; the play of light, figure, and sound. The idea of a “delightful place” suggests an experience of the whole of the architectural work being turned to an experience of fulfillment, of richness, of exuberance. There is a sense of leisure and luxury in the phrase, which reflects a long history of imagining spaces that contribute to the appreciation of nature, the arts, humanity, and divinity. The architect who aims at delight wishes to meet the user’s imagination where it is and to take it, in a pleasurable way, somewhere meaningfully greater.

The key to achieving this experience through form was again to balance strength and delicacy – strength always serving a sense of security and support, delicacy bringing the building to the level of the sensitivity of human touch and the buoyancy of the human spirit. Structural form and aesthetic form were to be wedded in a manner that would celebrate their constant interplay, the surfaces revealing qualities of their inner structure, the supports for those surfaces disclosing themselves suggestively.

The McGregor Conference center was and remains one of the most successful realizations of these central ideals. Its formal simplicity is complemented by intricate abstract patterns in the sculpting of the doors (by D. Lee DuSell), the metal screens in its arches, and the patterns of light that are cast upon its interior of wood and stone. The liveliness of all of this patterning is done with such a sense of complementarity that the resulting effect is one of balance and composure. The sculpture garden below the building, designed with Edward A. Eichstedt, extends the experience, creating, with mirror-like water surfaces that reflect the surrounding buildings and differently textured platforms, a quiet intimacy and elegance in a near-seamless integration of art and architecture. One architect and scholar who can be quite critical of Yamasaki’s architecture considers this piece to be a work “beyond criticism.” In it the Miesian strategies are evident enough, yet the freedom in the working of the sensuous details makes of it a decided departure from Miesian orthodoxy – to a degree, in some people’s minds, that suggested a new direction for modernism.

McGregor Memorial Conference Center

McGregor Reflecting Pool and Sculpture Garden

The devil in the details

When Yamasaki crawled under Farnsworth House, what he discovered was another revelation for him: a single, inconspicuous column that comes into the building from the ground to supply all of the needed services – the plumbing, heating, and electricity. Here, from another perspective, we see the integration of engineering and design: the mechanicals are so completely integrated as to disappear into structure. It is another lesson that Yamasaki learned well: if design is to function totally in the creation of a building, every aspect of the engineering must be considered integral to the design. Henry Guthard, a longtime electrical engineer and eventually vice president of Minoru Yamasaki and Associates, recalls the day that Yamasaki sat down with his whole staff to explain that everything that the firm was to undertake was to be driven by design. It is not a message that engineers typically welcome, given the conflicts that can naturally arise between trying to get a building to look good and getting it to function properly. At first blush, Yamasaki seemed to be giving an upper hand to designers over engineers. But he completed the thought in a novel way: “and you,” he said, “are all designers.” The tension that can arise between engineering and design is caused, in part, by a failure to see every engineering decision as a design decision and vice versa. But this is the goal that Yamasaki set.

A case in point is the question of the roofline. A onetime member of the firm Keith Brown puts it simply: “Yama didn’t like anything on the roof.” The rooflines of historical buildings are one of the most important features of their design. Why should modern buildings have to sacrifice that? If a deer were to carry around its lungs in a box attached to its back it would seem like a design oversight, and yet the equivalent is so common in modern commercial architecture as to seem like the default strategy. Yamasaki’s firm, by contrast, dedicated prodigious labors of imagination to find ways to integrate the mechanicals into the structure. In McGregor, for example, they are housed in the platform upon which the building sits. One can see inconspicuous ventilation grates along its side. With machinery off the roof or hidden within its design, the roofline could be a decorative feature, as in a number of buildings that feature a “tiara” along the edge. Or it could be simply, decisively flat, as in a number of skyscrapers. In the Rainier Tower, a skyscraper that stands on a single, enormous pedestal, mechanicals for the lower floors are incorporated into the pedestal (Skilling 1973). With all of the effort expended to achieve flat roofs on the two great towers of the World Trade Center, Yamasaki suffered agony over the New York City Port Commission’s decision, in 1978, to mount a 362-foot telecommunications antenna on top of the North Tower. Those who did not understand the core of Yamasaki’s thinking on design could not grasp how, for him, this simply ruined the entire concept (Yamasaki 1973).

Integral design, in Yamasaki’s thinking, is total design. To design a building is ideally to design it down to the door handles, the light switches, and the clock faces. It is common to speak of the impressiveness of the “finishes” in Yamasaki projects. William Bain Jr., whose firm, NBBJ, worked with MYA on Seattle projects, described how impressed he was when a man was sent from the Detroit offices just to oversee things like switches and fixtures. In Yamasaki buildings, one can always tell when railings were altered or added. The originals have not only a distinctive lightness to them but often also a complex visual patterning. Similarly, the spare, unobtrusive heating and ventilation registers that one finds throughout Yamasaki’s designs, with their simple parallel lines, put the stamp of the artist on the project, while behind them are systems of air movement strategically placed to minimize rattling and rumbling. To view the great pedestal of the Rainier Tower is not a sight that makes one think of meticulous details, but if one comes right

Oberlin Conservatory of Music

Rainier Tower

up close, one discovers that the entire surface, all the way round, is covered with pale circular tiles, each a little smaller than a dime.

In this attention to designing in detail, Yamasaki was bucking the trend toward prefabricated, modular finishes that was well under way in his day and has only accelerated since. While he understood the motivation to achieve economies of scale through mass production, he was frustrated to see the artistry of architecture being taken out of the hands of architects and put into those of manufacturers. And so he approached the matter strategically: when designing an office tower, say, if he wanted a door handle to be designed by his firm, or a particular font on a clock face, the number of units required for such a massive project could amount to a case of mass production in itself. The mold for the part might wear out on that one project alone. Or the same items might be used in other Yamasaki commissions. Moreover, in many cases, the firm would not copyright or patent the design, so that the manufacturer could put it in the company’s catalogue and add it to the items offered to all of its customers.

All such strategies, one can say, are dedicated to a unity of vision in design, an effort to keep the art in architecture, the art that is fragile in the face of innumerable practical considerations of mechanics and finances. In Yamasaki’s distinctive way of thinking they become part of the challenge to the designer’s creativity when they are imagined as, themselves, problems of design.

The architecture of humanism

An architecture intimately connected to human experience becomes a celebration and symbolization of that experience. The human respect that is reflected in granting even the small details of mundane projects a sensitive treatment elevates, by that act of care, the significance of moments in life that otherwise might seem minute and inconsequential. Yamasaki’s attitude in these matters might itself seem enough to classify his approach as “humanistic,” but humanism has a long tradition, and Yamasaki’s position within that tradition is more deeply rooted than would be suggested by these attitudes and design elements alone.

The European Renaissance is often identified as a time of the flowering of humanism, when medieval other-worldliness gave way to a reappropriation of the ancient Greek and Roman arts and sciences, when the magnificence of earthly existence was granted a more equal footing with the glory of the immortal life beyond. Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man of 1486

Temple Beth El

North Shore Congregation Israel

Oberlin Conservatory of Music

Rainier Tower

describes the condition of human beings as enviable not only by the beast but by the angel, for unlike instinctual animals humans have the intelligence to comprehend the meaning of the divinely created cosmic order while, unlike angels, they also possess a body of flesh that immerses them in the sensuous enjoyment of that same creation. The human person lives the life of a spiritual chameleon, he suggests, situated in a productive tension between carnal appetites that enrich life but may also drag it down and a sacred calling that, through the mind and heart, edifies the soul (1956, 4–9).

Geoffrey Scott’s 1914 book The Architecture of Humanism took Renaissance architecture as a paradigm for connecting the core of humanistic values to the specific context of architectural artistry (1999). The book forms, at the same time, a spirited defense of quattrocento architecture framed for a twentieth-century readership and achieved, in large measure, though a polemic against nineteenth-century trends perceived by Scott as having surrendered its vision. In some ways definitive of what an architectural humanism might mean and in some ways idiosyncratic, Scott’s influence persisted throughout the twentieth century. Beyond pointing to Renaissance works as a model, Scott’s aesthetic commitments are general enough – and one might say, ambiguous enough – to make them applicable in very different contexts, including one that Scott would likely abhor: the modern. His ideas are very much taken to heart in the revered histories of the modern movement by Hitchcock and Giedion, as well as in the pronouncements of several major modern architects, including Philip Johnson and Minoru Yamasaki (Hitchcock 1993; Giedion 1967; Martinez 2019). Whether the latter’s exposure to Scott was direct or indirect, one can find Scott’s vocabulary all through his writings and interviews, from the earliest to the last – though always modified and supplemented by his own convictions.

For Scott, the metaphysical excellence of humanitas is to be found (as the ancients believed) in the conscious rationality that grants to human beings powers of understanding and free will that other animal species have in slender quantities at best. However, for him the fine arts do not exist to employ that rationality so much as to enliven the embodiment that miraculously transforms it into sensuous humanity. Human delight in architecture is most purely experienced in the simple, spontaneous response to the play of forms encountered in the sculpted spaces through which one bodily moves, a response effectively occasioned by forms that exhibit balance, proportion, measure, and unity in complexity. The cultivation of these qualities promotes “taste,” a term that Scott uses in a normative rather than empirical sense (1999, 36–80).

The polemical side of Scott’s argument indicts a cluster of “fallacies,” all of which are variations on a propensity to interpret and value architecture by its conceptual content and according to conceptual criteria rather than through the concrete aesthetic experiences that it elicits. Romantics fallaciously interpret architecture through poetry, with the result that the meaning ends up in the poetry rather than in the architecture, while the poetry the Romantics favor looks back to an earlier age, promoting thereby an architecture trying to be nostalgically medieval rather than of its own time. The Romantics also import a vision of nature that favors its emotionally commanding wildness and extremity, imposing on architecture an alien value that Scott calls the “picturesque” (1999, Chs. 2 and 3).

By the “mechanical fallacy” and the “biological fallacy” lovers of natural science demand that architecture be judged according to its truthfulness in expressing its construction or according to a historical progression of stylistic development resembling evolutionary biology. The threat of these scientistic fallacies is to reduce architecture to engineering and to subordinate the achievement of any particular period to the grand speculative overlay that the interpreter brings to the interpretation (1999, Chs. 4 and 6). By a further fallacy – the “ethical” – the aesthetic qualities of architecture would be judged by the moral worth of the purposes for which a structure was built, or the social conditions of its creation, or the moral character of its patrons and producers. Again, this may be a noble purpose, but it is judging the art by reducing it to something other than art (1999, Ch. 5).

Yamasaki’s appropriation of Scott’s brand of humanism is evident in his values of serenity, surprise, and delight, for these are all experiential descriptors, saying nothing about structures, materials, techniques, or styles. They are emotions tied to sensual qualities. Scott’s conception of the intertwining of body and form is recalled when Yamasaki describes how a building must be comprehensible through the “mental hands” with which we reach out to it (Yamasaki 1959, 111). As with Mies, “form” is associated by Yamasaki with engineered structures but is equally, as in Scott, identified with the beauty that is the goal of architecture and is achieved through such qualities as proportion, creative line, measured elegance, and captivating ornament – values of Renaissance design that he has no trouble seeing in the potentialities of the modern movement.

But humanism means much more to Yamasaki than what is to be drawn from at least the most aestheticist reading of Scott, and in the process of expressing his own humanism he commits all of Scott’s fallacies in one way or another – as Johnson and other modern Scott enthusiasts tended to do. In seeing architectural forms as sedimented with cultural meaning and expressive of cultural values, Yamasaki is a symbolist to a degree that commits the Romantic fallacy; in employing natural paradigms he commits it a different way; in his love of engineering and the expression of structure he is guilty of the mechanical fallacy; in his convictions regarding the social mission of architecture he commits the ethical fallacy; and as he joins his professional and journalistic contemporaries in judging the architecture of his day through a narrative of evolving modernism, he commits the biological fallacy as well. But all of this is done consciously, as a way of holding that humanism must be something larger than aestheticism, believing that while Scott rightly shields architecture from interpretations that are remote from its nature, he risks wrongly isolating the discipline out of a fear of words and ideas. Works of architecture need not be protected from verbal interpretations because there is no need to worry that words will ever exhaust their meanings.

Yamasaki’s humanism is expressed in his seeking after an “architecture of enjoyment.” The revered Marxist philosopher of social environments Henri Lefevbre, in some posthumously published musings on architecture, notes with curiosity how easy it is to find examples of the architecture of mourning, of power, and of fantasy, but how difficult it is to identify an architecture of enjoyment – a curious fact, given that to enjoy life would seem to be a most highly promoted goal (2014, 13–17). The philosopher Alain de Botton, in his popular survey of architectural history, frames his account with a similar notion, that if architecture contributes to the good life this should mean that it serves the search for happiness (2008). “Happiness,” here, is being used in the sense that translates Aristotle’s eudaimonia, a holistic quality of well-being that is rooted in the truth of worthy character and an orderly life rather than in spontaneous feelings. In this sense, a happy life can also be a difficult one. Similarly, Lefevbre’s word, “enjoyment,” is jouissance in the French rather than plaisir – enjoyment as a deep-seated state pervading the whole of one’s being. And how would Lefevbre envision the architecture of enjoyment? Very comprehensively:

it will be the countryside or a landscape, a genuine space, one of moments, encounters, friendships, festivals, rest, quiet, joy, exaltation, love, sensuality, as well as understanding, enigma, the unknown, and the known, struggle, play.

(2014, 152)

To Yamasaki it was obvious that enjoyment in some broad sense is at the core of humanism and should guide the creation of a humanistic architecture. In promotion of the goal he produced, in the manner of Geoffrey Scott, a list of fallacies of his own. They include the “functional fallacy,” a preoccupation with commodity and firmness that fails to move into the highest aims of architecture: to bring to the built environment “the quality of aspiration toward nobility which will inspire [man] in the pursuit of happiness which he so urgently seeks” (Yamasaki 1955, 142). If such a goal – an architecture of enjoyment, of happiness – is a rare phenomenon, Yamasaki must be counted, it would seem, as a rare case.

References

De Botton, Alain. 2008. The Architecture of Happiness. New York: Vintage.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1883. The Conduct of Life and Society and Solitude. London: Macmillan and Co.

Fitch, James Marston. 2006. “Mies and the Climate of Plato.” In James Marston Fitch: Selected Writings on Architecture, Preservation, and the Built Environment, edited by M. Sawin. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Giedion, Sigfried. 1967. Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gyure, Dale Allen. 2017. Minoru Yamasaki: Humanist Architecture for a Modernist World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Heyer, Paul. 1966. Architects on Architecture. New York: Walker and Co.

Hitchcock, Henry Russell, Jr. 1993. Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration. New York: De Capo Press.

Lefebvre, Henri. 2014. Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment. Translated by R. Bononno, Edited by Ł. Stanek. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Martinez, Raul Martinez. 2019. “Geoffrey Scott and Modern Architectural Thought: The Creation of a Legacy throughout the Twentieth Century.” Journal of the History of Ideas 80, no. 4 (October): 597–619.

Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni. 1956. Oration on the Dignity of Man. Translated by A.R. Caponigri. Washington, DC: Gateway Editions.

Scott, Geoffrey. 1999. The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Skilling, John. 1973. Notes for M. Yamasaki from J. Skilling, June 13, 1973, re: Validity of Base Pedestal on Commerce House. Walter P. Reuther Library Minoru Yamasaki Papers, Wayne State University, Box 27, Folder 16.

Time. 1963. “The Road to Xanadu.” Time, January 18: 54–64.

Vandenberg, Maritz. 2005. Farnsworth House. London and New York: Phaidon.

Vitruvius. 1960. The Ten Books on Architecture. Translated by M. H. Morgan. New York: Dover.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1952. Typescript for Speech on Industrial Buildings, November 5, 1952. Walter P. Reuther Library Minoru Yamasaki Papers, Wayne State University, Box 26, Folder 8.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1955. “Toward an Architecture for Enjoyment.” Architectural Record 118, no. 2 (August): 142–9.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1956. “Yamasaki: Morality of Modern Architecture.” The Architectural Forum 104, no. 5 (May): 74–5, 92, 96.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1959. “A Conversation with Yamasaki.” Architectural Forum 111, no. 1 (July): 110–18.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1961. “A Humanist Architecture for America and Its Relation to the Traditional Architecture of Japan.” Zodiac 8: 141–5.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1973. Letter to Guy Tozzoli, March 26, 1973. Walter P. Reuther Library Minoru Yamasaki Papers, Wayne State University, Box 12, Folder 25.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1979. A Life in Architecture. New York: Weatherhill.

Chapter 5
The presence of the past

Tradition is sustained by an ongoing interpretation of the past. The past is embedded in everything we do – in the assumptions we live by, the language we speak, the built environment through which our world is ordered. So much is it within us that to wish to live without the past is like wanting to breathe without air. And yet we are not merely subject to the past. By bringing history to consciousness, by questioning and evaluating it, we can decide what should be maintained and honored or critiqued and abandoned. An emphasis on preservation of the past yields traditionalism; an emphasis on critique, progressivism; but both inclinations move within the same tension that blends both goals, whether one wishes it or not, whether one realizes it or not.

Western modernity broke with its ancient and medieval past to pursue a radical reorientation of cultural goals. Francis Bacon’s New Organon expresses the intentions of this break in terms that are still used today. The sages of centuries past, he claims, had taught us how to be humble before the harshness of nature, to moderate our aspirations and accept the narrow confines of life that nature had granted us. But once science becomes methodical, says Bacon, the whole purpose of learning could turn to creating the technologies by which we would end nature’s dominance over us, conquering the scarcity that generates so much suffering and conflict (Bacon 1960). Modern culture, then, defines itself from the beginning as a radically novel type of technological culture that employs science to pursue a new definition of higher civilization.

Yet everywhere in modernity the past persists. It persists not simply as a holdover, as nostalgia, but because its truths are seen to hold true or are rediscovered. The past can even be drawn upon to question modernity and to challenge it. Drawing on the perspective of the past we can ask, for example, whether the ancient ethics of moderation is so terribly irrelevant to our age, when the awesome, unrestrained forces of our technology have worsened our wars and put us on the brink of catastrophic ecological collapse. Indeed, modernity’s distaste for the cumulative wisdom of ages past can seem today arrogant and naïve in the face of the vast resources of thought and imagination that have been gifted to us through the legacies of history.

The field of architecture participates in these debates and tensions, with modern architecture functioning, at times, as a kind of microcosm of the aims of modernity generally. Modern architecture began as a revolutionary movement, dedicated to technology and the cause of progress, that sought to radically alter the function and look of structures to reflect potentialities of new technologies. In light of such aims, the nostalgic architecture of the nineteenth century, which clung to old styles and symbols, seemed mired in an ignorance of how modernity had transformed everything, inviting a critique of its traditionalism, which regularly rose, in artistic manifestoes, to the level of polemic.

Yamasaki’s entry into modernism initiated a lifelong commitment to its progressive principles. His Beaux-Arts education he now saw as based on something “completely false,” a devotion to various historical looks that was divorced from modern structural principles by which buildings of his day were actually built (Peter 1994, 15). For his architecture to be true rather than false, he realized, it must follow the avenues that the new technologies opened, expressing honestly their role in making structures stand.

But modern architecture, as it dramatically moved beyond the past, also sought its own kind of continuity, for it wished to be the legitimate heir of architecture’s historical legacy. Out of this intention came the various modern readings of architectural history that looked within that history for the roots of the modern vision. So, for example, Giedion’s Space, Time, and Architecture makes a grand historical survey, but highlights, at regular points, developments that anticipate Le Corbusier and other moderns (Giedion 1967). In this telling, reinforced concrete replaces the role of masonry, its plasticity adding new sculptural freedom; the power of steel and glass opens up interiors, as historical innovations in vaulting had so passionately sought to do. In such a reading the past is respected but is also appropriated in such a way as to strengthen modernism’s authority – shielding modernism, along the way, from any challenges to modernist assumptions that might be drawn from historical perspectives.

Yamasaki’s discovery of the power of the past occurred through his travels, where he felt the power of historical architectural works speaking more profoundly to him than he could ever have imagined. These creations that had endured the centuries were brimming with meaning. They were not false but spoke stunning truths, truths that suddenly seemed larger and deeper than the thin dogmas of modernism. They symbolized life and the perennial purposes of building with integrity, audacity, accessibility, and exquisite detail. Out of such experiences was born Yamasaki’s conviction that the modernists, having achieved a radical new conception of architecture, had yet to develop its full potential as a medium of meaning, as if they were speaking a new, perfected language but had not yet developed the vocabulary to say all of the countless things that a natural language can say. Modernism had perfected the art of the rectangle but seemed locked in an endless repetition of rectangles; it had learned to love the natural qualities of metal and concrete but had limited the range of surface qualities that could be achieved. Modern buildings did well at symbolizing the Baconian ideals of modernity, but they hardly attempted to symbolize anything else, such that one had difficulty identifying them – telling a bank building from a government office from an apartment complex – a limitation of expression that restricted modernism’s ability to be a voice for the whole of a culture.

The old buildings could do this. They were rooted in what Yamasaki called “a cultural concept,” a purpose born of shared cultural insights into the existential circumstances of human life on Earth, in history and community, in harmony with the natural and divine order (Bourne 1958, 166). The concept functioned to organize the totality of the work, driving each part to relate to other parts, each detail reflecting some aspect of the overarching aim. What Yamasaki was experiencing in great buildings of the past was something very different from “learning styles,” which is what he had done in school. He was now reflecting on the motivations, the narratives, the histories that give rise to specific architectural approaches and solutions. He was learning to ask the fundamental questions to which these works were responses.

All the while, however, he was also interpreting historical works in light of the question of modernism. Technology, he would say, is our culture. It is how we must build. The question then becomes, how can modern principles and technologies be used to do everything that great historical buildings do? The goal becomes an appropriation of architecture’s past that would simultaneously be an enrichment of modernism’s vocabulary. One can consider the arch, for example, as a historical advance on the engineering solution represented by ancient Greek post and lintel construction, creating an organic curve that opens up space and that can be further expanded into the dome, with its recollection of the arc of the heavens. With modern materials and engineering, one could argue, the arch is no longer necessary; one can open the same space with a flat roof and bring in just as much light with panes of glass. But this reversion to the rectilinear ignores the fact that while the arch may no longer be an essential solution, it is still a very good one. It is a creative and captivating way to carry loads, as elegant today as it ever was.

The idea here is not to simply reproduce or imitate but to recover strategies of the past in clearly modern ways, doing them differently and, in a sense, better, given that modern technology can produce more precise and elegant versions of forms than had ever before been possible. The goal is to interpret the past – not falsely imitating it or draping its appearances on modern structures but recovering its truths through the medium of modernism, seeking to make the past one’s own by making it new. Armed with these intentions, Yamasaki could be found looking for different qualities in traditional architecture than did his peers, leading to distinctive results in his own works.

Japanese heritage

Defining features of traditional Japanese architecture can be traced to geographical circumstances and spiritual traditions. As far back as the fourteenth century, Zen Buddhist priests were creating monastic spaces that eliminated the inessential for the sake of attunement to the spiritual core of reality. As these sensibilities found their way into the design of Japanese domestic architecture, the sacred and the mundane, the spiritual and the material came to be fully integrated into everyday architectural expression (Tada and Mehta 2005). The meditative peace of Zen is reflected in quietness of typical Japanese spaces, revealing the presence to the dharma in nature through the openness of interior rooms to outside gardens and through the meticulousness with which materials such as wood are made to reveal their natural qualities in the construction of interiors. A damp climate on an island with a high water table and regular earthquakes occasioned an architecture of raised structures and overhanging roofs, with water features in gardens that recall the sea or mountain waterfalls. In the lightness of these structures is captured a sense of the ephemeral passing of worldly life – so pivotal in Zen thought and practice.

Traditional Japanese architecture forms a paradigm for the idea of total design, wherein the overall meaning and purpose of the structure organizes each part and detail of the whole, creating a harmonious unity. The arrangement of floor plans and interior spaces sets up a symbolic and emotional connection between insides and outsides, as in the “palace” organization of living spaces that arranges them into separate rooms joined by corridors and surrounding a garden. Views of the garden come into the house through windows and doors that open onto verandas (Ueda 1998). The miniaturization of garden elements, including the art of bonsai, permits complex and highly symbolic arrangements of trees, water, stones, and paths that recall whole landscapes, bringing close the realms of nature in which we dwell. Precisely designated symbolisms in the choice and arrangement of features derive not only from Taoist and Buddhist traditions but also ancient Shinto beliefs in divinities that animate all natural things (Parkes 2002).

The influence of Japanese traditions on American and European art has a long history. Books had been published on the subject beginning in the 1700s. A mania for all things Japanese had spread through Europe in the nineteenth century and had deeply influenced such movements as Impressionism and Art Nouveau, while in America Japonisme became central to the Arts and Crafts movement. American World’s Fairs as early as the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876 included demonstration Japanese homes, the forms of which came to have their corollaries in American bungalows and the work of such American greats as Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan (Lancaster 1983, Ch. 9). The element of narrative surprise that Yamasaki had so admired in Japanese architecture was everywhere apparent in Wright’s designs, as was the exceptional attention to materials and detail. Such Japanese influences on American architecture carry right through to the 1950s – generally in the interpretation of modern minimalism, the horizontal spread of buildings, and the patterns of extended roof beams. One might point to specific examples in the homes designed by Philip Johnson as early as 1942, with their simple rectangular shapes and their transparent walls opening out on intimate courtyards (Lancaster 1983, 162–5).

But whereas architects like Johnson and Gropius tended to interpret Japanese architecture through modernist values of minimalism and flexibility in the use of space, Yamasaki’s reaction was a deeply emotional one that found inspiration in a broad range of qualities, a reaction certainly having to do with an awakening sense of being, through his heritage, “a part of” the tradition (Gyure 2017, 58–9). He was inspired not only by the great palaces and the stunning Zen gardens of the Ryōan-ji Temple but by more typical structures, such as a restaurant by Sutami Horiguchi, where each room, each passageway, exhibited a distinct character, precisely appointed with spare artistry, and unfolding in a series like an imaginative tale as one moved from room to room. When seated at his table in this restaurant, Yamasaki’s host raised a window shade to reveal, not the bustling city street outside, but a view of a peaceful walled garden (Yamasaki 1955, 145–6; Gyure 2017, 59). Such experiences prompted the architect to seek equivalents to this everyday quality of intimacy and contemplative repose.

Oberlin Conservatory of Music

The early homage of the Kobe consulate was one of the most overt efforts, deliberately seeking a design that would recall Japanese traditions in nearly every feature, including the raising up of the building, the separation of structures, the incorporation of an elaborate traditional garden, modernized shoji screens, and rooms provided with tatami mats. But Japanese influences are discernible everywhere in Yamasaki’s work. The Federal Science Pavilion of 1962 also organizes its five buildings around a central courtyard, moving fairgoers through them in a planned sequence, while the courtyard unifies them with a space for respite and reflection. The Oberlin Conservatory of Music (1959–64) clusters its buildings around a small Japanese garden complete with a koi-filled pond, but the function of the Japanese garden is equally evident in less overt efforts, such as the plan of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts building (1955–9, now part of the College for Creative Studies), where, within a high perforated brick wall, a transparent building is surrounded by plantings, giving each office and classroom the feel of having its own private garden.

Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts/College for Creative Studies

Yamasaki drew on Japanese structural traditions, for example in his revival of an ancient strategy of hoisting a large central roof beam with ridgepoles supporting a steeply sloped roof – a piece of engineering he employed in several major projects. He favored large, overhanging roofs in buildings such as the Horace Mann Educators Corporation building in Springfield, Illinois (1968–72), and Harvard University’s William James Hall (1959–65). But the Japanese influence is equally discernable in small projects and in decorative details. The modest building designed for the American Concrete Institute (1955–8) features a peaked folded roof with wing-like eaves that cannot help but recall a small pagoda. Celebrating, as this building appropriately does, the decorative potential of concrete, the architect thought that the diminutive size of the building should call to mind jewelry, with every surface finely shaped and patterned. A touch that is almost a signature feature in Yamasaki’s art is the use of hanging globe lights that recall the circular openings and paper lanterns that offset rectilinear designs in Japanese interiors. The effect could be achieved even in projects done with restricted means, such as the Northminster Presbyterian Church (1957–60), in Troy, Michigan, where a series of these globes lines up in a hallway, complementing the repetition of thin vertical columns and concrete roof shells.

Such pervasive examples of Japanese influence could be multiplied at length and formed part of the motivation for certain clients to seek out Yamasaki for further projects in Japan or Japanese-oriented projects in America, such as San Francisco’s Japan Center, which, in its moderated and modernized “Nisei” manner, evokes recollections of Japan in every corner. The intimacy of Yamasaki’s identification with Japan, however, is perhaps best represented by his most personal projects: the design of his firm’s office in Troy (completed in 1967) and his home in Bloomfield Township (1971–2). These buildings form two of his most

William James Hall, Harvard

American Concrete Institute/EcoWorks

American Concrete Institute/EcoWorks

Northminster Presbyterian Church

consistently Japanese-influenced designs in their simplicity, organization of space, and connection to their surroundings. When given the freedom to design for himself, Japan loomed large in the process. It clearly informed the kind of space in which he most wished to dwell.

Islamic legacies

Yamasaki spoke of technological culture as the culture of modern America. But ever since its inception, modernity has also posed itself as a global cultural dilemma. With the spread of technology throughout the world and the appeal of its advantages, every culture is forced to wrestle with the question as to whether, how, and to what extent to become modern. In his relationship with Japan, the architect was perceived as one who was pursuing a kind of middle path, able to fashion the elements of modern architecture into expressions of traditional values and symbolisms. Even more successful, one might say, was his role in effecting this same type of transition in the Islamic architectural tradition of Saudi Arabia.

Japan Center, San Francisco

Japan Center Peace Plaza by Yoshirō

Taniguchi and Kenji Murokami

Yamasaki Residence

Photo: Balthazar Korab

By a complex arrangement that speaks volumes about the political economy of America and the Middle East in the 1950s, a commercial airport was proposed for the city of Dhahran. The Saudi government had interests in developing its infrastructure and international markets for its oil production; the U.S. had interests in the oil and in a military presence in the country. The airport, then, was to be gifted by the U.S. to the Saudis in return for American use of it, with the construction, competed in 1961, overseen by the Army Corps of Engineers (Gyure 2017, 143). When Yamasaki came on board as designer, his thinking about how to let traditional architecture speak again through the voice of modernism was at a peak of intensity, and the results had the effect not only of making the cultural connection of respect and solicitude that he desired but of creating a symbolic architectural paradigm for the whole of the Saudi nation.

Any building designed for this landscape would need to resonate with the imagery of the desert and the challenges of strong heat and light that had conditioned architectural strategies for centuries. Points of reference would be the long, low, flat horizon and the highly visible movements of the heavens. The shelter of the building would emphasize shade, ideally creating a sense of oasis. Beyond these considerations, Yamasaki looked for inspiration and deeper understanding in the architecture of mosques that he had visited throughout the Islamic world, an inspiration entirely appropriate in a culture that infuses religious practice into the whole of daily life.

Arab sacred art is typically formed of creative geometries. Given doctrinal restrictions on representational imagery, Islamic art and architecture gravitates toward abstract patterns wherein lines build up to form complex planes and planes are seriated to create volumes. Among the patterns one encounters are arrangements that embed identical shapes of varying sizes within one another, recalling fractal structures in nature and intimating a universe of orders infinitely nested within orders, the unity of the cosmic whole being achieved through the rhythm and harmony of these endless series. The prevalence of repeated lively, dancing patterns in walls and overlapping arches is certainly aimed at communicating vitality of spirit but equally the calm, meditative state that is produced by music composed of constant drones and steady beats (Tonna 1990). If one were to conceive of a modern architecture that would seek a continuity with this tradition, it would be hard to abandon such symbolic qualities and hard to ignore how they manifest themselves in decorative features – the grilles and screens, the elaborate wall paintings and mosaics incorporating beautifully embellished calligraphy.

Dhahran International Airport/King Abdulaziz Air Base

Photo: Balthazar Korab

Photo: Balthazar Korab

Yamasaki tackled the desert conditions by building up the large structure out of sleek concrete columns that fan out into broad umbrellas – some standing almost free, but most meeting to form arches of an Arab style, within which are set large concrete wall panels rimmed by a line of windows and featuring patterns of filigree and overlapping arches within arches. The floor plan splits the international terminal from the smaller domestic one with a drop-off and pick-up lane that circles a slender tower and an “oasis” of vegetation. In the details of the airport there can be seen an element of finery – for example, in the copper and other metals in the doors – that is reflective of the association of the building with royalty. With the sweeping rise of many columns and shifting patterns of roof segments and panel figures, the airport design brings together a visual energy with rhythmic regularity, which, in the manner of traditional buildings, brings a quality of measure and calm to the whole.

Describing the Dhahran terminal, Friedrich Ragette writes, “It is an astonishingly effective design in which Yamasaki manages to suggest the Gothic vastness of a cathedral and the simple austerity of a mosque without detracting from its efficiency as a busy air terminal” (Ragette 1971a, 18). Upon its completion, the reigning monarch, King Saud, was said to have considered it the only modern building in the country that truly looked like a Saudi building. When Saudi currency was issued in 1961 it featured an image of the airport on the one-riyal note, continuing to appear there through the second currency issue in 1968. A third issue in 1976, offering a different view of the same airport, circulated until 1984. After that the airport was not featured again, but a fifth issue, circulating since 2007, displays an image of the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency building (1981), another Yamasaki commission. This means that for periods totaling more than 30 years, bills illustrating fruits of the imagination of this Japanese-American architect passed through the hands of millions of Saudi citizens. While many mosques from the nation’s rich history have been featured on the currency, Yamasaki’s buildings would appear to be the only nonindustrial

Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency

Photo: Balthazar Korab

Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency Entry by D. Lee Dusell

Photo: Balthazar Korab

modern structures that were celebrated in this way. This recognition makes for a powerful affirmation of the architect’s intentions from a culture that was debating how to modernize without the loss of defining Islamic traditions.

The success of the Dhahran airport earned Yamasaki’s firm a number of other projects in the Middle East, and perhaps because of his fame there, his style of recalling features of traditional Middle-Eastern architecture can be seen in projects by other architects working in the Arab world, notably the early 1970s airports in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, commercial buildings by Tony Irving and Gordon Jones, and, in a grand and majestic way, Gyo Obata’s precast-concrete approach to King Saud University in Riyadh, completed in 1984 (Ragette 1971a, 1971b, 1972; Obata 2010, 86–91).

Venetian synthesis

Henry Guthard recalls sitting with Yamasaki in Venice, viewing the fourteenth-century Doges Palace from across the waters of St. Mark’s Basin. “There’s something about that building…,” the architect would say, his voice then trailing off. In such a moment one can imagine this edifice, this iconic “public palace,” settling permanently into his imagination, to be turned over and over in thought, with an aim not only to understand it but to reproduce the effect that it had on him in his own creations. There is something about that building, something more than its parts, with their staggering variety and detail. It is a building that seems both heavy and light – heavy in the bulk of its upper stories and the solidity of their bearing walls, yet light in the way these upper stories are held aloft by colonnades. The design condenses multiple traditions into a complex coherence, exhibiting Gothic shapes but also Byzantine and Moorish influences (Pignatti 1965, 7–8).

The building projects strong lines, with its colonnades creating two loggia – a more delicate one, with a balustrade, on the second level – whose rhythmic horizontal pattern pairs with the vertical lines of the columns and the points of arches to create a movement of ascension that continues up to the tiara running along the roofline. The surfaces are ornately finished both outside and in; yet to gaze upon the palace from across the water, as Yamasaki did, is to be impressed by the simple, bold geometry of its structure, balancing the rectilinear and the curvilinear, with the straight lines and diamond patterns of the brickwork complementing the curves of arches and columns topped with embedded circular openings – shapes that also punctuate the brick façade. The effect is one of harmony in variety, an

Doges Palace, Venice, by Antonio Rizzo et. al.

Photo: Suicasmo

equilibrium irreducible to its elements. There is something about the dynamic synthesis of the whole that escapes explanation.

Yamasaki’s frequent use of Venetian Gothic forms in the 1960s can be read as attempts to recreate the elusive magic of the Doges in modern form, to use the building as a teacher for exploring an expansion of the modernist vocabulary. As was true in the Arab context, precast, prestressed concrete became the structural vehicle for this exploration. The control afforded by casting forms in a factory made possible an endless range of shapes. By shocking the concrete – subjecting it to vigorous vibration as it set up – the resulting density of the structures could achieve exceptional strength in stylistically delicate pieces. In the factory one could add surface aggregates of quartz that would soften the visual appearance, giving a surface texture of a precise shade, with sparkling elements in the stone and a detailed pattern when viewed up close.

After the McGregor building, we see emerging on the campus of Wayne State University some of the fruits of the architect’s Venetian forays into sculptural concrete. In the Prentis Building (1961–4) the upper stories are raised on slender columns with sleek vertical lines that end by forming a tiara along the roofline. The accompanying DeRoy Auditorium, fashioned as a separate structure surrounded by a pool of water and reached by a small bridge, is adorned with cast-concrete variations on the pointed arch, their tips recalling flower buds or the peaks of a crown. The tapered columns of the Prentis building hold a central mass of the structure aloft to create a breezeway through which the DeRoy building, with its vibrant contours, is framed and reiterated.

The Wayne State University College of Education building (1956–60) works another variation on the Gothic. The straight-pointed arch by which Yamasaki often abstracted the Gothic form is repeated almost uniformly around the whole building, surrounding it with an arcade on the ground floor. The top floors are set back, and again, a tiara creates a figure against the sky. The uniformity of the elevations, while it certainly grants visual consistency to the building, has been criticized for its effect of repetitiveness, something that Yamasaki did not defend except as a budgetary expedient – an exploration of the degree to which dramatic, visually rich effects can be achieved even on a limited budget (Yamasaki 1959).

In the Federal Science Pavilion in Seattle, everything that had been developed at Wayne State was raised to a grand scale. Here the architect introduces arches that have differing roles: some bear weight, creating arcades with curving crisscross shapes along the pools of water; others bring the visual theme of pointed

Prentis Building, Wayne State University

DeRoy Auditorium, Wayne State University

College of Education Building, Wayne State University

arches to the surface of the outer walls. In seeming to float on water, the buildings immerse one imaginatively into a Venetian world. Amid the pools are arranged flower-shaped fountains that add a cooling quality in the summer and freeze into ice sculptures in the winter. The five grand arches in the center of the pavilion read immediately as Gothic, yet, as Yamasaki insisted, reproduce no historical prototype exactly, using cutting-edge technology to make them almost impossibly light and airy. The pavilion’s central courtyard was meant to serve as a retreat from the frenzy of the surrounding fairgrounds, drawing fairgoers into a secluded, enchanting place for reverie. If the space seems ritualized, if it recalls features of traditional palaces and sacred temples, this is no accident. Yamasaki wanted to evoke not only the reflective mood of such hallowed places but to use the historical connotations of the Gothic to celebrate the spiritual nobility of scientific aspirations.

Federal Science Pavilion/Pacific Science Center

The Doges-inspired buildings of the 1950s and ’60s present Yamasaki to us in one of the most exuberant and exploratory periods of his artistic life. They epitomized the precise use that he sought to make of architecture’s history, and their great popularity seemed to prove, at least for a time, that modern architecture could win the hearts of the public. It was a period when he bore criticisms of his work lightly, when his powers of appropriating history seemed to grow with each project.

Classical transformations

Greek and Roman forms are so ubiquitous and well known that for Westerners their symbolism is hardly separable from their immediate affective impact. They spontaneously speak to us of permanence, ancient authority, and democratic and republican values. The common desire to want to connect with such values has for centuries rendered the forms standard accoutrements for all kinds of buildings, but especially governmental, commercial, and financial institutions, where in later centuries, they increasingly took the form of ornamental add-ons rather than structural essentials, such that they came to be regarded by many moderns as decorative clichés.

Under these circumstances, for Yamasaki to revive their use to the modernist’s toolbox would require an especially deliberate transformation, one that would recover their practical use in structural roles while effecting free variations on their look. The Roman arch leant itself to endless variation because it had historically been used in so many different contexts (Yamasaki 1979, 33). Yamasaki used it in a broad and heavy form in Seattle’s IBM building and a tall and slender version in the M&T Bank of Buffalo, New York. For the offices of the Michigan State Medical Society, narrow, stylized Roman arches were lined up in a long, uniform pattern, as if to create a regular rhythmic beat of forms, or to suggest a sort of endless repetition, as the modern sculptor Constantin Brancusi did in his series of “endless columns.” In a manner parallel to Brancusi’s sculptures – which symbolize endlessness by leaving unfinished the last unit of a series of stacked forms – the last arch at either end of Yamasaki’s series ends in mid-rise. The Roman arch could bear the weight of a skyscraper, or it could seem, as in the MSMS building, to dance above its columns. The form was so appealing and suggestive that even after the architect ceased using arches on his façades, one can find them in interiors, such as that of the 1981 building, 100 Washington Square, in Minneapolis. The great companion to the Roman arch – the dome – was used not only in Lambert airport but in several projects, notably the West Gymnasium at Carleton College (1961–4), where overhangs on the eyebrow-shaped rooflines create an artful curvilinear sweep that carries through to the supports at the corners of each domed section.

Yamasaki used Greek forms more sparingly, but did so emphatically for Robertson Hall at Princeton University (1961–5), designed for what was named the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Here, to evoke the stature of the academy and the ideals of democratic governance, he arranged to have a brick building moved to situate, in a prominent site at the corner of two intersecting streets, a building formed of a central rectangular block that is buttressed with 58 columns rising three stories to support an overhanging floor of offices. Associations with the Greek temple are unmistakable, and yet everything has been transformed in such a way as to seem, even today, almost futuristic. The classical columns rise like nothing in the classical world, with a sweeping, narrowing movement toward an improbably slender pinch near the top. Slender columns of similar gracefulness were used in less monumental projects as well – for example in the columned portico of the Northwestern National Life Building in Minneapolis (1961–4, currently Voya Financial) – its grand porch bringing slimmed-down recollections of ancient Greece to the world of modern business.

M&T Bank Headquarters

Photo: Balthazar Korab

“The New Formalism”

Noticing what Yamasaki was doing with historical elements and seeing similarities in the work of a handful of other modernists, historian William Jordy named their style “The New Formalism,” which Marcus Wiffen describes thus:

The buildings of the New Formalism are typically self-contained, free-standing blocks, with strictly symmetrical elevations. Skylines are level, the building often being defined at the top by a heavy, projecting roof slab. Wall surfaces are always smooth and often glossy, a wide range of materials, natural and artificial, being used for facing. Columnar supports tend to be thicker and more fully modeled than in the International and Miesian styles, while the arch … appears in various shapes and may constitute the ruling motif of the design. Ornament is employed, most frequently in the form of patterned screens or grills of metal, cast stone, or concrete.

(Whiffen 1969, 257; see also Gyure 2017, 127)

Whiffen identifies the style’s most prolific representatives as Yamasaki, Philip Johnson, and Edward Durrell Stone. Each of these three had undergone an immersion in the Bauhaus and Miesian forms of the International Style but were

Michigan State Medical Society, East Lansing

100 Washington Square, Minneapolis

West Gymnasium, Carleton College

Robertson Hall, Princeton

Northwestern National Life/Voya Financial

resisting the idea that the geometrical purism of the European sages must rule American architecture always and forever. Each of them looked to historical architecture as a means of enhancing modernism in ways that the public at large could recognize. Welton Becket (another graduate of the University of Washington) designed a number of buildings that fit the description of New Formalism perfectly; some of William Pereira’s works can be brought into the fold; and countless lesser-known architects helped to make the style common throughout North America.

The style was “formalist” in finding modern ways to incorpo rate iconic elements of long-standing architectural imagery to a symbolic or decorative effect. It is most frequently to be seen in academic buildings, civic and cultural institutions, and places of worship, since these institutions tend to draw heavily on the authority of tradition while also having a kind of permission to be symbolic and inspirational in their appearance. But the style was adapted to other kinds of projects, such as apartment buildings and commercial institutions (especially financial institutions) that wanted to evoke both “classical” and “contemporary” associations.

Johnson was a great believer in the power of architecture’s history, even as he came to produce some of the icons of the International Style. For him the guiding light was not the principles of a style but the opportunities that style granted to artistic creativity. His structures of the 1950s and ’60s are among the more restrained of the examples of New Formalism, yet by the 1980s he had arguably become the most eccentric of the style’s three main representatives if one considers his “postmodern” works to be a further development of his earlier formalism.

Stone is considered the most popular, or “populist,” among them. The elements of his signature American Embassy in New Delhi – its columns and screens, its fountains and massive hanging flower containers – became formulaic and frequently repeated to widespread acclaim. Like Yamasaki’s Kobe Consulate, Stone’s embassy sought to reflect, in modernized form, local design traditions and the demands of the local climate. Stone was attracted to the use of perforated barriers, such as grilles or screens, as a means of shielding glass exteriors from harsh sunlight, and in this respect he was following practical traditional strategies, but he found they were loved for their beauty as well, and this inspired him to adopt the screen as a decorative element in projects where climate did not call for it, paralleling Yamasaki’s use of perforated walls in many structures of the 1950s and early ’60s. But one eventually finds Yamasaki criticizing Stone for overuse of such features, and arguing, in the Time article of 1963, that “you shouldn’t put veils over buildings or barrels around them” (Time 1963, 63).

Once one begins looking for exemplars of New Formalism amid the cityscapes of contemporary North America – especially among buildings dating from the 1950s to 1970s – one may be surprised by how ubiquitous they are. In major cities one will find examples in commercial buildings across many neighborhoods; in smaller towns it is not unusual to see it in the town hall and other public structures. It is easy to find in libraries, churches, university halls, airports, and apartment buildings of the period. Some examples imitate Yamasaki specifically. The Church of Christ, Scientist, in Town and Country, Missouri, for example (by Robert Fischer 1966), works variations on Yamasaki arches and decorative concrete work. The Snohomish County Court Annex in Everett, Washington (by Harmon, Pray and Dietrich 1967), reproduces window patterns of the Oberlin Conservatory. The Taj Mahal Medical Center in Irvine, California (by Burke, Kober and Nicolais 1964), described on its Web site as “one of our country’s most treasured New Formalism, Mid-Century Modern buildings,” pays homage to Yamasaki’s Northwestern National Life office in Minneapolis, as does the Learning Resource

First Church of Christ, Scientist, Town and Country, by Robert Fisher

Snohomish County Courthouse Annex by Harmon, Pray and Dietrich

Taj Mahal Medical Center by Burke, Kober, and Nicholais

Photo: Beyond My Ken

John D. Messick Learning Resource Center and the Marajen Chinigo Graduate Center, Oral Roberts University, by Frank Wallace

Photo: Dustin M. Ramsey

Center and Graduate Center at Oral Roberts University (by Frank Wallace 1965). Scores of equally obvious cases could be added to these.

As occurs in most architectural movements, the appeal of New Formalism was eventually weighted down by the proliferation of half-hearted and superficial attempts to embody its aims. Its more distinctive qualities were applied more widely (though also tempered and compromised) in the larger trend of “soft modernism.” Then, at some point in the 1970s, the popularity of New Formalism waned as design took different directions. As a result, the great number of structures that can trace inspiration back to Yamasaki and his peers appear today as artifacts from a particular time in modernism’s history. They are described as landmarks and gems, or as obsolete holdovers, but typically with little investigation into the strategies at the heart of their inspiration, the attempt to produce a historically rooted yet historically transformative modernism. A lack of scholarly interest in the style contributes to a common underestimation of Yamasaki’s influence on the architectural world of his time.

References

Bacon, Francis. 1960. The New Organon. Edited by F.H. Anderson. New York: Macmillan.

Bourne, Russell. 1958. “American Architect Yamasaki.” Architectural Forum 109, no. 2 (August): 84–5, 166, 168.

Giedion, Sigfried. 1967. Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gyure, Dale Allen. 2017. Minoru Yamasaki: Humanist Architecture for a Modernist World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Lancaster, Clay. 1983. The Japanese Influence in America. New York: Abbeville Press.

Obata, Gyo. 2010. Gyo Obata: Architect, Clients, Reflections. Victoria, Australia: Images Publishing Group.

Parkes, Graham. 2002. “The Eloquent Stillness of Stone: Rock in the Dry Landscape Garden.” In Japanese Hermeneutics: Current Debates on Aesthetics and Interpretation, edited by M.F. Marra, 44–59. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Peter, John. 1994. The Oral History of Modern Architecture. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

Pignatti, Terisio. 1965. The Doges Palace. New York: Reynal and Company.

Ragette, Friedrich. 1971a. “Building on Tradition: Modern Architecture with an Arab Flavor, Part One.” Aramco World Magazine 22, no. 3 (May–June): 15–23.

Ragette, Friedrich. 1971b. “Building on Tradition: Modern Architecture with an Arab Flavor, Part Two.” Aramco World Magazine 22, no. 4 (July–August): 6–13.

Ragette, Friedrich. 1972. “Building on Tradition: Modern Architecture with an Arab Flavor, Part Three.” Aramco World Magazine 23, no. 1 (January–February): 7–13.

Tada, Kimie and Mehta, Geeta. 2005. Japan Style: Architecture + Interiors + Design.

North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle Publishing.

Time. 1963. “The Road to Xanadu.” Time, January 18: 54–64.

Tonna, Jo. 1990. “The Poetics of Arab-Islamic Architecture.” Muqarnas 7: 182–97.

Ueda, Atsushi. 1998. The Inner Harmony of the Japanese House. New York: Kodansha International.

Whiffen, Marcus. 1969. American Architecture since 1780: Guide to the Styles. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1955. “Toward an Architecture for Enjoyment.” Architectural Record 118, no. 2 (August): 142–9.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1959. “Minoru Yamasaki Interview.” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute. Sound recording and transcript.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1979. A Life in Architecture. New York: Weatherhill.

Chapter 6
The moral imperative

As Yamasaki’s architecture came to national prominence in the 1960s it began to draw doubts and criticisms from a number of influential colleagues, academics, and journalists, with the criticism coalescing around certain phrases and intensifying, with their repetition, over the ensuing years. Some critics simply reacted against his modernism, calling it austere, abstract, and impersonal, but modernists often argued that he was retrograde in reviving a role for ornament in architecture, a tendency that earned him charges of superficiality and lack of serious attention to structure and function. Gordon Bunshaft pronounced that “he was an architect, but now he’s nothing but a decorator” (Time 1963, 63). Robert Campbell declared that his buildings were “usually just boxes with arches pasted on” (1993).

A subset of this line of criticism took aim specifically at the architect’s taste for delicate form. The designs were called by various critics and architectural historians “fussy,” “precious,” “lacy,” “prissy,” “epicene,” “cosmetic.” He was said to belong to the “Ballet School” of architecture, or the “Spun Sugar School” (Gyure 2017, 154–7; Campbell 1993). Of the marble-clad columns at the base of his Michigan Consolidated Gas office tower, Ada Louise Huxtable wrote, “Where the building needs to say ‘strong,’ it says ‘pretty.’” She compared the anodized aluminum screen of his Reynolds Metals Regional Sales office to costume jewelry (1962), and in her damning 1966 assessment of the World Trade Center design, she pointed to an unsettling paradox: “Here we have the world’s daintiest architecture for the world’s biggest buildings” (1966).

Such criticisms can seem harsh, particularly as they are directed against a man noted for his graciousness. When taken together the labels form a contradictory

Michigan Consolidated Gas/One Woodward Avenue, Detroit

whole: the architecture is at once too popular and too off-putting to the public; it is too subjective but also too impersonal; it commits the sins of modernism but fails equally to be modern enough. The shifting ground of criticism baffled Yamasaki at times. He seemed to stand constantly before a tribunal that could not settle on which statutes applied to his case. If he was involved in a housing project or a conventional office tower, he epitomized the dullness of the International Style. If he advocated replacing old buildings, he was an urban-renewal villain. If he employed innovative engineering, he was a show-boater. If he added interest to his facades with graceful columns and tracery, he was superficial, backward-looking, a decorator.

Ambiguity in the message, however, did not keep it from being emphatically delivered, suggesting that there was something more at issue than matters of taste. It was a matter, one could say, of moral imperatives. The scale of Yamasaki’s projects, along with their artistic ambitions and public recognition, would seem to have come with exceptional obligations of artistic and cultural leadership – the normative task of bearing architecture into a better future. But where he was to lead, and how, and why, were questions that remain difficult to unravel.

Ethics and ethos

The moral function of architecture consists of two dimensions: ethics and ethos. Ethics, a branch of philosophy dedicated to reasoning about moral principles and actions, is everywhere relevant in any field wherein the actions of professionals have social consequences. Architecture engages in systems of social cooperation to produce social goods. There are values in the investment in architecture and values in its ends. Ethical considerations are involved in the funding of projects, the conduct of operations, the sourcing of materials, the organization of labor, and the displacement and environmental impacts that result from construction. In the moral dimension of these activities is to be found the most obvious “ethical” dimension of architecture, the dimension grounded in reasoned principles. Yet in saying so we must acknowledge that this is the less specifically architectural dimension of architecture’s role in moral life, for it is based on reasoning and argumentation, whereas architecture, by its nature, neither reasons nor argues. Architectural meaning is suggestive rather than discursive, multivalent rather than univocal. The values, virtues, and ends embedded in the artistry of architecture are imagined and symbolized rather than explained and defended. Indeed, architecture is, of itself, a wordless art – a wordlessness that Geoffrey Scott had in mind in opposing the “moral fallacy” in architectural criticism.

The word “ethos” has come to connote the broader scope of meaning in which moral convictions are not only argued but are symbolized in any number of forms, including narrative and visual forms. The word hearkens back to the ancient Greek root of the word “ethics” and expands the normative focus to embrace types of expression that, though they are more ambiguous than philosophical discourse, bring to the moral realm its affective and existential mass and momentum. It is within the realm of ethos that the bulk of one’s moral life is lived, and it is there that one can find the ethical dimension most proper to the art of architecture (Heidegger 2008, 167–73, 254–60; Norberg-Schulz 1979; Harries 1997, 281–2, 290–1).

Though Yamasaki did not speak in such terms, it is clear that his convictions on both architectural ethics and architectural ethos were deeply held. Ethical convictions are clearly expressed in his views regarding the social function of architecture and the professional ethics of architectural practice. Questions of ethos are everywhere present in his pronouncements on architectural meaning, history, and purpose, though he wrestled with the implications of those questions for modernism in ways that his critics did not, perhaps, entirely appreciate.

Ethics in practice

Yamasaki’s condemnation of the abuses of the bosses in the Alaskan canneries or his frustration with the oppressive atmosphere in certain architectural firms constitute moral objections. An architectural practice has moral obligations not only through its fiduciary arrangements with clients but to its teams of creators and builders. Modern practices of technological manufacture, wherein pieces are created in a factory and erected on site, represented a moral advance, in Yamasaki’s mind, in bringing a new level of skill and reward to construction workers that advanced the dignity of their labor. In his office, he sought to organize the work in a manner that would contribute to a sense of collaborative community. Granted, he was a designer, with a designer’s penchant for maintaining control over all aspects of a project. One longtime associate said that he oversaw the office with “a benevolent iron hand” (Gallagher 2015); another remarked, “If you worked for Yama, you did it Yama’s way.” But Yamasaki would often give members of the firm, including young members, a degree of scope that was empowering, and he did not set teams in competition with one another. He created opportunities for Asian-Americans and women in his hiring. That such practices were effective is reflected in the loyalty that the firm garnered, with a number of associates remaining for many years.

There is another kind of ethical concern, a social justice concern, in Yamasaki’s expression of regret over the Pruitt-Igoe project, for here he saw his failure to create community as a moral failure – a failure to rise sufficiently to architecture’s calling to be a force for the common good. It was a lesson, for him, in the complexity of problems of social justice, where architecture participates in social systems riven by racial hatred and systemic economic injustice. Though his response to his failing was an inclination to withdraw from social progressivism in his projects, he could always be found defending the social benefit that those projects would bring. His user-oriented approach never ceased to have a moral quality to it.

The ethos of modern architecture

When we expand our scope from ethics narrowly conceived to the broader realm of ethos, we can identify a pair of relevant moral functions that architecture undertakes: to serve and to edify. Architecture seeks to serve its users, communicating this quality affectively through design. In enlivening users’ experience through its artistry, the architectural work helps them to feel their own worth; in meeting effectively the tasks of a project’s program, users can sense, in the very pattern of their activities, the respect that the design shows for their purposes. But architects of all ages have sought also to edify. Because every work of architecture orders life, it forms, implicitly, a vision of an ordered life, whether in the smallest home or the grandest public hall. In pre-modern architecture the edifying function is often recognized in the scale and beauty of proportion in the work, in its situation in the landscape and the built surroundings, but also, importantly, in connections that are made to narratives that specify values and virtues – connections frequently established through ornament in the form of figures, inscriptions, and historical allusions.

No less than any other period in architectural history, modern architecture sought to serve and to edify, to work against the hierarchies of aristocratic (and, for some, bourgeois) society and the ostensive virtues that locked citizens into those hierarchies. The moderns embraced the project of cultural enlightenment that aimed to spread widely the fruits of education and technological advancement; hence, they reacted against backward-looking works that belabored a romantic attachment to an irrelevant past, which hid increasingly modern structural features behind ornamental facades.

The problem has been called one of divided representation, a phenomenon traceable to the European Baroque period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in which the structural supports for buildings, their engineering, came to disappear behind surface decoration, functioning as scaffolding upon which the aesthetically appealing elements of the design were hung. Freed from the discipline of structural duties, decoration moved, perhaps predictably, in the direction of extravagance, and indeed it is this overelaborate quality that has come down to us as the everyday (and often pejorative) meaning of the adjective “baroque” (Vesely 2004).

Modernism expressed a pent-up frustration with the phenomenon of divided representation. By the twentieth century, as architects continued to adorn their surfaces with Greek columns and Gothic or Romanesque arches, behind the walls of their buildings the structural technology had been further revolutionized. To a new generation of architects, the idea of pasting Greek columns onto a skyscraper held up by its steel and concrete skeleton was a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the practice of divided representation. As these buildings were being dressed in costumes of heavy stone, brick, or terra cotta, the potentialities of the modern materials – to create large, open interiors and to make outer surfaces of light-enhancing glass – were being ignored. For the early proselytizer for modernism, Adolf Loos, the matter took on the status of a moral crisis. Ornament had become so dishonest, so misrepresentative of the architectural essence of buildings, as to be criminal (Loos 1998; Harries 1997, 32–48). Works in the historical mode, according to Loos, had no integrity because they lied about what they were. His rhetoric was echoed in the manifestos of Le Corbusier, and when he and the other revolutionaries of the 1920s suddenly went to the opposite extreme and introduced designs that created their entire aesthetic effect out of the inherent potentialities of the new technologies, the result could not have been more startling.

Modernism emerged, then, not simply as a new style but as a cultural revolution demanding a transvaluation of values from the traditional to the modern. Such a revolution acts as a moral force, demanding strict loyalty from its followers, with its leaders constantly on guard against the influence of apostates and backsliders. The revolution’s moral imperative demands that it go beyond altering the practices of professionals to reshaping the expectations – indeed, the very sensibilities – of the citizenry at large. In earlier times, the public had thrilled to the sensuous qualities of stone and carved wood in their buildings, but now they would learn to love, with equal passion, sheet glass and bare concrete. Hand-crafted artifacts and architectural decoration – marks of the hierarchical social systems of the past – had to be condemned, its monuments denounced as aristocratic, its decorative arts as bourgeois. The use of words such as “charming,” “luxurious,” or even “beautiful,” when appraising architectural success, become suspect, replaced by praise for qualities of “honesty” and “integrity,” which are elevated to stand as the exclusive qualities by means of which architecture edifies its users. Matters of taste become matters of character, with the highest of virtues being that of fidelity to the modernist movement itself.

The revolution, however, was also understood as an ongoing one, with the expectation that it would evolve over time and would absorb whatever wisdom of the past that suited its purposes. It would be necessary for the movement to change and adapt, diversifying and developing to expand its base of support. The austerity of its tumultuous beginnings would likely diminish as the movement came to be more widely accepted. Innovation would be encouraged in an effort to correct the false steps that are inevitably made when charting new territory. The revolution, it was understood, would need to produce new leaders to show the path to reform from within. In this connection there was a consistent concern that the intensity of modernism’s embrace of explicit structure not result in the reduction of architecture to engineering – that buildings, though they may become “machines for living,” not be reduced to mere appliances.

Both the praise and criticism that Yamasaki received make the most sense when viewed in the context of this dialectic of revolution and evolution. As a professed modern he would be expected to hold strictly to the core values of honesty and integrity, but as an innovative spirit he would be encouraged in whatever ways he could show a path forward for the movement. Yet the moment he was perceived to be returning to an architecture of historical reference and ornament, he could easily be classed as a counterrevolutionary and subjected to the shaming that such deviance was believed to warrant.

One can see such a dynamic unfold in the development of Ada Louise Huxtable’s treatments of Yamasaki over time. Her 1962 feature on him in the New York Times attempts to appreciate both the praise and the criticism of his work. She takes care to articulate the elements of his vision and his motivations, including substantial quotations that articulate his principles. She describes in vivid detail features of his designs that made them complex and appealing. She looks into the character of the man and describes his struggles against prejudice – picking up on personal qualities of “serene manner and gently explosive humor,” his habit of self-criticism, and his sense of the need to be constantly moving forward as an artist. To his credit, he opposes bland austerity and strives for interest and enjoyment, but at the risk of possibly “going down the primrose path of token visual pleasures” without tackling the genuinely architectural problems to be addressed in his commissions. She recapitulates a range of criticisms leveled by others – of superficiality, shallowness, of reversion to pre-modern decorative styles – but counters that “many of his buildings are undeniably wonderful to look at,” offering a hope that a new restraint in his design would move his work toward the ideal combination of structural clarity and visual appeal (1962). As Huxtable’s criticisms grew more negative over time, both sides of this equation tended to emerge as demerits. She consistently blamed his work for being too characterless and austere when he cleaved to a rigorously Miesian paradigm, too fanciful and trivial when he departed from it.

Expressing structure

Yamasaki loved the study of structure from his student days. Throughout his career he regarded engineering as utterly integral to the design process, and he evoked extraordinarily creative contributions from some of the world’s most talented engineers, including John Skilling and Leslie Robertson, and the master of concrete construction, Albert Yee. But he was selective in his appropriation of the rules of the revolutionary masters. He admired the rectilinear perfection of Mies and the Bauhaus, but what was of greatest appeal was that the structure had been expressed, not that it was rectilinear. Yamasaki loved the paintings of Piet Mondrian, but also felt that a room full of Piet Mondrian paintings would get monotonous (1959). What excited him in Mies was the world of possibilities that the new technologies made possible (1957). This is why he saw no betrayal of modernism in his dips into history; he considered himself to be boldly exploring what the new expression of structure could express.

It should be observed, at this juncture, that in modernism’s pronouncements regarding the importance of expressing structure there is a certain disingenuousness. To begin with, the term “expression” is used ambiguously, such that it could mean literally revealing the actual structural supports to view or more metaphorically representing them as a decorative feature. Mies explicitly engaged in the latter practice when he attached decorative I-beams to the exterior of the Seagram Building, but more generally one could note that the façade of every curtainwall building hides the skeleton that supports the building, representing it rather than literally showing it in the rectangular grid of glass on its surface. But in the case of the curtain wall we may go further, noting not simply this quality of representation but a degree of illusion involved in making a building that, on its surface, would appear to be a standing wall of glass. Indeed, if one looks for illusion in works of the modern masters – including the tricks of levitation that Yamasaki so admired in Farnsworth house – one will find them everywhere.

For such reasons Yamasaki regarded the expression of structure as a complex affair with room for creative variation. Nothing should be attached merely for decorative purposes, but a feature could be decorative while functioning as nothing more than a sunscreen, as was done with the metal rings of the Reynolds headquarters, or with flourishes in concrete in the Romanesque exterior of Carlton College’s Olin Hall of Science (1958–61). Some of the stylized Gothic arches of the Federal Science Pavilion function structurally and others merely as representations of structural forms. Decorative patterns under the upper platforms reproduce visually the stress lines of the engineering. Even in Yamasaki’s most organically sculptural designs, the fundamental structural shapes of the engineering are discernable, whether in the regular pattern of upright supports, the trussing of floors, or the vaulting of roofs.

Reynolds Metals Regional Sales Office

Photo: Balthazar Korab

Olin Hall of Science, Carleton College

Federal Science Pavilion/Pacific Science Center

Still, while he could produce a reason beyond mere decoration for every feature added to his designs, over time Yamasaki could be found to be concerned that he was not expressing structure as obviously and purely as he ought to, and his critics’ charge that he was a surface decorator may well have aggravated such self-doubts. It is likely for this reason that he began exploring with John Skilling the possibility of bringing the structural supports of buildings to their exteriors. The firm explored the use of the precast concrete exterior in its first skyscraper, the Michigan Consolidated Gas Company Building, in Detroit (1963), where the design featured an exterior wall of narrow windows surrounded by concrete panels. The strong vertical lines of the panels created a soaring effect while making the interior windows narrow enough that one could rest both hands on columns as one looked out – an opportunity meant to be reassuring to acrophobics (a group to which Yamasaki himself regularly admitted to belonging). But while the precast sections contributed to the strength of the outer walls, their bearing of stress was not carried to the ground, and although the architect considered the project a great success, this feature he came to view as something of a missed opportunity.

Precast concrete was beginning to function structurally in other Yamasaki projects of the period, but it was with Seattle’s IBM office tower of 1964 and the World Trade Center that he and Skilling discovered how to turn the exterior of a heavily glazed skyscraper into an actual bearing wall. The IBM design does so by running thin columns of steel, covered by precast concrete, from the top of the building to a set of oversized, high-strength Roman arches at the base (Hornbeck 1965, 125). As the columns support the building, so too do these arches – though not without a little modern magic that exaggerates their arc and makes them end mid-span at the corners.

In the World Trade Center the same strategy was raised to a staggering scale. Skilling’s concept of a load-bearing exterior wall would contribute a remarkably new approach to the engineering of the world’s tallest skyscraper. The pinstripe steel columns, braced by horizontal spandrels, would now rise 107 stories, sharing the load of the building with its core, thus eliminating the need for heavy columns in the building’s interior. Floors were built upon the same type of Vierendeel trusses used to support bridge spans, suspended from the outer walls. The whole of the towers’ structural design produced buildings that were as much as 40 percent lighter yet more than ten times stiffer than traditional structures.

IBM Building, Seattle

World Trade Center

Photo: Balthazar Korab

Structure, then, was expressed in the World Trade Center to a degree rarely encountered at the time. Though clad in aluminum coverings, the shapes of the exterior columns and spandrels provided the vertical flow of lines that defined the buildings’ aesthetic motif. There was something traditional in the strategy; it hearkened back to the buildings of previous centuries that were held up by the columns and arches of their exteriors, but the precise shapes of these columns and arches were born of the structural question as to what shape of arch, from the point of view of engineering, could provide the greatest support for the least amount of material. The ideal of Emerson served again as the guiding light.

Strength as symbol

Among the photographs in the Yamasaki archives of Wayne State University there is one of the architect shaking hands with President Lyndon Baines Johnson. The two men are smiling cordially, and the photo is autographed “with best wishes” by Johnson. The two would most likely have had more than one occasion to meet, as the president appointed the architect to the inaugural National Council on the Arts in 1965 and spoke at the dedication of Robertson Hall at Princeton in 1966, when Yamasaki was at the height of his fame. But the dedication of Robertson Hall would not be the last time Yamasaki and Johnson would come to be connected through this building. When, shortly after his election, the president became interested in selecting an architect for his presidential library, his wife, Lady Bird Johnson, took up the task of investigating possibilities and visiting representative buildings. At the end of this process the three finalists that she suggested were Gordon Bunshaft (of Skimore, Owings, and Merrill), Philip Johnson, and Yamasaki – the last of these primarily on the strength of the First Lady’s appreciation of Robertson Hall. She admired all three architects for their sense of order and their choice of materials, and she considered all of them to be suitable choices.

The process of final selection, however, seems to have been out of Mrs. Johnson’s hands. It was aided by two architects, Max Brooks and Roy White, who had accompanied her on many of the architectural tours; Frank Stanton, a friend and the president of Columbia Broadcasting Systems, also gave informal input; and an important role was played by William Womack Heath, an old friend of the Johnsons from Texas who, in 1965, was Chair of the Board of Regents at the University of Texas. When the final discussions took place, it was a matter of Brooks, Heath, and White persuading Johnson by a kind of process of elimination (Hufbauer 2005, 78). Johnson seemed to begin by favoring Yamasaki, apparently reflecting Lady Bird’s preference, but Heath was very much against this. In the first place, he argued, the library should be designed “by an American architect” rather than (as he mistakenly presumed) a Japanese immigrant. Secondly, as Heath later recounted,

This Japanese architect – one building that he did that we looked at was the Woodrow Wilson School…. It was sort of effeminate, so to speak. It’s very graceful. And I know I remarked to President Johnson once when he was saying something about the Japanese architect …, “Mr. President, if this library was to have this big building to house the papers of some famous Queen – a woman – I would expect that it would be a beautiful and a dainty style of architecture [but] I can’t see you in it as you have always been known as a man forceful, strong, who came from the harshest hills out there.” … That was the last time he ever mentioned this Japanese architect.

(Hufbauer 2005, 78)

Photo courtesy of Walter P. Reuther Library

Robertson Hall, Princeton

Philip Johnson was eliminated in a somewhat analogous manner, by the advisers making indirect but pointed allusions to his exoticism and apparent homosexuality. Once Bunshaft was on board, Brooks and Heath made clear to him that the library’s architecture should not be at all “decoratorish,” like that of Yamasaki and Philip Johnson, and Bunshaft clearly took the request to heart. At one point he said that President Johnson was “really a virile man, and he ought to have a vigorous, male building” (Hufbauer 2005, 83).

One can dismiss the attitudes of all of these men, and Heath in particular, as typifying the crude and prejudiced masculism of the day. But they illustrate in a blunt way the power of a criticism that was often stated more subtly (or played an unspoken role): that Yamasaki’s style was too feminine. The words that Heath and Brooks chose, “effeminate” and “decoratorish,” have the further connotation of a man affecting feminine qualities, that is, a homosexual, with allusions to the stereotype of the gay interior decorator, connotations that are equally present in the terms employed by Huxtable and others: “pretty,” “sweet,” “dainty,” and the like.

Such characterizations raise questions worth pondering, particularly given the rise of feminism and multicultural awareness that has occurred in the intervening decades. Yamasaki did not deliberately set out to create a feminine style of architecture, but if to be a feminine architecture means to be delicate, soft, graceful, light, gentle, peaceful, and fine, then certainly one must at least say that such qualities are abundant in his work.

We are dealing here with cultural stereotypes, of course, and I am making no claims as to what might or might not be rightly called “feminine” in artistic design. That is a question which, in architectural theory (as well as gender studies generally), is very far from resolution. But if the qualities that I have identified were perceived as feminine, this is all it would take for sexism to play a role in the assessment of the works. It is hard, after all, to think of any conversation in which the statement “You look pretty” would be meant as a criticism that does not carry some degree of sexism.

If we stipulate that Yamasaki’s style does possess feminine qualities, then we can elaborate on the sexism of its critique by speculating on what kinds of specific deficiencies are seen in those qualities. Why did the charge of femininity have such negative connotations? Clearly it must have to do with the assumption that “feminine” means “weak,” whereas architecture must be “strong.” The point in this case has nothing to do with strength in the literal, structural sense, for no one doubted that Yamasaki’s buildings were structurally sound. It has to do with the way the building communicates the feeling of strength, the way it symbolizes strength or fails to do so. Lyndon Johnson’s library had to look strong so as to be a monumental metaphor for his physical virility and his strength of will.

Could Yamasaki’s critics on this score accept any feminine qualities in architecture that would be positive qualities? Perhaps, as Heath said, if it were a monument to a woman, yes. But in architecture generally? Here we may observe the curious cultural fact that qualities considered feminine are much more acceptable, it would seem, on the inside of buildings than on the outside. The outside must be “strong” – that is, masculine – for it must face the outside world and protect the interior. Male designers, naturally, dominate the field. But interiors may be feminine; they form inner, protected spaces of civilized cooperation and domesticity. The field of interior decoration will welcome women and woman-identified gay men, and there is even a place for their work to be “dainty.” When Yamasaki is criticized for being “decoratorish” or, in Bunshaft’s words, an “exterior decorator,” he is being charged with putting on the outside what was supposed to be on the inside; he is symbolizing vulnerability – fragility – in a way that real men should not.

Is it feminine to think of strength, as Yamasaki did, in terms of security rather than aggressive might? He was “for thinness” because he thought the strength of a building should not be overpowering in itself but should be communicated to its users by making them feel safe and supported. He considered it arrogant and uncivilized for buildings to use their bulk to make one feel small and insignificant.

In any case, there remains the simply stated possibility that Yamasaki’s architecture is not better appreciated because it has been deemed overly feminine and because architecture must be overtly “strong” in a male sense. That the person who most effectively leveled this charge against Yamasaki – Ada Louise Huxtable – was a woman need not be seen as terribly ironic, for one certainly would have to identify with masculine values to rise to the level that she did in the deeply masculine worlds of architecture and journalism of her day.

A prominent architect who had worked on multiple projects with Yamasaki’s firm once remarked, “People said Yamasaki’s work was feminine, but what it really is, I think, is Japanese.” The observation is a telling one, and in rather complicated ways. It defends Yamasaki against a prejudice – the prejudice against feminine form in architecture – by connecting his work with another quality – Japanese style – against which there may likewise be prejudice, but also a long tradition of professional respect. The remark implicitly suggests that Americans who view Japanese forms without accompanying explanation are prone to see them as feminine – an implication which, if true, may say something interesting about some forms of anti-Japanese sentiment. The alternative, of course, to both kinds of prejudice, is to say emphatically what should be said, that whatever might be meant by “Japanese” or “feminine,” there is not one inch of any project, inside or out, where such qualities constitute flaws. To believe otherwise is, in most cases, a simple expression of masculism and cultural chauvinism. The Yamasaki case may be one that illustrates how deeply embedded such prejudices are in the history of architecture and its interpretation, and how difficult remains the task of altering them. But altering them is, let us insist, a moral imperative.

Whether or not we choose to highlight the prejudices in judgments of Yamasaki’s structural strategies, his story reveals that what is meant by “strength” can often be something perceptual and metaphorical rather than literal. One might think again of the railings and balustrades used so consistently in his designs. They tease the eye a bit; one does not suspect how firm they are before one grasps them. But once one appreciates how admirably they perform their function, there can seem to be something clumsy about railings that are made of hollow tubes of metal in order to look bigger and stronger without thereby adding anything of real strength. “Perfect economy,” one might say, is an acquired taste, and one that may require the overcoming of intuitive and habitual assumptions.

The design that Gordon Bunshaft produced for the Johnson Presidential Library is indeed strong and vigorous. Its central building, which houses the archives, is a massive, blockish, monumental structure – not something that Yamasaki would likely have produced. And yet, in certain respects, it has some uncanny resemblances to the Princeton building by Yamasaki that Lady Bird Johnson admired so much. Its top story hangs out over its outer walls; it is clad, both inside and out, in the travertine marble that was popular with both Bunshaft and Yamasaki; and the side walls, which create a columnar effect at the front and back of the building, taper and curve like the columns of Robertson Hall. Bunshaft scholar Carol Krinsky has associated the overhang effect with Le Corbusier’s highly influential monastery, La Tourette, rather than Yamasaki’s precedent, and the notable Japanese quality in the design of the library – its resemblance, from certain angles, to Japanese castle walls or ceremonial gates – Krinsky attributes to direct influences resulting from Bunshaft’s trip to Japan in 1960 (Krinsky 1988, 245). One cannot help but wonder, however, at the coincidence of an architect who was selected, in part, because he did not use sweeping forms and was not Japanese creating sweeping walls for this building and fashioning shapes that look curiously Japanese.

The question reconsidered

Stories such as that of the Johnson Library illustrate how the perception of Yamasaki

Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum

Photo: Jay Godwin

as a “decorator” could obscure the very question as to how he might be integrating style and structure. If one spontaneously interprets every stylish flourish – every archway or colonnade – as an “add-on,” then an overall judgment of superficiality is likely to operate as a foregone conclusion. A critic for whom the charge functions in this manner is likely to have little patience with the idea that Yamasaki was devoted from beginning to end with the problem as to how to express structure and how to recover the structural powers of traditional form in modern materials. Less likely still is such a critic to be open to the idea that in this effort to integrate style and structure Yamasaki was uniquely inventive. Yet if one recognizes Yamasaki’s self-understanding as an artist-engineer wrestling with the problem of structural expression, and if one immerses oneself in that problematic, one may be willing to entertain a rather striking possibility: that Yamasaki’s solutions were not only unique but so decidedly out of the mainstream of American architectural culture as to be hardly recognizable as solutions. If what Yamasaki was doing was indeed discovering non-Western and feminine ways to reimagine the meaning of “strength,” then two of the most powerful biases in American culture – in favor of the European and the masculine – could easily cause not only a lack of appreciation for what he achieved but also a blindness to his very project.

References

Campbell, Robert. 1993. “An Act of Architectural Hubris Meets Its End.” Boston Globe, August 13.

Gallagher, John. 2015. Yamasaki in Detroit: A Search for Serenity. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.

Gyure, Dale Allen. 2017. Minoru Yamasaki: Humanist Architecture for a Modernist World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Harries, Karsten. 1997. The Ethical Function of Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Heidegger, Martin. 2008. “Origin of the Work of Art” and “Letter on Humanism.” In Basic Writings, edited by D.F. Krell. New York: Harper Perennial.

Hornbeck, James S. 1965. “Bearing Wall Expressed in a Skyscraper.” Architectural Record 137, no. 2 (February): 125–8.

Hufbauer, Benjamin. 2005. Presidential Temples: How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas.

Huxtable, Ada Louise. 1962. “Pools, Domes, Yamasaki: Debate.” New York Times, November 25.

Huxtable, Ada Louise. 1966. “Who’s Afraid of Big Bad Buildings?” New York Times, May 29.

Krinsky, Carol Herselle. 1988. Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Loos, Adolf. 1998. Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays. Translated by Michael Mitchell. Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press.

Norberg-Schulz, Christian. 1979. Genius Loci: Toward a Phenomenology of Architecture. New York: Rizzoli.

Time. 1963. “The Road to Xanadu.” Time, January 18: 54–64.

Vesely, Dalibor. 2004. Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1957. Questionnaire Responses. Walter P. Reuther Library Minoru Yamasaki Papers, Wayne State University, Box 5, Folder 16.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1959. “Minoru Yamasaki Interview.” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institute. Sound recording and transcript.

Chapter 7
Populism and democratic culture

It is regularly observed that the spirit of modern architecture is infused with democratic ideals. “Democratic,” in this context, must describe more than a political system; it means a set of values and the character of the people that hold them. Plato called it the “democratic soul.” When Alexis de Tocqueville, a French aristocrat who visited the United States in 1831, wrote his epic study of the nation, Democracy in America, he was keenly focused on this same sense of an infusion of democratic assumptions into the “habits of the heart” – in American family relations, in their ways of evaluating the opinions of others, the types of associations they form, and their manner of cultivating the arts (De Tocqueville, 275, 439–43, 485–8, 558–63).

Modernism in architecture can be called democratic in an analogous sense, symbolically embodying democratic values while encouraging types of interactions and feelings that feed the democratic soul. The open plan, for example, even in its early use by Frank Lloyd Wright, has been called an expression of the freedom of democratic life – the way different activities can be distinguished and organized even as the formal but artificial barriers between them are broken down (Scully 1974, 20–2). The open plan in the home encourages a fluidity in family life; in the workplace it promotes a sense of equality and shared enterprise over that of separation and hierarchy. The abstraction of building facades, similarly, creates plasticity in the interpretation of a building’s function, for where the old decorative facades proclaimed the structure’s significance according to an established cultural narrative, the abstract exterior renders a building capable of suggesting any number of things by refusing to denote any of them specifically. The emphasis is upon open possibility, a value paramount in democratic culture.

The movement of modern architecture was, from its beginning, motivated by egalitarian and progressive values. The stripping down of design to simple forms that could be multiplied indefinitely and constructed out of modular elements created the possibility of providing great numbers of sanitary, light-filled homes and workplaces at affordable prices. The focus, in the emergence of the International Style, was often on the needs of workers, families, and the city as a whole rather than the needs of elite institutions and individuals. The progressivism found in this architectural mentality was certainly not confined to the work of democratic architects or democratic regimes and did not prevent modernists from designing for the fascists of Italy or the brutally authoritarian Soviets, yet it is fair to say that it found its least adulterated expression within the cultural context of democracies. Indeed, the rise of fascist regimes in Europe was a cause for the flight of some of the most prominent modernists to more democratic nations.

When De Tocqueville spoke of the cultivation of the arts in America, he saw a particularly telling sign of democratic values in the way Americans fashioned public monuments. Where in France the streets of major cities were filled with large monuments to historic events or persons, in the antebellum United States such monuments were usually modest affairs, reflecting a sense that a truly egalitarian society should not celebrate too generously the achievements of particular individuals or groups. True grandeur was reserved for those monuments that memorialized the ideals of the nation as a whole and the democratic way of life. In American arts generally, De Tocqueville surmised, a cultural love of equality engenders a preference for practical arts over the unique, extraordinary works of fine art that were the standard in aristocratic societies (De Tocqueville 2000, 439–44).

One hundred years separate Alexis De Tocqueville from Minoru Yamasaki, and vast changes had swept American society in the intervening period, yet in striking ways Yamasaki typifies the kinds of democratically influenced aesthetic tastes that De Tocqueville describes. The architect’s frank criticisms of European monumentalism have much to do with the politics and economics behind it, for not only was the intent of the great castles, cathedrals, courts, and statuary to overpower the people who encountered them, but the creation of such structures required labor that frequently, in one way or another, bordered on slavery (Yamasaki 1955, 148). That America was not immune from such practices, that it often manned its most ambitious projects and most dangerous industries with immigrant workers enduring inhuman working conditions, was something Yamasaki had gotten to know firsthand in his labors in Alaska. If a democratic nation condones such things within its borders, he believed, it is only by falling short of its ideals, for a democracy should seek to elevate all of its citizens; it should function as a civilizing agent that promotes cooperation over force, opportunity over exploitation.

All of these aspirations, of course, reside in the realm of ideals. Yamasaki was focused on what democracy should mean and how it should function, seeking to embody architecturally its highest aspirations. In his early career this meant combining design with social advocacy, but as he eventually came to see himself as a specialist in the aesthetic enhancement of life, he communicated his values through an appeal to public sensibilities and the symbolization of freedom, dignity, equality, toleration, opportunity, and cosmopolitanism. The results can be illustrated in three notable areas: in government commissions, which in most cases required representing American values abroad; in academic projects, where the role of education in undergirding democratic values is facilitated and symbolized; and in commercial structures, where the architect expressed his conviction that commerce can and should serve democratic society, a conviction that produced an emphasis on the public face of private edifices.

Symbolizing the state

As Yamasaki’s primary commissions for the U.S. government were projects done in foreign countries, he was consistently placed in the position seen in the Kobe and Dhahran projects, of engaging in a cross-cultural communication and acting as kind of architectural diplomat. This role is further illustrated in his commission for the 1959 World Agricultural Exposition in New Delhi, India. Given that the United States had entered this fair late, and only upon hearing that the Soviet Union would be exhibiting there, the architect assumed that he was expected to somehow outdo the Russians and to somehow achieve this feat under the pressure of an extremely tight deadline. Knowing that the Soviet modus operandi in such situations was to produce a pompous and culturally chauvinistic display of the genius of the Communist five-year plan, Yamasaki chose the opposite tack, following the same strategy as the embassy program – of adapting to the cultural context of the project – doing so with a vivid show of surprise and delight, that is, the kinds of qualities he had encountered in Indian structures such as the Taj Mahal.

To this end a design was produced that led visitors through a series of structures blending recollections of American and Indian agricultural events. Fairgoers moved into the site up a ramp that led to platforms perched over pools of water dotted with fountains and topped with a set of gold-colored pointed domes with clear references to Indian architecture. From there they moved into an indoor exhibition space, then an outdoor area with a large barn, American-style county fair booths, and a play area for children before exiting under another series of pools and domes. The project was completed under great pressure and challenging conditions, given that all of the concrete had to be poured on site and that every board sawed and hole drilled had to be done by workers with simple hand tools. But the result was exactly the kind of success that Yamasaki had hoped for, creating

U.S. Pavilion at the World Agricultural Fair, New Delhi

Photo: Balthazar Korab

a welcoming and enchanting structure that overwhelmed Soviet ostentation with gestures of friendship (Yamasaki 1979, 59–63; Architectural Record 1960).

Another example might have been Yamasaki’s design for the U.S. Embassy in London, made for a competition in 1956, had the firm not lost the competition to Eero Saarinen. Yamasaki had the idea of creating a strongly geometrical façade to match the neo-Georgian architecture of the surrounding buildings in Grosvenor Square, but to do so with a lightness and luminosity analogous to St. Chapelle’s effect amid Paris’s heavy stone environment. It was to be, he said, like a “cathedral in the square.” In perhaps his earliest nod to the Doges Palace, two long, parallel structures with narrow windows and strong vertical lines were held aloft by delicate columns topped with finials to form a tiara: “we wanted to combine the strength and English quality of Westminster Palace with the elegant laciness of the Doges” (Architectural Record 1956, 226, 1957, 176–7; Gyure 2017, 69–71). Saarinen’s winning design was also successful in combining the historical and the modern, the styling of its elaborate system of window frames capturing well the geometry and massing of its neo-Georgian neighbors. Its modernism was, of course, controversial, given the very traditional look of Grosvenor Square, but one might have expected the controversy to subside had not a 35 foot-wide gilded eagle been added to the front elevation, a gesture that many saw as symbolizing domination more than diplomacy (Loeffler 2011, 197–205).

Imagining the academy

Some of the ancient world’s strongest criticisms of the democratic system of governance had to do with the fact that most people, being illiterate and untutored in the workings of the state, were essentially incompetent to govern and were, for the same reason, easily swayed by the rhetoric of demagogues. The modern forms of democracy that took shape during the Enlightenment envisioned a new kind of citizenry that would be transformed by widespread and compulsory education. American democracy has always rested on this pillar, this notion of rigorous education as utterly essential to the success of its democratic institutions, and in Yamasaki’s day, with the advent of the G.I. Bill, there was a growing ambition to educate an unprecedented number of citizens to the level of the bachelor’s degree. The most progressive of educators infused their pedagogy with a sense of its democratic function, empowering and liberating the individual to achieve his or her full measure of dignity and autonomy. In this spirit, Yamasaki tried to serve the cause of education but equally to create designs that would express a specifically democratic vision of education.

University Liggett School, Grosse Pointe Woods

This goal is found already in the early K-through-12 school commissions, which, though typically long, low, and plain, with a limited palette of inexpensive materials demanded by tight budgets, nevertheless follow design strategies with the learning experience of the students in view. A representative example is the addition done to the Grosse Point University School (now the University Liggett School) in 1954. To protect the prominence of the school’s existing 1928 two-story brick building, Yamasaki kept the added classrooms, library, and auditorium to a single story. For this purpose he even put the floor of the gymnasium below ground level. Classrooms and hallways are organized, in Japanese fashion, around courtyards, which today are planted and decorated with different themes, so that one feels opened out on natural greenery as daylight streams in from multiple angles. The original mechanicals were carefully tucked away rather than placed on the roof. As with all of Yamasaki’s best buildings, one has a clear sense, in this design, of the importance of the feelings of those who would use the space, the dialectic of concentration and relaxation, of study space and recreational space that reflects a student-centered approach to education (Yamasaki 1955, 149).

Goodhue Hall, Carleton College

With the commission of the McGregor Memorial Conference Center, his educational arena now became the university campus, with the success of projects fueling ever more commissions. As he developed Wayne State buildings he was also designing the neighboring Detroit Society for Arts and Crafts building. Soon he was producing several buildings for Carleton College (where his daughter, Carol, was to become a student), as well as the master plan and buildings for the University of Regina, for Oberlin College, Princeton University, Harvard University, Butler University, and others.

King Building, Oberlin College and Conservatory

In the university context, pursuing student-centered designs involved taking advantage of the Arcadian vision of the college campus as a retreat from surrounding life, easily reinforced in sites that were rich with natural amenities. Amid the rolling green stretches of the Carleton College campus, for example, he proposed locating a residence hall across one of the small lakes on the site so as to include, in the aesthetic of the project, a kind of nature walk to a domestic retreat. Though there was controversy in seeming to split apart the campus community and to hide students from watchful oversight, the results do indeed heighten the feel of the natural setting (Jarchow 1959). At Oberlin, the whiteness of the building facades is meant to form striking figures when seen through the many trees of the campus, while courtyards and covered walkways create the feel of a tranquil retreat.

In the designs for academic institutions one frequently finds historical allusions that help establish connections with older campus buildings and venerable academic traditions. The Romanesque façade of Carleton’s Olin Hall of Science, the arches of the Irwin Library at Butler University, or the stylized Gothic of Oberlin’s King Building and several of the Wayne State structures provide prime examples. But in some cases the architect’s tactic is to create less historically specific but equally interesting shapes that give a unique visual identity to an institution. This is true of the Oberlin Conservatory, where repeated shapes in the windows of the main classroom building are elongated hexagons that together create a kind of a honeycomb effect. Variations on this pattern define the entry ways, and in a separate auditorium building the pattern shifts to one with wider concrete panels and thin paired columns with diamond-shaped capitals. Inside the auditorium the lines become curvilinear, with pointed tops of arches cutting into the ceiling and introducing natural light as the lines flex and cross one another. As this complex of structures is dedicated to music, one naturally makes musical associations. The rows of windows set up a steady rhythm, diamond shapes recall old ways of writing notes on the staff, and in the lines of the auditorium visual melodies blend and soar.

Everywhere in Yamasaki’s campus buildings one can see him softening the feel, thinning the supporting structures, and lightening the color palate to create an inviting, comfortable setting rather than a domineering one, giving the feelings and perspectives of students a priority over the muscle flexing of the institution. For the Irwin Library, for example, the architect had something of a hard pitch to make in wanting to set a light and intricate white building in the middle of a campus composed predominantly of heavy dark stone, a pitch made successfully, in the end, by having the clients imagine the spectacle

Oberlin Conservatory of Music

of a Mississippi river boat, especially when gloriously lit up at night (Butler Alumnus 1965, 3). But he wanted the building to be on a scale to which students could relate, with a lively pattern of light arches enclosing a space of unimposing calm. At one point in the design process, he moved an ornamental fountain that was to be located in front of the building into the central atrium. The sound of the water completes the interior’s dynamic of concentrated study relieved by the atrium’s tranquility, to which one is drawn by the trickling sound heard throughout the building.

Oberlin Conservatory of Music

In the symbolization of democratic ideals Princeton’s Robertson Hall enjoys a place of special importance. It would be, he said, “a building that would stimulate students of government to higher aspirations” (Maynard 2012, 187). The importance to Yamasaki of the building’s symbolic status is evidenced by the fact that its prominent location was secured by lifting up an entire three-story, 7 million pound building (now named Corwin Hall) with hydraulic jacks and moving it 100 feet (Maynard 2012, 170).

For all its Parthenon-inspired stateliness, however, there is something personable about Robertson’s graceful styling. The effect of the columns is imposing enough to seem monumental, yet their tapered shape makes them a comfortable backrest for students working on their laptops in view of the pool and fountain of Scudder Plaza.

Irwin Library, Butler University

Robertson Hall, Princeton

Yamasaki’s vision of an inviting, student-centered campus architecture was powerfully felt in another way on the campus of his alma mater, the University of Washington, due to his presence as a founding member of the university’s Architectural Commission, formed in 1958. Flying in for the regular meetings over a period of eight years, Yamasaki, as a native son with a growing national reputation, proved a strong voice, along with that of another influential “soft modernist,” William Wurster of the University of California at Berkeley. In his comments recorded in transcripts and minutes of the meetings, Yamasaki encourages architects to transcend merely practical considerations in order to seek something spiritual, prompting them to design buildings that will be pleasing in their refinement and choice of materials. In the commission’s discussions, rarely is any member exactly trying to tell architects how their buildings should look, focusing on the process of design more than the products (with Yamasaki, more than once, making the case for the use of exact scale models). The goal was to encourage a variety of building types within a coherent overall vision for the campus. Yet on the subject of brutalism Yamasaki could be brutal. He opposed architects who would build, he said, “with an iron fist.” This was his assessment of Stephen Richardson, an architect (and founder of The Richardson Associates, or TRA, in Seattle) who had built two International Style residence halls on campus prior to the formation of the commission. When Richardson and associate Phillip Jacobson (later a member of the university’s faculty) brought the design for a three-building women’s dormitory before the commission in its early days of meeting, Yamasaki was highly prejudiced against them. Richardson had worked to create an alternative impression, proposing a design for what became McCarty Hall that was “light and airy.” Its overall style and finishes (in drawings more than in the completed building) clearly show elements of New Formalism. But this did not prevent the commission from choosing, when it came time to construct the third building in the complex, to go with a different architect (University of Washington 1959–60).

There were few storms as tempestuous as this one in the working of the commission, but in the case of the design of an addition to the university’s Suzzallo Library, a massive neo-Gothic structure in warm tones of brick and terra cotta, Yamasaki felt so strongly the need for an intervention that he had designers from the project’s firm, Bindon and Wright, visit his Detroit office for consultation. The result resembles, in some ways, a Yamasaki design. Gothic arches frame a first-floor arcade, supporting a glass box with strong vertical lines in aggregate concrete and ending in a roofline tiara that picks up a pattern of ornament in the windows of the old building. Yet the final result falls short of some of the commission’s suggestions, particularly that of a warmer color. The repetition of Gothic shapes in the addition have never been considered very successful, perhaps because they simplify and exaggerate details from the original in a manner that seems almost to caricature them. Indeed, many of the buildings of the university’s New Formalist era have been considered less than stellar successes, and a number of them, as they pass their 50-year mark, are being replaced. Yamasaki’s legacy, in this case, is both little known and quickly vanishing.

Suzzallo Library Addition, University of Washington, by Bindon and Wright

Serving the market

Yamasaki considered the ideals of the democratic state and those of the private sector economy to be, for the most part, mutually reinforcing. Swept up in the postwar conception of world trade as the fundamental alternative to world war, he believed that technology and private industry provided the means of bringing the civilizing forces of modernism to public life. Capitalism, in his mind, had proven itself in America by contributing to the emergence of a strong middle class. The nation was plagued, to be sure, by classism and racism, and he had been beaten down repeatedly by those scourges, but American values and institutions had also provided the means for him to fight successfully against bigotry and elitism. As a creative person, Yamasaki tended to appeal to the creative side of corporate leaders and could be very persuasive when using ambitious social ideals to justify the design of a particular corporate structure.

As a result of conceiving the role of business and industry in this way, Yamasaki often aspired to produce private buildings that would make a public statement. They would announce what the company was about, both as a producer in the market and as a contributor to a standard of living. Hence the innovative use of decorative concrete in the design of the offices for the American Concrete Institute, the use of an elaborate aluminum screen to form the exterior of the Reynolds Metals Company headquarters, and the burning of gas torches in the middle of the pools outside of the Michigan Consolidated Gas building – features that do not simply say, “here is what we sell to our clients,” but “here is how we contribute to a vision of modern living.”

Yamasaki’s love of skyscrapers grew, in part, out of this same attitude, for the skyscraper establishes a commanding presence for a company – one which, if it is to function in a positive way, must offer an appealing public space and an aesthetic contribution to the skyline. The Consolidated Gas building, for example, was intended to be something quite different from the art-deco wonders of its celebrated neighbor, the Guardian Building, but like the latter it aimed at making an architectural statement. The simplicity of its overall form qualifies it as modernist and minimalist, yet the thin columns and light tones of its exterior add a classical quality, while the vertical thrust of its lines and narrow hexagonal windows make it soar like a cathedral, ending in a simple lantern at the top. The architect patiently but stubbornly resisted the company’s desire to top the building with an electric sign proclaiming its logo – even jokingly offering to wear the sign himself instead. The building’s public statement, he believed, should be architectural rather than overtly commercial, its artistic appeal taking precedence over its value as potential advertising space. In a similar vein he argued that the ground floor of the building should be open to the public, as a kind of civic amenity (Yamasaki 1979, 53–4).

Michigan Consolidated Gas/One Woodward

This sense of the importance of the interface between the private and the public is evident in many other commercial projects. Lobbies and plazas are imagined as places of activity and respite from the hectic streets of urban commercial cores. Public art is frequently incorporated and, in ways that are occasionally novel for the day, restaurants and shops are included in street-level spaces. On the very restricted site of Seattle’s IBM building, for example, Yamasaki was able to tuck a lower level plaza into the scheme, with a fountain by James Fitzgerald and space for a restaurant that has been successful in this location since it opened (Yamasaki 1979, 104). For One M&T Plaza, a bank building in Buffalo, New York (1966), he proposed a plaza 75 feet by 225 feet, with low walls for seating, a fountain by another sculptor recruited repeatedly for Yamasaki projects, the Cranbrook-educated Harry Bertoia, and heating coils under the stone pavement to facilitate year-round use. The function of the plaza as civic space – especially the daily lunchtime concerts that have been running during summers for more than 45 years – is a point of pride for the bank’s directors (Carter 2011, 5, 34).

If there are egalitarian sensibilities on display in this sensitivity to the public experience of private buildings, so can those sensibilities be seen in the way the architect imagined commercial buildings from the point of view of workers. The appeal of the details in the office spaces communicate this concern, but Yamasaki held similar concerns for the conditions of factory work. In 1952 he spoke of visiting the Detroit Tank Arsenal, the gargantuan building by Albert Kahn that put 27 acres under one roof. While impressed by the building itself, he was appalled by the “bedlam” resulting from making workers perform all of their tasks in the same spaces:

Gasoline lift trucks roaring back and forth, the odors, the machinery pounding, the utter confusion added up to one of the most unpleasant places I have ever been. I could not help but think of how much more pleasant was the little individual machine shop in the country town, and how much better this building would have been if it had been built as a series of machine shops with garden courts between.

(1952, 6)

Whether or not military tank production could be efficiently organized in this fashion, the observation displays Yamasaki’s immediate identification with workers and his conviction that in a democracy every form of work should bring with it experiences of dignity, collaboration, and enjoyment.

Populism and manufactured culture

Yamasaki’s project of enriching the modernist palette included a place for a degree of ornamentation that would echo aesthetic effects that had been achieved in pre-modern times through handcrafts. He did not regard ornamentation as decadent or “criminal” if it served appropriate structural and symbolic goals and if it could be integrated with the aesthetic of the overall conception. In this respect one can see him aligning with the Bauhaus tradition of “total design,” where furniture and fixtures are reimagined along with architectural forms and harmonize with them. The modern public need not be deprived of the enjoyment it had derived from the ornamentation of historic buildings, thought Yamasaki, if it were part of this modernist vision of total design. What had been done in the past with handcrafts would now need to be achieved through manufactured features, a necessity that Yamasaki took as a tremendous opportunity. A new world of custom design would be opened, he believed, through manufacturing processes that could manipulate metal and concrete into any shape one fancied at an affordable cost (Yamasaki 1955 142, 1979, 31; Peter 1994, 78).

In one sense the Bauhaus vision of total design and manufactured art has been wildly successful in American culture. People largely do take pride in the beauty of the manufactured goods that fill their homes. And yet the project has not been successful in fundamentally rearranging the hierarchies of beauty in the popular mind. “Handmade” and “customized” continue to be sought for their premium status, while “pre-fab” and “mass produced” maintain a second-tier status, carrying a kind of social and aesthetic stigma even among the middle classes that constitute their chief market. When machines become involved and multiple identical items are produced the results lack, by definition, the idiosyncrasy that makes a thing rare or unique, and no matter how far designers go in the exact reproduction of handmade items, these items remain “reproductions” in a sense virtually synonymous with reduced value.

Such attitudes complicated the reception of Yamasaki’s efforts at making manufactured equivalents of the handcrafted beauties of architecture’s past. It would seem that as long as pre-fabricated building elements displayed little beyond their engineering – as was true in the International Style – a building could be received by architecture critics as serious and sophisticated, but once these building elements began to adopt the figures of handcrafted buildings, they risked being treated as if they were popular fancies purchased on the retail market, as when Robertson Hall was called “God’s Bicycle Rack” or Ada Louise Huxtable pronounced the Rainier Tower a “popsicle” of the sort that Claes Oldenburg might create (Maynard 2012, 188; Huxtable 1974).

Such associations are made to support the thesis that Yamasaki’s use of manufactured arts sullies his designs with the superficiality and derivative status of items commercially produced for popular tastes. The argument was made with equal vigor against another New Formalist, Edward Durrell Stone, with his Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., likened to a “glorified candy box” and the columns of his Gallery of Modern Art, in New York’s Columbus Circle, with their ovals inset with rose granite, variously labeled “tennis rackets,” “lollipops,” and “boudoir hand mirrors” (Hunting 2013, 110–17). So plebian was such imagery regarded that Stone was labeled a “populist” architect whose worst excesses bordered on kitsch; so inappropriate was its ornamentation considered that the Gallery of Modern Art was eventually reskinned with a new, mutely modern exterior, the “lollipops” visible, now, only on the inside.

Edward Durrell Stone’s Gallery of Modern Art, now the Museum of Arts and Design, redesign by Brad Cloepfil

Part of what makes charges of populism so damaging is that they play into an age-old distinction between “fine” or “high” art, on the one hand, and popular arts and crafts on the other. High art results from uniquely exceptional talent, imagination, skill, and innovation coming together in ways that may never have been achieved before and may never again. It may realize conventions to a degree never before thought possible, or it may challenge conventions in ways that create whole new styles of art. The uniqueness of such works communicates a historical moment, yet in their ability to epitomize that moment, the works are granted a quality of timeless permanence. In fine art, one might say, history comes to be crystallized in a singularly exceptional expression. Popular art, by contrast, plays to existing tastes, satisfies typical expectations, enhances common fantasies, and has no qualms about being reproduced identically and indefinitely. Such distinctions between the “fine” and the “popular” make perfect sense in societies where tastes conform to socially stratified lifestyles: patrons with the means and the training could cultivate appreciation for rare excellences and could afford them; common people could not.

Criticisms of Yamasaki and others on this score can seem oddly ironic in the period of the 1950s and ’60s when the distinction between “high” and “low” art was subjected to unprecedented challenges that rejected many of the values that have traditionally made fine art “fine.” The bonds of taste that had formed an implicit gulf between the elite and the demos now encountered resistance, both to the traditional foundations of that elitism and to the very idea of popularity, by a newly autonomous creative class. Once Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain and Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes moved to the center of debates over the meaning of art, it might have seemed that the whole fine-art/pop-art distinction was doomed; and yet while many values in the art world have indeed undergone revision, there persisted, as if by an immutable iron law, the widespread assumption that, in most cases, if the art is popular it must be somehow deficient – though now it was less because the public lacked refinement than because its tastes were outdated or in various arbitrary ways naïve.

Yamasaki, it is fair to say, had no taste for aesthetic elitism or obscurantism, and there was little irony in his aesthetics; he wanted modern art, without sacrificing any of its modernism, to have the same status of the arts of old – to be challenging and excellent – and yet also to be widely enjoyed. After all, the fine arts of the past were, and continue to be, extraordinarily popular without loss of their status as fine arts. The Parthenon, the edifices and murals of Michelangelo, the fountains of Bernini – all of the stunning creations that Yamasaki had visited – have long been and continue to be objects of intense public admiration and pride. Why could modern arts not aspire to the same status? While never setting out to be “populist,” he was uninclined to demand that public taste conform to the acquired tastes of the avant-garde. Such demands seemed to him more elitist than democratic.

Serious play

Of related controversy is the matter of playfulness in architecture. On the one hand, architecture aims to be more permanent and fundamental in its meaning than other arts, to be free of the fashions that would date it over time, to speak in a language of historical constants or in timeless terms. Such intentions fuel some of the animus behind charges against any architecture that is not “serious,” against triviality, fashionableness, and populism. Playfulness leads down such paths and is to be shunned out of fear of that most dreaded of all condemnations, the judgment that one’s architecture is “silly.”

On the other hand, by its nature, architecture is, like every art, a form of play. A mind that cannot play, that cannot freely and playfully explore, does not create art. For centuries aestheticians have highlighted this quality of artistic play as essential to the nature of art: in play comes the liberation that transforms pigments, metals, and sounds into paintings, sculptures, and music. By the act of playing words transcend their common usage to become poetry; through play characters and stories are woven into the play of players on the theatrical stage. Through play artistic insights blossom and experimentation unfolds, opening participants and spectators out onto worlds of experience and meaning that they had not thought imaginable (Gadamer 1990, 101–21). In this role, play carries a significance that goes beyond merely aesthetic value, underlining the broader importance of art to culture generally, for even in the search for truth through the exploratory work of philosophers is to be found, as Plato saw it, a kind of serious play (Plato, Laws 803b-c; Voegelin 2000, 259).

Yamasaki had a clear belief that architecture is serious business that must follow the moral imperative to be steadfastly true to its foundational principles. But if architecture is the fruit of the play of the imagination, play that can fruitfully occur in the freedom of child’s play or can unfold in the world of dreams, as it regularly did for Yamasaki, then why should such play, even lighthearted play, not be celebrated in serious architecture, just as comedy forms a part of serious literature?

Yet the charge that his architecture was too playful, that it was not serious enough, was a criticism that clearly bothered Yamasaki and was leveled by powerful voices, such as Huxtable’s in 1962, when she wondered whether there was not too much “delight” in his style (Huxtable 1962). Such a charge assumes an inherent opposition between delight and seriousness, charm and depth. In its play of forms, both new and old, Yamasaki’s architecture would seem to have gotten altogether too playful to garner a fully respectable reputation.

The architecture is indeed playful. There is the play of water as it shoots into the air, cascades into pools, ripples in the wind, and shimmers in sunlight. There is the play of light as it filters through screens, casts shadows from columns and mullions, and sparkles on surfaces of marble and quartz. There is the play of curvilinear form, the sweeping lines that stream from the artist’s brush, sculptural form set in dialogue with the possibilities of structure. There is the play of spatial volumes, of narrow passageways and grand halls, the play of rooflines and pinnacles against the sky. To a great extent, the notion of “delight” in Yamasaki comes down to an invitation to join in myriad forms of play.

There is a lighthearted humility in this gesture of invitation – a matter of not taking oneself too seriously, granting people pleasure rather than demanding their reverent obeisance. Yamasaki could be fussy about the seriousness of the process of design, yet at other times could poke fun at that very seriousness. Anecdotes are told of Yamasaki injecting humor into the presentation of designs, as when, displaying the model of the Wayne State University Education Building – which, with its tiered stories and ruffled exterior, resembled a wedding cake – he placed a figurine of a bride and groom on the top (Heyer 1966, 189–90). Such anecdotes are retold, at times, as illustrations of the architect’s lack of seriousness. But more fairly, they can be seen as moments where a quite serious artist with an impish sense of play would use humor to diffuse the kind of gravity that can inhibit appreciation of the play of art.

One cannot deny that the impishness comes through in certain characteristic ways in Yamasaki’s work. For example, there is a play upon what could be called the “architectural” qualities of his name’s initials – the “M,” with its feet solidly on the ground and a symmetrically balanced v-structure between the uprights, the “Y” that begins as a column and soars with exuberance as it rises. One can discover the shapes of these letters in Yamasaki’s buildings – in bannisters and balustrades, in columns and archways, and in fixtures of various sorts. Finding them can become a kind of game. Does a game such as this take away from the seriousness of the work, or should it be seen as a sign of joyfulness in the play of creation? Is architecture diminished when there is something fun about it, or is it better when it is intractably poker-faced? This is part of the question of the balance of seriousness and play.

Yamasaki’s unhesitant claims that features in his work are meant to be “fun” contribute to the unfortunate reputation that he continues to have of being overly populist and trivial. Such charges make assumptions about seriousness and play in art that are remarkably particular to their time and circumstances but remain a persistent feature in estimations of Yamasaki’s value; yet one may wonder if the questions behind those assumptions are being asked with the full scope that they deserve, or whether they ever were.

References

Architectural Record. 1956. “Competition for U.S. Chancery Building, London.” Architectural Record 119, no. 4 (April): 221–32.

Architectural Record. 1957. “Minoru Yamasaki.” Architectural Record 121, no. 5 (May): 167–82.

Architectural Record. 1960. “Golden Architecture Steals Show.” Architectural Record 127, no. 5 (May): 175–8.

Butler Alumnus. 1965. The Butler Alumnus 7, no. 4 (Summer).

Carter, Brian, editor. 2011. Minoru Yamasaki: M&T Bank. Buffalo: School of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Buffalo, State University of New York.

De Tocqueville, Alexis. 2000. Democracy in America. Translated by H.C. Mansfield and D. Winthrop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1990. Truth and Method. Second edition. Translation revised by J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall. New York: Continuum.

Gyure, Dale Allen. 2017. Minoru Yamasaki: Humanist Architecture for a Modernist World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Heyer, Paul. 1966. Architects on Architecture. New York: Walker and Co.

Hunting, Mary Anne. 2013. Edward Durrell Stone: Modernism’s Populist Architect. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Huxtable, Ada Louise. 1962. “Pools, Domes, Yamasaki: Debate.” New York Times, November 25.

Huxtable, Ada Louise. 1974. “Surviving Downtown ‘Progress’.” New York Times, October 20.

Jarchow, Merrill E. 1959. Memorandum to Bruce Pollock, October 23, 1959. Carleton College Archives, folder 500.3a: Yamasaki Reports.

Loeffler, Jane C. 2011. The Architecture of Diplomacy: Building America’s Embassies. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Maynard, W. Barksdale. 2012. Princeton: America’s Campus. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Peter, John. 1994. The Oral History of Modern Architecture. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

Scully, Vincent. 1974. Modern Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy. Revised edition. New York: George Braziller.

University of Washington. 1959–60. University of Washington Architectural Commission Minutes and Reports. University of Washington Archives, Accession 91-018, Box 1, Folders February 1958–April 1959, June 1959–February 1960.

Voegelin, Eric. 2000. Plato. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1952. Random Beliefs. Typescript. Walter P. Reuther Library Minoru Yamasaki Papers, Wayne State University, Box 26, Folder 8.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1955. “Toward an Architecture for Enjoyment.” Architectural Record 118, no. 2 (August): 142–9.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1979. A Life in Architecture. New York: Weatherhill.

Chapter 8
Greatness and vulnerability

St. Louis sequel

In 1956 a facility was opened by the United States National Archives and Records Service (N.A.R.S.) in the St. Louis suburb of Overland to house the service records of former U.S. military personnel. Designed by the architectural firm of Helmuth, Yamasaki, and Leinweber, the six-story 728 foot by 282 foot glass curtainwall building ranked, at the time, among the 20 largest buildings in the world in square footage, second only to the Pentagon in size among U.S. government buildings. Its 12.5 million dollar cost would equal over 100 million in today’s dollars. The establishment of this new facility reflected a growing conviction on the part of the N.A.R.S. that a single administrative agency should house and manage the records of former federal employees. The St. Louis Military Personnel Records facility was to specialize in a single kind of record, the record of military service, which, because it provides crucial information for veteran’s and Social Security benefits, loan applications, job placement, and burial rights, is the most frequently requested document from national records facilities, with daily requests today numbering around 5,000. Requests are time sensitive, requiring heavy staffing to service, and by 1973, with 52 million records within its walls, the St. Louis center employed some 2,000 staff.

When Yamasaki’s firm first received the commission for the records center in 1951, its team spent considerable time consulting with directors of existing federal personnel archives to determine standards for the St. Louis building. A point of contention was the question as to whether to include a sprinkler system

Military Personnel Records Center

for fire prevention. Yamasaki advocated for the model of the Navy records center in Garden City, New York, which was equipped with such a system, but the administrators of a Department of Defense center in Alexandria sternly opposed the use of sprinklers, claiming that a records facility had more to fear from water than from fire. It was their view that prevailed in the St. Louis case, which was completed without the installation of a sprinkler system (Stender and Walker 1974, 523; Yamasaki 1979, 23).

At a few minutes after midnight on July 12, 1973, as if in strict accordance with Murphy’s Law, a fire broke out on the sixth floor of the building. Without sprinklers, and with a lack of walls separating interior spaces (left open to facilitate movement among the millions of records), the fire quickly spread throughout the floor. Fire crews, at first, were able to enter the building and fight the flames from within, but heat and smoke soon made this impossible, so that they were reduced to pouring water on the building from outside, which they did for two days before bringing the conflagration under control. Surveying the aftermath, crews found that millions of records had been reduced to piles of ashes, but many more were partially damaged or damaged by water rather than fire. As it turned out, the administrators had more to fear from fire than from water, for the water-damaged records at least still existed. Crews began hauling these records out in milk cartons to dry under the canvases of a “tent city” that had sprung up in the parking lot. In a race to stay ahead of the growth of mold, an ingenious idea was hatched to take soaked records to the nearby plant of the McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Corporation, where vacuum chambers designed to simulate the conditions of outer space for the Apollo space program were engaged to suck millions of gallons of water out of the soggy documents (Stender and Walker 1974; O’Neill and Seibert 2013). The sixth floor of the Military Personnel Records Center was eventually demolished and a new roof put over the fifth floor. In this reduced state, with the improvised roof prone to leaking, the facility continued to function on the site until 2011, when a new building was dedicated eight miles to the northeast of the original location (O’Neil 2012).

In the 1973 fire some 16 to 18 million records were simply lost, but many more became part of the carefully maintained “B-files” (“B” for “burned”), records from which are currently requested on the order of 200–300 per day. The Records Reconstruction Branch of the National Personnel Records Center now employees a staff of 23 people who, under the direction of Marta O’Neill, employ a wide range of techniques – from low-tech pasting of papers to high-tech spectral and digital imaging – to make information on burned, dirtied, and sodden documents readable. This is a project too gargantuan to be attempted for all of the B-files. Even the limited ambition of recovering materials in response to requests, an effort that has treated as many as 20,000 documents to date, is one that will occupy the entire careers of those who continue to work in the branch and can be expected to continue for generations to come (Baugher 2012). The fire of July 1973 remains an all-consuming reality in the professional lives of these individuals.

The case of the Military Personnel Records fire tells a tale of the pervasive and long-lasting effects that a single programmatic decision in a building project can have. The decision to forgo sprinklers is the obvious decision to implicate in this regard, but there is another, perhaps less obvious decision at work: the decision to locate all of the federal military records in one place. By such a decision one certainly achieves benefits of simplification and convenience, but the concentration of resources makes a single disaster more devastating to those resources. One can imagine that a fire on the first floor of the building, with flames that could not be reached by water hosed onto the roof, might have wiped out the bulk of the military records that the government possessed, requiring a whole new means of identifying the beneficiaries of benefits to be invented. To ponder such possibilities is not necessarily to condemn the decision to locate the resources under one roof but is to raise a point of logic that governs all major building projects: that with great scale comes a unique type of vulnerability. While we are tempted to associate greatness of size with grandeur and invincibility, the logic suggests that large-scale projects possess their own distinctive brand of fragility.

The calamity wager

Every architectural project, not merely the large ones, presents its developers, regulators, architects, and contractors with dilemmas requiring the weighing of safety against feasibility, functionality, and/or aesthetic value. To what degree does one prepare for disasters, and for what kind? The easy answer is “build to code,” but what if the codes are unclear on a particular matter? What if the codes are not as stringent as they should be? In his 1979 autobiographical statement, Yamasaki says that he learned from the Military Personnel Records Center fire that one must exercise a degree of caution in the design of safety features that may go beyond the intentions of the client and may even put one in conflict with them. When working in foreign countries, his firm often held to stricter requirements for structures, materials, and fire safety than the codes of those countries required (Yamasaki 1979, 23).

And yet there remains an inevitable trade-off, with features introduced for the sake of design potentially introducing risks that one might not have foreseen or might simply have accepted in the face of the impossibility of planning for every eventuality. Yamasaki’s design for the First United Methodist Church of Warren, Michigan, put classrooms, social space, and the building’s mechanicals below grade so as to keep the bulk of the building to one story and allow the sanctuary roof to rise above it. Some 200 years ago, the Red Run section of the Clinton River became a drain that runs about 125 feet from the church. On August 11, 2014, an epic storm caused the drain to flood, dumping eight feet of water into the basement. Though the first floor was spared, the mechanical structures in the basement and equipment from the heavily used activity rooms, including computers, were ruined by water damage. Should the design of the building have taken flooding potential into account? The Federal Emergency Management Agency had records of flooding in the area, but not at the time the church was built.

A similar fate befell the University Liggett School. The gymnasium of the school – again, in order to keep the roofline low – was sunken below grade. One winter a burst pipe began filling the school with water. As water will do, it sought the lowest point, which happened to be the gymnasium floor, the finished boards of which were warped by the water to the point of requiring complete replacement. Was it unwise to put a gymnasium floor so low? Should design take second place to the anticipation of such eventualities?

First United Methodist Church of Warren

These are questions pertaining to what might be called the “calamity wager” that every architectural team must make. If every potential mishap were taken into account, there is not a project in the world that could pencil out, but if an architect or engineer does not take into account the Achilles’ heel that ends up undoing the building or claiming victims, the loss of the wager may haunt that professional for the rest of his or her life. For Yamasaki, the Military Personnel Records story bore the lesson of the need to resist the naiveté of clients in the area of safety. He never forgot that in some ways the wager was lost in this case.

Red Run drain, Warren

Scale and concentration

One of the most oft-quoted statements in the world of urban planning is by the great City-Beautiful champion, Daniel Burnham, who, in 1891, advised, “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized” (Moore 1921, 147).

A plan, in Burnham’s view, should not only serve a present need but should create a vision for the future; it should stretch the public’s imagination toward loftier ambitions than those they currently possess. Yamasaki’s St. Louis projects were not City-Beautiful visions in the nineteenth-century mold, yet they bore characteristics of this kind of great-plan thinking. The cavernous chambers of the Military Personnel Records building embodied the ideal of fully rationalized bureaucratic management on a scale that would equal the demands of a whole nation’s populace; Pruitt-Igoe sought a scope that was equal to the massive scale of America’s housing problem. Yet in these projects the corner-cutting that might have been innocuous in smaller ventures produced dysfunction on a disastrous scale. The calamity wager may be no different in its options for a small project than for an enormous one, but in the latter the budget savings may prove more tempting because of the large dollar figure attached to them, while the consequences of a failed wager, because of the quantity of people and property affected, may tip the failure from the category of “mishap” to “catastrophe.” A simple logic, then, holds in all such cases: the larger the project that fails, the larger the failure; the greater the concentration of people and activity, the greater the scale of disaster when it happens.

In general, Yamasaki liked large-scale projects. He took pride in being able to envision and bring to fruition designs in which great quantities of space are enlisted to serve human purposes. He loved the challenge of creating works of imposing size that would be relatable to human scale. Yet one can imagine that failed wagers perhaps reinforced his desire to keep his firm small enough to maintain oversight of all aspects of projects. In letters to peers he would sometimes play the underdog, teasing colleagues at larger firms about their big budgets and large resources, complaining that a small office like his had to do things frugally and efficiently. But in such posturing one can hear a kind of pride in producing work that was fully under his control and resisted compromise.

City in the sky

The city of New York provides the consummate American statement on the power of urban density and concentration of uses. In the heyday of postwar manufacturing it was a place where one could achieve great efficiencies in production because so many kinds of suppliers would be close at hand, and with its concentration of population, so many interests could be satisfied, so much innovation could happen, such large local markets could be created. For officials of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the World Trade Center was to epitomize the metropolitan region’s power of concentrated human capital, unique among American cities. Located in the middle of the nation’s greatest financial center and linked to transportation facilities connecting the whole region, the opportunity presented itself to assemble a concentration of private- and public-sector activity that would be as staggering in its scope as the project would be in size.

To Yamasaki, the scale of the project at first seemed preposterous – impossible, even. When he received the invitation to apply for the commission, he famously thought that there had been a mistake in the statement of the project’s size: it could not be a $280,000,000 project; there must have been an extra zero added. He gathered staffaround to use the error as an opportunity to warn them of how small typographical errors can make for big consequences. But they urged him to call the sender, Richard Sullivan, of the Port Authority. When Sullivan confirmed the figure Yamasaki immediately began begging off the project, pointing out that his firm of 55 employees could not handle a project of that size. But it was suggested that he could partner with a large New York firm to do the working drawings and provide engineering support, leaving Minoru Yamasaki and Associates to focus on overall concept and design. Putting the engineering under the direction of Yamasaki’s favored colleague in this role, John Skilling, would assure that the design work would be fully integrated with the engineering. When it came to the structural approach to the buildings on the site, Skilling was extremely effective in putting across the tube-form of outer bearing wall support, showing how, with its narrow columns and Vierendeel trusses that abrogated the need for diagonal bracing, the buildings could be far stronger than conventional skyscraper skeletons while at the same time using less steel and creating more open interiors.

I have described how Yamasaki’s gentle and serene style was intended, by the Port Authority, to counter the boldness of the trade center program. This goal of balance makes sense if we imagine all of the elements and all of the participants working in harmony and mutual understanding. But in fact, the combination introduced a tension into the project that was never exactly resolved. The Port Authority was hiring one of the world’s most anti-monumentalist architects to design one of the nation’s most ambitiously monumental projects. As the Port Authority’s enthusiasm for monumentalism persisted, tensions at times became heated. The architect was not even told, at the beginning, that the design should include the world’s tallest building. This was a charge that came from Malcolm Levy, the man designated to oversee Yamasaki’s progress on behalf of the Port Authority. It was Levy who, looking at the first design ideas (some of which he dismissed as “a bunch of small buildings”), judged them unequal to the core goal of the project, which was to be a signal to the world of the greatness of New York and America. The demand angered Yamasaki at first, who considered the “world’s tallest building” status to be a chimera of narcissists, a distinction one might own for a few months before the next champion of publicity bests one by a few stories. But he found a way, out of his own sensibilities, to embrace the ambition. By fashioning two towers of over 1,000 feet and closing several of the traffic-choked streets within the 16 acres of the site, one could create a five-acre pedestrian refuge in one of the most pedestrian-unfriendly parts of the city (Glanz and Lipton 2003, 99–107).

In this decision we can see the tension that the project created not only with the Port Authority but within Yamasaki’s own conscience – a tension essential to understanding the structures that were ultimately produced. We must appreciate what it means that the architect was being ordered to do something that he had been denouncing publicly since the early 1950s – the creation of a “great” – that is, arrogant – building that would dwarf all of its neighbors in order to puff up the egos of the government officials, along with those of the Rockefellers and other captains of industry. In submitting to the will of his clients, the architect did not abandon those long-held beliefs that put him at odds with the basic, defining features of the project – its outsized scale, its grandeur; he rather turned his attention toward values that might be won in the compromise. From this point on one can notice that his accounts of the project and his defenses against critics speak in different terms than those of the clients and promoters. It is the language of justification, compensation – emphasizing what will be gained by allowing the towers the height that the Port Authority demanded (Winther-Tamaki 2000–1).

The principal item in this economy of recompense was the plaza. He was clearly conceiving it along the lines of the Piazza San Marco, similarly surrounded with repeated arches, and he hoped it would be embraced as Rockefeller Center was embraced, as a place for open air activities, celebrations, and festivals. If the towers would take an undeserved share of the skyline, at least they could give back generously at the ground level. The plaza would function, he said, as a “mecca,” a place where people would be drawn by its ring of benches, its 130-foot circle of flower boxes, and its sculptures, including the large sculpture and fountain, The Sphere, by Fritz Koenig. Here they would find peace and repose among the urban frenzy of the financial district (Yamasaki 1979, 114–15).

In bringing his humanistic values to the design, Yamasaki worked hard, and not without conflict, to give the aluminum column covers enough depth to provide the surface of the building some character and to specify an alloy that would have warmth to it. He stubbornly insisted on keeping the windows narrow, to preserve the human scale and the feeling of security that he so valued whenever designing tall buildings. He brought a transparency to the structure, so that at the ground level of the world’s tallest buildings you could look right through to the other side, and the colors of the sunset would filter through its center. While early work on the façades incorporated decorative tracery, the architect gradually stripped most of it away, in keeping with his conviction that tall buildings should be relatively “quiet.” Indeed, we can imagine this conviction being strong in the case of buildings that would be so dominant: their scale would give them more than enough prominence; they needn’t also shout. Some critics have acknowledged that the minimalism of the surface design can be interpreted as having Zen-like meditative silence. If that is true, it counts as a success for Yamasaki in complementing the monumental buildings with qualities of his anti-monumentalism. From a distance one could observe another signature quality: that the proportion of height to width gave the towers, despite taking up an acre on each floor, a slender look. Yamasaki’s love of thinness managed to come through even here.

There is never a moment, then, in the history of Yamasaki’s labor on the World Trade Center in which one cannot identify motivations tied to the core values and convictions that he had established in the 1950s. Yet it was the scale of the buildings, not the details of design, that predominated in nearly every account of them. For the promoters of the buildings it was a roll call of facts readily invoking

World Trade Center Plaza

Photo: Balthazar Korab

astonishment: 200,000 tons of steel used in construction, 10 million square feet of rentable space, 43,600 windows, 239 elevators, 198 miles of heating ducts, 87 tons of food delivered daily to the complex, and 30,000 cups of coffee served (New York State Museum n.d.). The wonder was that such a thing could be built, that so much

Photo: Balthazar Korab

construction could occur on such an impossibly constrained site, with the forces of the Hudson River having to be held back with an enormous slurry wall; the tons of materials brought in from distant sources and threaded through Manhattan streets. The primary point of astonishment – the towers soaring above an already dizzying skyline – made them an instant landmark, and over time a popular icon that defined the city, gracing countless souvenirs and picture postcards.

Photo: Carol Highsmith

For many of the buildings’ detractors, however, their failure was in being unable to communicate anything beyond this boastful scale. Whatever the architect might have intended, the towers struck many critics as barren monoliths, their variegated surfaces (however striking they might be up close) vanishing, from a distance, into the raw geometry of their envelope, their breakneck rise to the heavens outstripping, in rectilinear monotony, icons like the Empire State Building or Rockefeller Center that had earned their height by the artful tapering and massing of complex forms. The twin towers were not merely taller than other buildings in the skyline; they seemed to exist in another universe of scale, like visitors from an alien world of giants.

Angus Kress Gillespie has described the process by which, over the decade of the twin towers’ design and construction, journalism’s two most potent architectural critics – Huxtable at the New York Times and Wolf von Eckardt of the Washington Post – changed from cautious supporters to scathing critics of the project. In 1964 von Eckardt was praising Yamasaki’s sensitivity and was comparing the proposed plaza to the Piazza San Marco and Rockefeller Plaza, “the two most exciting outdoor spaces in the world” (Gillespie 1999, 174). But two years later his review article for Harper’s magazine, subtitled “The World’s Tallest Fiasco,” concluded that “these incredible giants just stand there, artless and dumb, without any relationship to anything, not even to each other,” while describing the plaza as “a bland, vast expanse of pavement” (Gillespie 1999, 175). Huxtable, in 1964, was echoing Yamasaki’s descriptions of the human-scaled plaza and ground-level façade, but by 1966 she was channeling the doubts of architects and other critics:

He has developed a curiously unsettling style which involves decorative traceries of exotic extraction applied over structure or worked into it. His choice of delicate detail on massive construction as a means of reconciling modern structural scale to the human scale of the viewer is often more disturbing than reassuring. It makes many competent architects go to pieces.

(Huxtable 1966)

By 1973 her article marking the opening of the towers was called “Big But Not So Bold.” Their greatness in size was not matched with great design; the details of the façade, she said, did not so much express structure as “tart it up” (Huxtable 1973a). The project had failed on two fronts: the towers were too big and their decorative softening looked out of place. The Port Authority was to blame for the scale, Yamasaki for being superficial in countering the scale.

Huxtable’s criticism hit Yamasaki so hard that he composed a carefully reasoned reply, which he sent to her in a letter, with a copy to Port Authority director Austin Tobin (who called it “a masterpiece”) (Tobin 1973). Here the architect repeated the full range of his intentions – the innovations of the engineering, the blending of design and structural support, the humanizing qualities of the plaza – but all of these points remained intentions, in Huxtable’s view, whereas she was judging the results. “I have tried,” she wrote in a letter to him, “in the brief space I had, to make it clear that you had a philosophical and structural rationale for your design; but I feel that the esthetic effect is not really successful for buildings on this scale.” She was already quite familiar with the complex of aims in Yamasaki’s oeuvre, and she had written already on the feats of engineering embodied by the buildings, but in the end, as a critic, she had to make her judgments. “You are the architect, and I am the critic, and it is an honest parting of the ways” (Huxtable 1973b).

Photo: Carol Highsmith

Huxtable, with her long familiarity with Yamasaki’s architecture, could appreciate the tensions in his aesthetic sensibilities; she rested as much responsibility as she could on the Port Authority’s program and never wanted him to take her criticism personally; but a long list of critics, historians, and other interpreters have laid the scale of the project at his feet as well. He was made the target of diatribes against the coldness of modernism, characterizing him as brutalist in his embrace of a hulking minimalism. In the eyes of many, project scale, in this case, seemed to overpower the architecture itself, and they blamed the architect for it.

The scale of tragedy

One cannot be a humanist without seeing the cutting short of any human life as tragic, without experiencing something of the pain of loss as it spreads ripples of grief into the community of family and friends of every lost loved one. In the case of a disaster such as that of September 11, 2001, the imponderable depth of grief is magnified by the thousands, while the loss is magnified by the horrific nature of the spectacle, wherein final moments that should have been private and hallowed were made gruesomely public. It is amplified, too, by the shocking suddenness with which a place of peace and ordinary life was transformed into a scene of unspeakable carnage. By now many thousands of stories have been told of loss and horror, of rescue and salvage – the days and weeks of managing the chaos and confusion that was Ground Zero – yet nothing seems to make the tragedy comprehensible. It is like the tale of a great battle in war, but without the kind of narrative framework by which such stories derive some degree of coherence. The human tragedy of September 11 is of such singular enormity as to fit in no existing category of American experience.

The tragedy is intensified, as well, by virtue of the attack being a deliberate, meticulously planned act of aggression against the nation – an act waged against noncombatants by ideologically fueled worshippers of death who proudly defied all recognized conceptions of just war, or even the idea that there should be something like conventions in warfare. The attack was multipronged, comprising the crash of four airliners in which all on board were killed. Two planes flew into the twin towers, a third hit the Pentagon, and a fourth, heading toward Washington, D.C., was thwarted by passengers, crashing in southwest Pennsylvania. This coordination of simultaneous attacks created uncertainty that led to the immediate grounding of all nonmilitary aircraft, so that the skies maintained an eerie silence in every corner of the nation. Markets closed, and in the coming weeks uncertainty fueled an economic downturn, such that there was hardly an American citizen who was not affected by the disaster. One reminds oneself that the attacks did not constitute war, yet the carnage was on the scale of war, the reverberations felt throughout the country had the feel of being at war, and the

Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

response to the attacks was ultimately for the United States to engage in costly military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. One grieves at the loss of a single life, but the scale of grief in this case, the scope of this calamity spreads beyond the number of lives lost, beyond those personally affected. Just as one would not have imagined an attack conceived after such a fashion, so one could not have anticipated how devastating would be the effect of the terror.

Photo: Eric J. Tilford

The scale of the disaster expands further into the great loss of property, the loss of information and records, the decimation of whole organizations, such as the investment bank of Cantor Fitzgerald, which lost 658 employees, and the professional services firm, Marsh and McLennan Companies, Inc., which lost 358. The World Trade Center was a nexus of American and international commerce, making the economic costs of its destruction profound – felt most dramatically in New York’s local economy but to a lesser extent in the United States and other national economies as a whole. Damages to the physical health of those connected with the disaster persist in the lives of the more than 6,000 people directly wounded and those who suffered from toxins that filled the immediate surroundings of Ground Zero after the collapse of the buildings.

In the original design of the twin towers the calamity wager was undertaken with special care. It was well understood that there would be extra expectations of a structure that dared to go more than 1,000 feet into the air, and the warnings voiced by opponents of the project included the possibility that the towers could be struck by an errant passenger plane. A key selling point of the tubular framing design for the towers was that loads were so evenly distributed throughout the outer shell of the buildings that it was believed that the structures could withstand the impact of a plane the size of a Boeing 707, though it was noted that the jet fuel would cause a fire of massive destructiveness inside the building (Nalder 1993). Analysis of the structural behavior of the towers after 9/11 concludes that when they absorbed the impact of planes significantly larger than a 707 they maintained their integrity long enough for thousands of people to escape the buildings, yet the heat of the burning jet fuel, aggravated by the dislodging of fireproofing in the impact, weakened core columns, making floors sag, eventually causing the outer walls to buckle and collapse with a force that lower floors could not withstand. Once this sequence had begun the buildings came down swiftly (National Institute of Standards and Technology 2005, 175–6).

The question as to whether more might have been done in the original engineering to mitigate the collapse of the buildings on 9/11 is one that is unlikely to be ultimately resolved, for the vulnerabilities of architecture can be multiplied indefinitely, while the constraints of the engineering budget for any project must impose their practical limits. After the attacks, the principal engineer for the towers, Leslie Robertson, who had gone on to found one of the most accomplished engineering firms in the world, received cards, letters, and emails with praise and gratitude that his towers had withstood the ferocious impact of the planes long enough for so many occupants to escape with their lives. Yet the events of 9/11 haunted him in multiple ways. If he were really an engineer with such talents as these missives proclaimed, would he not have found even better ways to make these towers “braver, more stalwart,” to fortify them against the kind of fate they ultimately met? “Thoughts of the thousands who lost their lives,” he has written, “as my structures crashed down upon them come to me at night, rousing me from sleep, and interrupting my thoughts at unexpected times throughout the day” (Robertson 2017, 148–56). Such feelings are a reminder of how deeply and thoroughly the decisions involving the calamity wager constitute moral decisions, and how every moral decision must be made in the face of a future that is knowable only dimly.

On top of all of this there is the loss of the buildings themselves. Though Robertson felt this loss more abstractly than the loss of lives, still, this project had consumed the careers of scores of people from a great range of disciplines and trades over a period of ten years, and it seemed to him altogether appropriate to experience the architectural loss through grief and mourning. In the human dedication to the creation of the work, the work comes to embody humanity. Not least of those who deeply invested themselves was the architect, Yamasaki, who had put so much faith in Robertson as an eager young engineer. Robertson knew how to show the sincerity of his gratitude, including through the daily visits that he made to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center as Yamasaki was facing, there, his final illness.

Greatness and bigness

I have characterized the tensions in the World Trade Center design as occurring between Yamasaki and the desires of the Port Authority, but of course the architect was going up against forces much larger and older than that body’s members. He was facing a mania that had been driving construction since the dawn of the skyscraper: the futuristic dream of building ever taller and bigger, colonizing the air with structures that would house activities as diverse and complex as those of a small city. It was a dream that was championed at world’s fair exhibitions and in the imagery of artists and magazine illustrators, yielding a postwar “worlds of tomorrow” in which social planning began to blend freely with science fiction. For all of its grounding in science and technology, this futurism could ring with the enthusiasm of religious revival, seeking a redemptive entry into tomorrow as into a new promised land.

Against these lofty associations of the spiritual qualities of greatness and hope with the material qualities of size and height, Rem Koolhaas has offered the more dispassionate category of “bigness” to describe the momentum that has driven the skyscraper era, seeing it as a force that unfolds with an internal logic of its own and with the infectious quality of a virus, overwhelming architectural intentions with the incomprehensibility of the whole, thereby communicating only through the parts that people experience directly. Bigness is fueled by demand, the countless microeconomic decisions that combine to fuel unimaginable amounts of mass-produced construction. In Delirious New York, bigness becomes the implicit theme, as the history of the city’s skyscraper mania spills out in breathless present-tense prose that captures the pressing immediacy of its drive, reeling forward as if in a delirious state (Koolhaas 1994).

If the World Trade Center was a culmination, of sorts, of the mania for bigness, we can appreciate what an unstoppable force Yamasaki was trying to mitigate through his design. Yet he did not consider his task an impossible one. “If man can build it,” he said, “man can comprehend it.” Despite the massive scaling up and the staggering multiplication of problems to solve, what he brought to the project was the same core vision with which he approached other commissions: unity of design, overall integration, a concept, a look, a purpose. The extent to which he succeeded is at the heart of the debate over the architecture of the towers, and that debate remains more salient than ever in our age of rising urban concentrations and demands for ever more astounding quantities of square footage. Every architect involved with projects on the huge scales that are regularly called for today can appreciate Yamasaki’s struggles with maintaining architecture’s art in the face of bigness.

References

Baugher, David. 2012. “Lazarus Archive: St. Louis Facility Restores Burned or Otherwise Damaged Records.” St. Louis Beacon, January 1.

Gillespie, Angus Kress. 1999. Twin Towers: The Life of New York City’s World Trade Center. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Glanz, James and Lipton, Eric. 2003. City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center. New York: Time Books.

Huxtable, Ada Louise. 1966. “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Buildings?” New York Times, May 29.

Huxtable, Ada Louise. 1973a. “Big But Not So Bold.” New York Times, April 5.

Huxtable, Ada Louise. 1973b. Letter to Minoru Yamasaki, April 23, 1973. Walter P. Reuther Library Minoru Yamasaki Papers, Wayne State University, Box 12, Folder 26.

Koolhaas, Rem. 1994. Delirious New York. New York: Monacelli Press.

Moore, Charles. 1921. Daniel H. Burnham, Architect, Planner of Cities. Vol. 2. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Nalder, Eric. 1993. “Twin Towers Engineered to Withstand Jet Collision.” Seattle Times, February 27.

National Institute of Standards and Technology. 2005. Final Report on the Collapse of the World Trade Center Towers.

New York State Museum. n.d. www.nysm.nysed.gov/wtc/about/facts.html.

O’Neil, Tim. 2012. “Federal Personnel Records Making Massive Move in St. Louis County.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 5.

O’Neill, Marta G. and Seibert, William. 2013. “Burnt in Memory.” Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration 45, no. 1: 28–35.

Robertson, Leslie E. 2017. The Structure of Design: An Engineer’s Extraordinary Life in Architecture. New York: The Monacelli Press.

Stender, Walter W. and Walker, Evans. 1974. “The National Personnel Records Center Fire: A Study in Disaster.” The American Archivist 37, no. 4 (October): 521–49.

Tobin, Austin. 1973. Letter to Minoru Yamasaki, April 30, 1973. Walter P. Reuther Library Minoru Yamasaki Papers, Wayne State University, Box 12, Folder 26.

Winther-Tamaki, Bert. 2000–1. “Minoru Yamasaki: Contradictions of Scale in the Career of the Nisei Architect of the World’s Largest Building.” Amerasia Journal 26, no. 3: 162–89.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1979. A Life in Architecture. New York: Weatherhill.

Chapter 9
The ambiguity of symbols

There is something that fails to be captured in any discussion of the World Trade Center that confines itself to matters of size, function, architectural style, and popular appeal. Lying deeper is the symbolic dimension. That the twin towers were symbolic is obvious, as is the fact that their importance to history has much to do with their symbolism. They meant something to their creators and to the workers and citizens who spent time in them and among them. They carried this symbolic weight more intensely and differently after their ruin – indeed, carrying more meaning for more people in their demise than they ever had in the course of their material existence. The buildings were symbolic for the terrorists who planned and carried out their destruction, and this symbolism, even as it diverged radically and violently from what Americans saw in the gleaming icons, overlapped, nonetheless, with certain American interpretations of their meaning. That the buildings had symbolic meaning, then, is evident; but what they symbolized is a puzzling question. Even in those traumatic days when they were called upon to mean so much to so many people, a question lurked as to whether modern buildings such as these could really embody the degree of symbolic content that was demanded of them. Indeed, can any form of architecture truly express the identity and common aspiration of a nation in the precise way that this nation looked to these two vanished monoliths to provide?

A question of this sort easily flowers into larger questions: How did symbolism function in Yamasaki’s architecture generally? How is it that modern architecture achieves symbolization, given that it largely eschews the codified symbols of the

World Trade Center

Photo: Balthazar Korab

past? How does any architecture, for that matter, symbolize? And what does it mean to “symbolize” in the first place? I am going to linger with these larger questions for a moment before returning to the question of the World Trade Center, for to do so adds substance to questions about the symbolism of the towers, permitting a connection between Yamasaki’s approach to symbolism and long-standing debates over the general nature of architectural symbolism. I want to argue that architectural symbolism, like all symbolism, is ambiguous by its very nature, acquiring its power by possessing ranges of significations – not just any meaning whatsoever, but ranges of meanings – and that this power can also function as a weakness, in that symbols will inevitably resist confinement to the meanings that we may want them to have – and at times need them to have.

The nature of symbol

Like language, architecture speaks. Unlike language, its normal idiom is equivocation. Architecture communicates not through the plain declarations of verbal discourse but through sensuous symbols. A symbol is not a sign, though like a sign a symbol points to things; it is not a metaphor, though it invariably incorporates many metaphors. This quality of combining and compounding indications, suggestions, and metaphors, we might say, is the defining quality of symbols. They mean not one thing but multiple things, enriching words or objects with multivalence: multiple meanings, multiple types of meanings, multiple levels of meaning.

The meanings contained in symbols are felt meanings, often spontaneous meanings, always occurring partly unconsciously. Some of the meanings are suggested morphologically, that is, through the look or other sensual qualities of a thing, as when we say of an architectural column that it recalls a plant stalk, a tree trunk, an upright human figure, a phallus, or the axis mundi. Other meanings may be narrative and historical, connecting with stories, myths, and histories of a people, as columns do by recalling the temples, palaces, and halls of justice that they have historically enclosed. A set of symbols may conform to a codified lexicon of meanings, but even in such instances the power of these symbols is to be found in their multivalence, the way they spill over into more suggestiveness than mere signs or concepts would do, and this multivalence can be enriched when an artist increases the number of things that are suggested by suggesting none of them too exactly.

To say that a symbol is multivalent is not to say that it can mean anything whatsoever. A column can mean many things, but it looks like some things more than others and is tied to some institutions and histories more than others. One can see what one wants in a column, with some basis for even the more random associations that one might make, but at the same time there is a role for historians and theorists who can draw out the latent meanings that one’s limited knowledge and experience prevent one from perceiving.

Symbols carry their meaning not simply by showing realities but by participating in them. This fact is most obvious in the case of religious symbols. A carved figurine of a divine being, such as the 25,000-year-old “Venus of Willendorf ” is presumed to be, contains the immortal chthonic power of the Earth by being carved in limestone; it embodies human life by taking on the form of a woman; and it brings sacred forces to bear through its divinity. But most importantly, by means of this multivalence, it pulls all of these forces together into one, participating in all of them simultaneously, bringing multiple ontological layers of the cosmos into the palm of one’s hand. If a small figurine can perform such a function, so much more so can a work of architecture. Stonehenge and similar sacred circles achieve their incomparable profundity by doing just that. By their arrangement the stones participate in the order of the heavens and the changes of the seasons; they pull the cosmos together in a single place. A Gothic cathedral or a mosque, similarly, marks the terminus of the path of pilgrims and orients itself both to the heavens and to sacred lands, thus organizing human space according to sacred meaning. By instantiating the unity of the whole of being and the whole of history as revealed through sacred narrative, architecture in such examples announces the sacred dimension of all mundane things.

We intensify the power of symbols, and our appreciation of that power, when we grant them their multivalence and try to find our way through it; we experience their frustrating ambiguity when we try to restrict them to one meaning or one narrow set of meanings, or even one particular “central” meaning. Trying to control symbolic meaning in this manner can be like trying to hold back the sea (Eliade 1990, 5–6).

Because Yamasaki’s desire for a richer modernism with greater historical resonances constituted a desire for greater symbolism, he frequently took advantage of the multivalence of symbols – particularly in the way he freely moved imagery back and forth between sacred and secular contexts. But the World Trade Center puts us in the middle of the problematic side of symbolic ambiguity, for it refused to consistently hold the symbolism that Yamasaki intended for it, veering often into conflicting, opposing meanings that have rendered it a symbolic conundrum even long after its destruction.

The sacred and the mundane

As religious commissions create opportunities to put symbolism at the center of a design, so Yamasaki’s religious designs show best his symbolic imagination at work. He had a solid sense of the importance of transcendent meaning, having come from a Protestant background and even having considered, at one point, entering the Baptist ministry. For most of his career, however, his faith was something that informed his practice rather than something that he practiced within a faith community. His was an open-ended faith that made him sensitive to many kinds of religious traditions, and it is interesting that his most important sacred buildings were non-Christian. His first religious space would appear to be the now-destroyed chapel at the Sampson base. It was a simple and conventional structure in wood, with a sanctuary defined by a series of pointed arches forming the interior ribs of a vaulted room, with windows set between each pair of arches. But these arches curve and taper in organic ways, giving the simple room a degree of style. When one comes to a later sanctuary, that of the First United Methodist Church of Warren, Michigan, the curves have been straightened and the ribs have been hidden behind pure white surfaces. But a dynamic is set up, in this small church, that would be repeated in many of Yamasaki’s sacred buildings: a vertical thrust toward an apex, symbolizing divine transcendence, and a surround of windows at the base, opening on a garden, that communicates the sacralization of the surrounding world. The leadership at the church sees a symbolic significance in the fact that the peak of the roof forms a solid line above the congregation rather than rising to a steeple above the altar: “we have a high line roof over the entire congregation which serves as one continuous steeple over all who worship here; this signifies the Protestant thought that ‘every member is his own priest’” (First United Methodist Church of Warren n.d.).

Two of Yamasaki’s most majestic religious spaces are the sanctuaries he designed for synagogues: North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoe, Illinois (1964), and Temple Beth-El, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, outside of Detroit (1974). In these spaces Yamasaki raises to a grand scale the tension that he explored in Warren United Methodist between the lines that soar vertically and the windows that draw the eye horizontally to landscaping and gardens (designed, at the Glencoe site, by longtime collaborator Lawrence Halprin). In the sanctuary of the North Shore Congregation Synagogue the upward thrust is made powerfully dramatic by a series of fan vaults interlaced with patterned skylights, the curving lines of which create one of the most biomorphic effects in all of Yamasaki’s architecture. An account in Architectural Record notes the evocation of Art Nouveau in the space, seeing the shape of calla lilies in the vaults, palm fronds in the walls, and artichoke leaves in the ogival windows running along the base (Architectural Record 1964, 192). So captivating is the pattern of windows and skylights in the sanctuary that the solid walls can seem almost incidental, and yet one knows that somehow they must be supporting the structure.

First United Methodist Church of Warren

In the entry to the sanctuary at Temple Beth El the element of surprise plays a particularly striking role. One moves from a low-ceiling common area, surrounded by gardens seen through glass, to a small transitional space – a space that might seem claustrophobic were it not still open to the views of the gardens – where one grasps one of the large handles of the doors to the sanctuary and then suddenly, as

North Shore Congregation Israel

Temple Beth El

one enters the door, the eyes soar up 70 feet to an enormous skylight at the peak of a massive tent-like ceiling. The surprising transition underscores the large scale of this structure, which was inspired by imagery of the camps of the 12 tribes of Israel. The engineering of the space took its cue from tents as well, supporting the huge ceiling with two pairs of sloping concrete columns at either end, allowing the walls at ground level to be made largely of glass and thus further creating the feel of a structure that floats above the congregation (Gyure 2017, 246–51).

In Meishusama Hall, created for the Shinji Shumeikai religious organization in Shiga Prefecture, Japan (1983), a structural scheme similar to that of Temple Beth-El was employed, the curving rooflines, created by cabled catenaries covered on the exterior with sheets of copper, soaring to some 150 feet and supporting an enormous rectangular skylight. As the building juts out from a hilltop, the surround of windows at the base affords spectacular views of the lush wooded hills of a national park (Yamasaki 1979, 184; Gyure 2017, 251–3).

Because buildings such as these are sacred spaces, religious symbols are at their core, but to examine the whole range of Yamasaki’s work is to see a remarkable pattern of fluidity of religious imagery and allusions flowing regularly into spaces where they are normally unbidden. An obvious example is the lofty modern-Gothic arches of the Federal Science Pavilion. Mid-century modern architects were especially hesitant to use Gothic forms because of their immediate association with European cathedrals, but Yamasaki’s uninhibited use of them encourages such associations, which in turn adds something of a reverent aura to the feel of the place (more so in its original uncluttered state of 1962 than today). If such associations seem inappropriate, given the pavilion’s purpose of celebrating the secular world of science, it would not seem so to Yamasaki, who would want the emphasis to be placed on human aspirations to ultimate truth, in which regard modern science certainly exhibits a spiritual dimension. The light, airy arches hover between the sacred and the secular in their implication, but in this multivalence Yamasaki clearly saw symbolic strength.

A step further down the path of ambiguity would be a building like the Northwestern National Life building. With its columns running the height of the exterior and forming arches, the building immediately recalls a temple, while the stone between the columns – bookmatched slabs of verde marble ascending from ground to roofline – creates a decorative effect reminiscent of stained-glass windows. A temple? A cathedral? It was an insurance company. But the structure is a very public one, prominently located at the end of Minneapolis’s central downtown

Temple Beth-El

Meishusama Hall

Photo: Taro Yamasaki

Photo: Taro Yamasaki

mall, and in this positioning it comes to looks like a grand civic building, suggesting, in its extravagance, high civic ideals more than religious practices. There is certainly something delightful in the grace and grandeur of this building. One thinks of the workers heading to their offices, passing by a large reflection pond and into the majestic colonnade of the portico. The symbolism incorporated into the design clearly adds to its meaning, and so to its public appeal, but its combination of sacred and secular connotations would be hard to sort out. Is there a need to do so in a case such as this? Perhaps not. Perhaps one should simply enjoy one of New Formalism’s most ambitious efforts to dignify and elevate the life of the office worker.

Federal Science Pavilion/Pacific Science Center

Northwestern National Life/Voya Financial

The World Trade Center as symbol

During the life of Yamasaki’s twin towers many wondered how these giant boxes of metal could symbolize anything at all. To many New Yorkers they represented (especially when compared to the decorative towers of older buildings) the very absence of symbolism in modern architecture – or the inability of modern architecture to symbolize anything besides modernity itself. And yet the towers were designed with definite symbolism in mind and became, both in life and in death, unusually powerful symbols. The twin towers held a kind of symbolism for their architect, for politicians and patrons like the Rockefellers, port officials like Austin Tobin and Guy Tozzoli, financiers, potential tenants, and the many others who contributed to their inception and realization. They were symbolic for New Yorkers, including architects and architectural critics, who lived with them daily. They were symbolic for people all across the globe, including enemies of the United States. The content of this symbolism varied among and within these populations. It varied over time and with the phases of creation, life, and destruction. As Yamasaki always did, he sought to embed his symbolic intentions in metaphorical imagery and historical association, yet these intentions competed mightily and at times unsuccessfully with the intentions of others involved in the project, all of whom had competing symbolic ambitions.

The symbolism of the completed structures was a subject of vigorous debate among critics and the public. One could count on almost every New Yorker to have an opinion, and rarely one of simple satisfaction. Public appreciation of the towers seemed to grow over time by a process of people becoming accustomed to them, perhaps, and learning to see them in different ways. Once the towers were destroyed, everything about their significance seemed to change, and yet in the debate over the fate of Ground Zero, opinions that had shaped their public reception played into the aftermath of their destruction. We have, then, four perspectives from which to interpret the symbolism of the twin towers: the inception, the reception, the attacks, and the aftermath.

In his attempts to reconcile his intentions in architecture with the muscular ambitions of the Port Authority, Yamasaki centered his focus on the ideal of world peace through world trade. The words in which he expressed this value have been quoted often since 9/11 and are emblazoned on a wall of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum:

Beyond the compelling need to make this a monument to world peace, the World Trade Center should, because of its importance, become a living representation of man’s belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his beliefs in the cooperation of men, and through this cooperation his ability to find greatness.

(Yamasaki n.d.)

The towers were to symbolize power, yes, but the power of human wisdom to replace conflict with cooperation, to organize this cooperation into global systems of exchange that expand prosperity everywhere.

With this symbolism in mind he turned to familiar sources for inspiration. The twinning of the towers had its immediate exemplar in Mies’s Lakeshore Apartments in Chicago, where the two structures sit on a diagonal to one another rather than straight on, giving them a subtle identity-in-spatial-difference, but the pairing of towers is, of course, an age-old architectural idea, present in countless bridges, gates, castles, and sacred buildings. Its archetype in nature is ubiquitous, in the pairing of limbs, organs, and mates, in the bifurcated formation of plants and animals, manifesting a natural beauty in the form of balance and symmetry. The tradition of pairing in architecture has roots in the necessities of building, as well – especially the need to balance forces of tension, compression, and gravity through structural engineering. In the pairing of Yamasaki’s towers the buildings acquired a structural interdependence, as each served to buffer wind loads on the other. Dwelling uniquely in a scale of their own creation, they shared that space in a unique companionship with one another.

For more specific historical design inspirations, photographer Tony Vaccaro has identified two Italian sources (Vaccaro n.d.). For the plaza level, the Doges Palaces would serve as model, as it had in the Science Pavilion. For the proportions and shapes of the buildings, it would be two towers in San Gimignano. This medieval town stands on the brow of a hill, its stone houses with their red tiled roof clustered tightly together and encircling, at the center of the town and the apex of the hill, a group of 14 surviving towers that strike a dramatic figure against the Tuscan sky, the tallest of which is the Rognosa Tower, standing at 51 meters. Among the towers are a pair built in the early thirteenth century for the home of the powerful Salvucci family. It is said that at one time these square-based twin towers stood taller than the Rognosa but were lowered, after 1255, when a regulation forbade families from competing, for prominence, with the building that housed City Hall (Steves 2016). Whatever the crowns of these structures might have looked like in the days of their original stature, the Salvucci Towers today are flat on top, making of them simple columnar shapes that contrast strikingly with the complexity of color and figuring in their stone masonry. Yamasaki’s towers could be read as simply Miesian in their leveled tops, and yet by this medieval connection their tall and narrow forms seek to blend the timelessness of the modern with the permanence of the past.

Salvucci Towers, San Gimignano

Photo: Luca Aless

Photo: Balthazar Korab

Every effort that the architect made to “humanize” the World Trade Center – to make the plaza a place of congregation, to add interest to the exterior with soaring lines topped with pointed crowns, to narrow the windows to provide comfort and security – were simultaneously meant to symbolize the humanistic values implicit in those efforts, as well as to spiritualize the secular and commercial program of the project. But in the eyes of many the symbolism of the buildings’ dominating and forceful scale won out over the idealistic goals of the architect. They were indeed monuments to world trade, but world trade undertaken with the purpose of winning. America was not in the global trade business simply to spread peace and prosperity; it was there to exploit resources, to find cheap labor, to make a buck or a million bucks, and to elevate the American standard of living over that of every other nation. In whatever ways a person might feel excluded or oppressed by the intentions of global capitalism – its brutality in the seeking after profit, its disparities in the distribution of wealth and power – one could look to the towers and see a symbol of the system, a system of such overwhelming magnitude and complexity that one individual, one poor cog in the great machine, could not hope to influence it, nor even comprehend it.

For different reasons the plaza did not succeed as a public space in the way Yamasaki had hoped. Early in the design process it became clear that since few people would arrive at the Trade Center via surface streets and most would come from underground, it made sense to have retail shops in an underground concourse rather than at the plaza level where he had wanted them. The architect put a good face on the change, noting that the concourse would allow for all-weather activity, but a crucial means of activating the plaza was lost in the process. He underestimated, as well, the degree to which winds whipping around the buildings could create a mighty chill, and this, no doubt, contributed to resulting descriptions of the plaza as a cold and barren place. During the design process, engineer Leslie Robertson approached him on the wind issue, suggesting structures that could mitigate the effect, but the architect rejected them, feeling they worked against the open, European-plaza feel. “We all make mistakes,” Robertson has wryly observed (2017, 120).

The incomprehensibility of the buildings is often said to have been overcome, in a symbolic sense, by the act of intrepid defiance and artistry in which Philippe Petit, in the early morning hours of August 7, 1974, performed for 45 minutes on a wire between the two towers. The event has stirred as much fascination as anything that happened to the buildings during their life, including through an autobiographical book, a film documentary, and a motion picture dramatization (Petit 2002; Marsh 2008; Zemickis 2015). While Petit is often credited with “humanizing” the buildings through his feat, I might suggest more specifically that he helped the public associate them with the fascination of the sublime. I use this word, “sublime,” in its eighteenth-century sense, before it became synonymous with “beautiful,” for at that time it was a distinct aesthetic category, referring to those experiences where one is overwhelmed by the force and grandeur of nature – the awe-inspiring expanse of mountain ranges, the terrifying force of storms, the unfathomable power of great waterfalls. Hikers and climbers head into the wilderness to encounter the sublime – not simply to enjoy the beauty of nature but to feel small against its majesty while yet identifying as an undaunted participant in that majesty. To reach the summit of a mountain or to raft the course of a mighty river is to accomplish something uniquely important because it is measured by the sublime. The achievement announces, with a stroke of defiance, the rightness of human purpose within the vast scheme of nature – and for this men and women will happily risk their lives. This was the new symbolic avenue that Petit (and the climber, George Willig, after him) opened for interpretation – a path that fearlessly accepts the challenge of their overwhelming magnitude, finding in it the source of a powerful human inspiration (Goldberger 2004, 320).

For the attackers of the towers, both in the bombing of 1993 and the weaponizing of Boeing 767s on September 11, 2001, the towers held another kind of symbolism. To Osama bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the plotters and the accomplices, the terrorist pilots and those who cheered them on, the towers symbolized (as they had for a number of Americans) forces of economic and military domination. But for the radical Islamists, they were also the monuments of the materialistic infidels and the champions of Israel; they were the fortresses of warriors who attacked Muslim nations and threatened everywhere the rule of Muslim theocracies and Sharia law. The goal in destroying the towers was not only to kill enough civilians to terrorize the rest but to turn America’s powerful symbols of strength into equally powerful symbols of vulnerability. The plotters of the attacks understood that Americans had sufficiently embraced Yamasaki’s creations as expressions of national pride that bringing them down would deal a blow with a deep and devastating emotional impact throughout the population.

Investigations of the planning of the 9/11 attacks determined that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been the chief advocate for designating the World Trade Center as a principal target of the coordinated attacks (New York Times 2004). In a 2004 broadcast video, Osama bin Laden spoke of his memories of bombs raining down on residential high-rises in 1982 U.S.-backed Israeli attacks on Lebanon, his conviction that the killing of innocent women and children had become “deliberate American policy,” and his determination that towers in America should be destroyed so that the oppressors could “taste some of what we tasted” and be punished and deterred (Al Jazira 2004). For years Mohamed Atta, leader of the group of hijackers in the United States, had denounced what he saw as a global Jewish movement of Arab oppression, centered in New York City and fueled by its power over the American financial world and the media (New York Times 2004). Clearly, for him, the twin towers would epitomize the evil that he imagined.

In an article for the online magazine, Slate, published in December of 2001, journalist Laurie Kerr made the case for a more specific, architecturally rooted motive in the selection of the twin towers as target. Pointing to the extensive work that Yamasaki had done in Saudi Arabia and his success in creating modern expressions of traditional Islamic architectural features, Kerr notes that the arches at the base of the buildings are in the shape of the ogee arch that is common in traditional Islamic design. In the columns of the facades she sees “the Islamic tradition of wrapping a powerful geometric form in a dense filigree.” In Yamasaki’s intention that the plaza become a “mecca” she finds something more than analogy, for the plaza is laid out in a pattern like the court of the Al-Masjid Al-Harām mosque itself, in Mecca, where pilgrims end their Hajj, their holy journey to the heart of the sacred world, circling around the Holy Ka’bah, the great dark-veiled cube at its center that one faces in prayer. In this metaphorical light Yamasaki’s towers become two enormous minarets at the gates of the holy shrine, their surfaces like the “mashrabiya,” the tracery that fills the windows of mosques. Bin Laden, Kerr observes, would have been familiar with Yamasaki’s work in Saudi Arabia, particularly as his family was so heavily involved in the construction of such projects. He would have a special reason to abhor the way “Yamasaki had clothed the World Trade Center, a monument of Western capitalism, in the raiment of Islamic spirituality” (Kerr 2001).

Al-Masjid Al-Harām Mosque

Photo: Adli Wahid

World Trade Center Plaza

Photo: Balthazar Korab

Kerr’s interpretation is as intriguing as it is provocative. While the conclusion is highly speculative, the visual case that it makes is remarkably compelling, particularly when one puts Islamic examples next to images of the World Trade Center complex. In weighing the issue there are two sides: bin Laden’s perceptions on the one side, Yamasaki’s Arab influences on the other. On the side of bin Laden’s views, nothing in his statements over subsequent years indicated the kind of specifically architectural animus that Kerr infers. On the side of Yamasaki’s imagery, certainly there is a general truth to what Kerr observes, but the Middle Eastern influences are not exclusive enough to warrant labeling the overall design scheme “Islamic.” We have seen that it would not at all be uncharacteristic for the architect to bring sacred form into secular contexts, but his knowledge of Islamic architecture would not play into his imagery any more than that of traditional Jewish, Christian, or Japanese architecture. To blend their forms while modernizing them was by now something that was habitual with him. There does not seem to have been discussion of specific Islamic qualities among the designers who worked in Yamasaki’s office on the World Trade Center, and the arches at the base are no more exactly Moorish than they are exactly Gothic.

The aim of terrorism is to sow chaos, confusion, and fear. However devastating its material and human destruction, its larger goal is psychological, which it achieves through symbolism; for again, symbols do not merely represent their meaning, they embody it. To lose the twin towers is less like losing a sign of meaning than it is like losing a sizable piece of the meaning. The loss of life in the 9/11 attacks is the paramount tragedy, but also tragic is the loss of a symbol. The two searchlights sent skyward at Ground Zero crystalized this sense of loss that reverberated throughout the population, far beyond any personal connection to those who died.

But because this paralyzing flood of feeling on the part of victims constitutes success for the terrorists, there was felt everywhere among the American public the need to dig in and fight back. In a period when the American public was experiencing ever-greater political conflict between its conservative champions of liberty and its liberal champions of equality, the slogan “United We Stand” came to express the fighting spirit that held a promise to join everyone in solidarity against all of the forces that sought to undermine the nation. Those words promptly found their way onto T-shirts, commemorative coins, license plates, and countless other items. Everyone could agree that shared grief about September 11 should unite them, but unite around what? And against what? Obviously, they should unite around the core values of the American republic, yet those core values were exactly what were at stake in the country’s reigning political divisions. “They hate our freedoms,” President George W. Bush proclaimed, casting the conflict as one of liberty versus dogmatic authoritarianism, and this theme seemed to carry the day (The Washington Post 2001). The defiant structure that was put in the place of the twin towers came to be called “the Freedom Tower,” symbolizing the American refusal, under any threat of violence, to bow to anyone’s dictates as to how they should live or die. But Americans were not really united around the conservative libertarianism embedded in this rhetoric of freedom, and scores of conflicts followed as the Bush administration instituted policies that restricted American freedoms for the sake of security.

And what were Americans united against? One could agree that it was “global terrorism,” but what is that? Small but well-funded bands of conspirators operating by means of random stealth? All of the country’s default strategies for fighting nations seemed ill suited to this particular kind of enemy, and yet symbolically, this was the enemy that most needed to be fought. The symbolism of a united force against terror mustered sufficient national will to prosecute costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have forever changed the face of those nations and that of the United States. Those two beacons lighting up the night sky at Ground Zero, reminders of permanent loss, symbolized also a need for constant vigilance against those who would destroy a people, but the question as to how to effectively maintain that vigilance remained and remains a point of uncertainty and contention.

In their relatively brief tenure as scions of the Manhattan skyline, the twin towers meant many things to many people, but after their destruction, Americans wanted them very badly to mean what they had meant for Yamasaki – a symbol of civilizing, rational forces over the brute power of fanatical violence, an expression of faith in the good that the nation could do in the world. Yet in death as in life, the icons continue to resist confinement to a single significance.

Rebuilding and not rebuilding

The tale of the complex and contentious process by which the World Trade Center came to be rebuilt is by now one that has been repeatedly and expertly recounted (e.g., Goldberger 2004; Nobel 2005). A central conflict arose immediately between those who gave priority to the rebuilding of symbols of freedom and those who considered Ground Zero a sacred site of burial and remembrance. As negotiations and compromises moved the city toward a plan of action, the always-complicated process of defining a program, selecting architects, and developing a design was immensely complicated by the fact that the public had a laser-beam focus on the project, so that every decision carried enormous emblematic weight. At this stage of the tale, with the towers destroyed and eyes turning to the future, it might seem as if we reach the point where Yamasaki bows out of the story. Having passed away 15 years before the disaster, the tale of his struggles and hopes for the project seemed like matters of history rather than anything relevant to the problems at hand. And yet there is a striking epilogue to the significance of Yamasaki in the story of September 11. It is one voiced by a small minority of citizens, people who felt ignored and neglected, dismissed rather than refuted, even as Yamasaki himself had been regularly dismissed by critics and neglected by architectural historians.

The episode may best be introduced by recalling historical precedents. In 1944, toward the end of World War II, when bombing had destroyed some 80 percent of the mediaeval walled town of St. Malo on the northern coast of France, surviving residents had to decide what to do – to abandon the town altogether, to build a modern town in its place, or to rebuild the town as it had been (Beck 1981). The last option might seem the most chimerical of the three, and yet it was the one that was chosen. Over a 30-year period, every artisanal skill imaginable was put to work recovering and reproducing the medieval town’s pre-war look. Something similar – the essential rebuilding of a historic district – was done in Warsaw (Prudon 2008, 47). In 1995, reconstruction began on Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which had been destroyed by the government in the 1930s with the intention of replacing it with the mammoth “Palace of the Soviets,” a 1,365-foot wedding-cake-styled structure to be topped with a 325-foot-high statue of Vladimir Lenin – a structure ultimately never built. The new cathedral is as much a facsimile as a recreation of the original edifice, using concrete and marble veneer rather than solid stone, and paint in the place of gold leaf, but the symbolism is clear (Dupré 2001, 146–9). In all such examples of communal response following loss, there is an extra measure of defiance against the forces of destruction, saying not simply that we will recover but that we will recover exactly what you took from us and erase your deeds from the visual record. It is a kind of ultimate refusal of defeat.

Similar precedents were cited by grassroots groups, in the years following 9/11, that went by names such as “The Twin Towers Alliance.” London after the war, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima – grave losses of life were suffered, but the victims rebuilt, in part to show symbolically that they were unbeaten. The State and the City of New York had decided to rebuild the site of the World Trade Center as a combination of recovered commercial space, a revitalized transit hub, and a memorial. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, established by Governor George Pataki and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, had conducted an international competition for the master plan design. None of the master plan ideas that included new versions of the twin towers was selected, and the winning designs, by Daniel Libeskind and Team THINK (a collaboration by four architects that included Rafael Viñoly), emphasized the memorial function of the site over the commercial one. Larry Silverstein, the developer who held the lease on the World Trade Center, objected to the lack of leasable office space in the designs. The THINK proposal was called a “World Cultural Center” and featured two steel structures that rose into the air; the winning Libeskind design, which was said to be the one preferred by the families of victims, included buildings with slanted, diamond-shaped roofs, and a seventy-story office building topped with a scaffolding that would tower over the skyline. At the time, Libeskind’s reputation was shaped by his involvement in multiple museum projects that contained powerful memorial components. The signal that was sent was that Ground Zero, where such a devastating destruction of human life took place that remains were not entirely recoverable, should retain its identity as a sacred burial ground, and that any architectural remembrance of the towers should be symbolic rather than an actual replacement of the lost buildings (Goldberger 2004, Ch. 11; Nobel 2005, Ch. 8).

It was outside of this official process, then, that advocates for rebuilding the twin towers had to work. Architect Herbert Belton and engineer Ken Gardner developed a design that they called “Twin Towers II,” which reproduced Yamasaki’s design, now with greater reinforcement, advanced safety features, and an additional five stories. With the backing of then real-estate developer Donald Trump, in 2005 they produced a 10 foot-tall model that included memorial structures at the foot of the new towers, on the footprints of the originals, along with new versions of what had been World Trade Center buildings three, four, and five. At the unveiling of this model at his namesake tower, Trump proclaimed it the public’s preference. Indeed, there was evidence in a variety of polls (and the intense lobbying that Larry Silverstein had experienced) to support the claim. For Trump, it was not only the most popular option but the one carrying the right kind of message: “We want to rebuild the World Trade Center as the World Trade Center,” he said, “but better: a little bit taller, a lot stronger – just plain better.” He denounced the Libeskind Freedom Tower, characterizing its empty scaffolding rising above the usable space as a “skeleton.” “If we rebuild the World Trade Center in the form of a skeleton – Freedom Tower – the terrorists win” (AP Archive 2005). He rallied the spirit of defiance that settles for nothing less than the return of what was lost.

But circumstances were not exactly like those of St. Malo, Moscow, London, or Hiroshima. The enemy had not ceased aggression, and the war – this strange war against elusive nonstate enemies – was far from over. To rebuild the exact same towers seemed, to many, to create a target even more vulnerable than the originals, like posing an irresistible dare. Even if it could be built, would tenants want to occupy it? One can understand the desire not to escalate the status of a war zone that the city had briefly become, the desire to mourn, instead, the nation’s loss, rebuilding in a fashion that would exercise respectful restraint. One can appreciate, as Paul Goldberger has stated, that the grief of families would only be intensified in sight of replicas of the buildings where their loved ones had lost their lives (Goldberger 2004, 61).

Twin Towers II Model

Photo courtesy of Gardner Group Design

Thus it can be said that there were reasons having nothing to do with Yamasaki’s design that kept the towers from being reconstructed according to the architect’s original plan. And yet, one wonders, had the towers been better received at the outset, had they captured the public’s imagination without the note of ambivalence that haunted their reception, had they been endorsed from the beginning as the peace symbol that Yamasaki had intended, might the campaign to rebuild them have been able to gain momentum sooner and to gain it among the officials and experts that oversaw the redevelopment process? There are perhaps few expressions of appreciation of the towers as passionate as those of the activists who sought to have them rebuilt. The testimonials speak again and again of the longing for the return of “our beloved towers” (see Wright 2011). But the grassroots affection was little shared by experts, particularly by architects, who cannot be blamed if what they saw, in Ground Zero, was a blank slate awaiting new creativity in the language of architecture’s present and in response to the profound experience of violation and grief that the site now represented.

After all that has happened, however, in the course of reenvisioning and building up from Ground Zero – and even as the title, “World Trade Center,” is passed to new and different architectural entities – it remains true that the twin towers, with their silhouettes in the form of the number 11, with their pin-stripe vertical lines and trident columns, remain the permanent shape of the memory of the events of 2001 and of what was lost. The figure of these twins is etched and sculpted in stone and metal at hundreds of memorials across North America and throughout the world. In Corr Chapel at Villanova University, they appear in glorious stained glass. More than 1,000 pieces of steel recovered from the wreckage are distributed among these memorial monuments and remembrance gardens, standing tall again, or forever twisted by the force of the attacks, granting visitors an immediacy to the tragedy not unlike that of sacred relics (Lubell 2016). Powerful artistic vision has gone into evoking the same kind of spiritual ascent that Yamasaki originally sought to instill in these beams of metal, artists working, in some cases, to take these rusted remnants that occasion dark visceral feelings and to clothe them in moods of silent remembrance and hope that evoke quiet chills of recognition and emotion. The twin towers did not return, but few buildings in history have been subject to such a passionate and inspired collective determination to keep their memory and what it symbolizes alive.

9/11 World Trade Center Memorial, Kennewick, Washington

Photo: Carol Highsmith

9/11 Memorial, Texas State Cemetery, Austin

Photo: Carol Highsmith

Tribute in Light

Photo: Dennis Gould

References

Al Jazira. 2004. “Full Transcript of Bin Ladin’s Speech.” Al Jazira, November 1. www.aljazeera.com/archive/2004/11/200849163336457223.html.

AP Archive. 2005. “Donald Trump Presents His Proposal for World Trade Center Site.” AP Archive, May 18.

Architectural Record. 1964. “A Synagogue by Yamasaki.” Architectural Record 136, no. 3 (September): 191–6.

Beck, Philip. 1981. “The Burning of Saint-Malo.” Journal of Historical Review 2, no. 4 (Winter): 301–4.

Dupré, Judith. 2001. Churches. New York: Harper Collins.

Eliade, Mircea. 1990. Symbolism, the Sacred, and the Arts. Edited by D. Apostolos-Cappadona. New York: Crossroad.

First United Methodist Church of Warren. n.d. http://warrenfirstumc.org/church/church.htm.

Goldberger, Paul. 2004. Up from Zero. New York: Random House.

Gyure, Dale Allen. 2017. Minoru Yamasaki: Humanist Architecture for a Modernist World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Kerr, Laurie. 2001. “The Mosque to Commerce: Bin Laden’s Special Complaint with the World Trade Center.” Slate, December 28.

Lubell, Sam. 2016. “9/11 Memorials Aren’t Limited to NY and DC: They’re Everywhere.” Wired, September 10.

Marsh, James. 2008. Man on Wire. Film documentary. BBC Storyville, et al.

New York Times. 2004. “Threats and Responses; Excerpts from Statement by Sept. 11 Commission Staff.” New York Times, June 17.

Nobel, Philip. 2005. Sixteen Acres: Architecture and the Outrageous Struggle for the Future of Ground Zero. New York: Metropolitan Books.

Petit, Philippe. 2002. To Reach the Clouds. New York: North Point Press.

Prudon, Theodore H.M. 2008. Preservation of Modern Architecture. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Robertson, Leslie E. 2017. The Structure of Design: An Engineer’s Extraordinary Life in Architecture. New York: The Monacelli Press.

Steves, Rick. 2016. “Medieval Tower Power in Tuscany.” Hartford Courant, December 4.

Vaccaro, Tony. n.d. “Minoru Yamasaki, 1969.” http://tonyvaccaro.studio/mimuriyamasaki-1969/.

The Washington Post. 2001. “Text: President Bush Addresses the Nation.” The Washington Post, September 20.

Wright, Joe, editor. 2011. Debacle: Failing to Rebuild the Twin Towers. New York: Klaatu Publishing.

Yamasaki, Minoru. n.d. “Statement by Minoru Yamasaki of Minoru Yamasaki and Associates.” Typescript from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, reproduced by Anthony Robbins. https://anthonywrobins.com/WTCarchive/BOOK%20-%20Statement%20by%20Minoru%20Yamasaki.pdf.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1979. A Life in Architecture. New York: Weatherhill.

Zemickis, Robert. 2015. The Walk. Motion picture. TriStar Productions.

Chapter 10
Postmodern postludes

Yamasaki has a curious relationship with the architecture that emerged in the late 1970s, called by architectural critics “postmodern” architecture. Like most attempts at labeling the work of distinctively different architects, the word “postmodern” distorts as much as it explains, yet it rightly identified a range of practitioners who sought innovative and sometimes radical alternatives to modernist orthodoxy, and their practice was supported by theories of knowledge and art that gave them a set of common intellectual touchstones.

A case could be made that Yamasaki was a precursor of some strains of postmodern architecture, a case that would be best advanced simply by looking at his buildings, some of which, had they been completed in the 1980s rather than the ’50s or ’60s, would likely be labeled postmodern. Yet one does not find postmodernists acknowledging Yamasaki as any kind of forebear, and in fact he has been famously used by some of them as a modernist foil. It was a movement that did not embrace Yamasaki and that he never embraced – sticking, in his last years, to the stylistic vocabulary that he had established decades earlier. Yet the parallels and connections of his work with the postmodern movement are intriguing. Postmodernist frustrations with mainstream architecture echo some of Yamasaki’s own ambivalence about modernism at key moments in his career, though the postmodern bases for rejecting modernist assumptions were utterly at odds with many of Yamasaki’s most cherished convictions.

The day modern architecture died

It was in 1977, just five years after the destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe complex had begun, that Charles Jencks declared the first dynamiting of its buildings a signal of the end of modern architecture as a movement.

Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3:32 p.m. (or thereabouts) when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grace by dynamite. Previously it had been vandalized, mutilated and defaced by its black inhabitants, and although millions of dollars were pumped back, trying to keep it alive (fixing the broken elevators, repairing smashed windows, repainting), it was finally put out of its misery. Boom, boom, boom.

(1991, 9–10)

Jencks’s passage has itself become something of an icon in the world of architectural criticism. It does not make a case but announces a historical fact, the point at which modernism as a style could no longer credibly justify its principles, requiring a new vision to replace it. Postmodernism is introduced as a reaction – a critical, sometimes polemical, sometimes irreverent and satirical reaction – working from the assumption that modernism had proven itself, at least in part, a failure.

The force of this reaction manifests longstanding frustrations. On the aesthetic front, there existed the feeling that the liberatory revolution of modernism had ossified into a restrictive ideology ripe for counterinsurgency. Where modernism in twentieth-century painting and sculpture had granted permission for every kind of experimentation, architecture, with its severe proscription of anything nostalgic, experimental, romantic, figurative, sensual, populist, or playful, seemed locked in a beetle-browed dogmatism that was producing mostly monotony. It was time to call out architectural modernism – bluntly, in books such as Peter Blake’s Form Follows Fiasco, or satirically, as in Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House, a book that Yamasaki read at the urging of the editor of the Detroit Free Press (Blake 1977; Wolfe 1981; Yamasaki 1981).

Already in 1966 Robert Venturi’s groundbreaking Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture was introducing a new way to argue architectural aesthetics: “I like complexity and contradiction in architecture,” he says at the outset of his “gentle manifesto,” pulling the rug out from modernism’s prime imperatives, revealing its “puritanically moral language” to be reducible to matters of taste preferences. Complexity and contradiction, more than clarity and simplicity, he suggests, meet the complexity and ambiguity of human experience, permitting a layering of meanings that achieves a more fully engaging architectural expression (Venturi 2002). Venturi does not get far into his argument before finding it necessary to distinguish what he is talking about from the approach of Yamasaki, whose architecture he accuses of “picturesqueness and subjective expressionism,” which he interprets as replacing orthodox simplicity with a “false complexity” achieved by ornamenting simply conceived programs. Yamasaki’s evocation of the art of handcrafts through manufactured components, he says, loses the individuality and complex “exuberance” that such features bring when they are truly handmade and reflective of an individual’s skill. The ideal of “serenity” Venturi deems equivalent to the goals of purism: to provoke a simple response rather than a complex one (Venturi 2002, 18). Whatever the merit of this interpretation, it is significant that Venturi felt the need to articulate his distinction from his colleague, who was, when Venturi was writing, at the height of his celebrity.

To the doubts about orthodox modernism that mavericks like Venturi express we may add the influence of historic preservation movements that gained strength in the 1970s. Urban historians sometimes point to the 1963 razing of Pennsylvania Station in New York City, making rubble of its magnificent Grecian facades to prepare for the construction of Madison Square Garden, as a symbolic turning point. Before, it seemed, one could count on civic pride and the conservatism of governing officials to promote the preservation of a city’s architectural heritage, but with the postwar mania for progress and with modern architecture symbolizing that progress, historical causes had lost some of their traditional sources of support. Nothing was safe in the face of the new forward-looking fashion in city-making. Citizens with interests in preservation, then, had to adopt the tactics of grassroots activism, canvassing for popular support and lobbying or battling public officials to incorporate preservation principles into municipal codes. This movement posed the crucial question: are modern buildings really so much better? Is there really something aesthetically wrong with the beautiful old buildings of our cities (e.g., Gratz 2010)? The questioning spread to the doubts that I have discussed in the context of the Pruitt-Igoe debate regarding the failures of the Radiant-City ideal to cure the ills of America’s declining industrial cities.

Frustration with style limitations, resurgent interest in historical buildings, critiques of modern planning ideology – one could leave the account of postmodernism’s rise at that and have a workable explanation of its architectural motives and concerns. But the power of the movement, its ability to take on so effectively the giants of the modernist establishment, also owes much to the fact that a philosophical juggernaut of critical theory was available to recruit for the campaign of the architectural insurgents. One cannot understand the full range of the interest of postmodernists (nor their difference from Yamasaki) without a taste of some of the theoretical assumptions involved.

Postmodern theory

The modern world that modern architecture symbolizes, with its core values of technology, cosmopolitanism, rationalism, and “truthfulness,” constitutes a view of history that separates the modern period from virtually everything that had gone before. The historical narratives that had traditionally grounded cultures and defined identities – narratives grounded in history, story, and religious rituals – were, in the modern age, first augmented and then fundamentally challenged by the researches of natural science that revealed objective truths about the world that were binding for all places and times, regardless of culture or history. From the very beginning of the European Enlightenment in the seventeenth century, natural science was to be dedicated to the production of inventions that would render all of human life greater in health, comfort, and longevity. Human beings would become, in Descartes’s famous words, “the masters and possessors of nature” rather than the hapless victims of its ravages (1931, 119).

Postmodern theory challenges these claims in a radical vein, and while this challenge assumes as many faces as there are theorists, the influence of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Roland Barthes has acquired the force of an intellectual coalition. A common root of their thought is the radical nominalism of Friedrich Nietzsche – the idea, that is, that the concepts produced by human minds do not illuminate the richness of experience so much as obscure it.

We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things – metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities…. What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.

(2006, 116–17)

To this nominalist conviction of Nietzsche postmodern theorists bring the added sophistication of structuralist linguistics and anthropology, which identify the human speaker, the human symbol-user, as functioning within structures of self-contained symbol systems and serving as a vehicle of those structures rather than as an autonomous extra-linguistic agent employing words and other symbols as tools. The privileging of certain kinds of discourse in Western thought, such as “reason,” or “dialectic,” or “science,” occurs on the assumption that there is some extra-linguistic measure (such as “reality”) by which discourse is to be judged, but in the absence of any outside of language, every kind of speech, writing, or expression becomes equivalent and equally multivalent, with this multivalence being best observed from the vantage point of marginalized or negated kinds of discourse, showing that every form of denial, distinction, and rejection depends for its very meaning on that which it has purportedly done away with. Better than trying to sort out a hierarchy of philosophical concepts, if one is to follow Nietzsche and his postmodern heirs, is to explore the creative expansion of metaphorical and other devalued forms of meaning, the free play of signifiers.

Applied to the project of modernity, philosophical assumptions such as these imply the impossibility of a historical “meta-narrative” – a body of knowledge or a universal standard independent of particular histories and cultures that would define goals for humanity as such. The claim to any such perspective functions as a mask, these theorists frequently argue, for a quite particular cultural narrative, and one that is anything but benign. So for a prime example, on the basis of the superiority granted by their scientific enlightenment and advanced civilization, the moderns of Europe engaged in imperialist and instrumentalist subjugations of peoples all over the world on a scale and with a violence that only modern technology could achieve. Science itself has not produced a universal worldview but has fragmented into ever-more-specialized fields of study that derive their meaning and purpose from the willful, power-driven aims of the cultures that fund their researches. The universal humanity that is imagined by cosmopolitan moderns turns out to consist in a narrow society of like minds shaped by historical acts of exclusion and suppression of populations who exhibited differences, with the consequence that the like minds are typically alike, as well, in class, gender, and race. The only hope of envisioning alternatives, in the face of the power of a dominant, totalizing modern culture, is in the exposure of the illusions of modernity, the unmasking or deconstruction, to whatever extent possible, of the metaphysical-linguistic constructions that have made the edifice of modernity seem to constitute the very essence of the real (see, for example, Lyotard 1984; Descombes 1980; Coyne 2011; Fontana-Giusti 2013).

In the eyes of those who embrace such premises, a person who speaks the language of modernity, who endorses its aims and holds fast to its promise, is not simply mistaken but naïve, and not merely naïve but dangerously so. To attempt to debate the value of modernity’s aims in its own rationalistic terms would be to grant that there is something within those terms that could reverse modernity’s underlying self-deception, but there is not. Even to express a common liberal-democratic interest in liberation or peace would grant too much to the unacknowledged power motives that such terms disguise.

The architects who came to be called “postmodern” were captivated by the challenges posed by these theories to the modern worldview that they had been taught to instill in their architecture through abstract conceptualism, a fetishism of technology, and a “timelessness” that presumably stepped out of history. An architect did not have to grasp the details of the new philosophies to realize that their critiques were backed by a rare degree of sophistication and intelligence, nor to realize that architecture was being called upon to overcome the blunted tropes of modernity with a new burst of creativity and artistry. The radical character of the theoretical ideas granted permission for dramatically novel explorations in design, and this just in time to capitalize on pent-up public fatigue over the by-now-predictable routines of the International Style.

Ironic historicism

Liberation from the rationalism and functionalism of the modern-architecture mainstream offered architects of the 1980s the chance to once again draw upon elements of architectural history, as Yamasaki had done. But whereas Yamasaki had proceeded with openly modernist intentions and with a great deal of reverence for the past, postmodern architects, working against a background of the delegitimization of grand theories and dreams of progress, often made their historical quotations in deliberately idiosyncratic ways, so as to defy, at once, both the modernist prohibition of historicism and the traditionalist enshrinement of architecture’s past glories. There could be an eclecticism that was both traditional and modern while also being neither, an eclecticism that self-consciously flaunted its doctrinal transgressions while shielding itself with postmodern theory from critical condemnations of its uninhibited inventiveness and light touch. At times the representative designs could be called “new classicism,” given their overt historical references (Jencks 1980; Aslet 1988), but when the Palladio windows and Greek pilasters were made oversized and set at odd juxtapositions, when Mansard roofs and Gothic pinnacles were done in curtain-wall glass, clearly something mischievous was undercutting any simple attribution of classicism or formalism.

Philip Johnson had the distinction of being a pioneer in both American modernism and postmodernism. Establishing a definitive modernist reputation by partnering with Mies on the 1958 Seagram Building on New York’s Park Avenue, his New Formalism of the 1950s and ’60s already bucked the narrowest of modernist strictures, but he added his definitive postmodern statement to the New York skyline in the defiantly whimsical AT&T building of 1984 (now 550 Madison Avenue), with its multi-story Roman arches at the entrances and a crown reminiscent of a Chippendale Highboy chest of drawers. Though Yamasaki had no interest in making any such equivalent move, after his death the surviving firm of Minoru Yamasaki Associates did produce designs that fit the postmodern description, allowing one to imagine what Yamasaki’s characteristics pushed in this direction might be like. The Xiwang Tower (1999) in Dalian, Liaoning, China, for example, sports the alternating thick and thin white pinstripes and Roman arches that recall Yamasaki’s M&T Bank building in Buffalo, New York, and similar buildings, but the arches at the base of the Chinese tower are closer to the exaggerated versions of Johnson’s AT&T building than to Yamasaki’s own, while the tower’s crown sports fan-like shapes that are more decoratively representational than what one would expect from Yamasaki himself.

In a Yamasaki-inspired postmodernism one would expect that however much the historical allusions or decorative features were elaborated, the building would retain a certain calm and lightness, but much of historicist postmodernism has a heavier feel to it, recalling traditional stone and brick structures held up by their walls. A striking example, given its context and our focus, is the complex of the Fisher and Bendheim Halls at Princeton University (1990). Standing adjacent to

AT&T Building/550 Madison Avenue by Philip Johnson

Photo: David Shankbone

Yamasaki’s Robertson Hall, these buildings, by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, take their cue from a variety of older Princeton buildings.

The building’s limestone-trimmed strip window, big bay window, and ornamentation adapt … Princeton’s Gothic-Elizabethan architectural vocabulary, but as a stylistic abstrac tion, a representation rather than a substantiation of the whole.

(Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc. n.d.)

Fisher Hall, Princeton, by Venturi and Scott Brown

Fisher and Bendheim are connected both stylistically and physically to Corwin Hall, the building that Yamasaki had insisted be moved in order to give his Robertson Hall prominence. The quotation of older, bulkier stylistic elements of that brick building serves to highlight through contrast, appropriately enough, the modernism of Yamasaki’s structure – or even, we might say, its “futuristic” look.

Postmodern violence and anti-violence

Architects who came to be called “deconstructive postmodernists” or “deconstructivists” had varying relations to theory. In some cases, theoretical foundations are not as important as the simple sculptural freedom that the questioning of orthodox modernism allowed. Such is no doubt the case with Frank Gehry, whose work represents, more than the architectural instantiation of any theory, a realization, in the realm of architecture, of the kind of freedom that modern sculptors, painters, and musicians had long enjoyed. But with figures such as Peter Eisenman and Daniel Libeskind one sees attempts to realize in built form some of the convictions at the heart of deconstructive theory. Libeskind is of particular relevance to our subject, having been selected to redesign Ground Zero and, originally, the Freedom Tower. In his writings, the themes of Nietzsche and post-structuralism provide the driving core of the prose, while its verbal style manifests the refusal to be pinned down to anything so bloodless as discursive argumentation.

In his approach to both theory and design, an emphasis falls on that which is absent, its having been expressed as a trace of its occurrence. This approach ensures that one will not fall into the illusion that one can possess reality in some eternal present or unity of time, or to imagine sites located within a totality of space, or to believe Euclidean geometry to be somehow ultimate: “to speak about architecture … is to speak about the paradigm of the irrational. In my view, the best works of the contemporary spirit come from the irrational, while what prevails in the world, what dominates and often kills, does so always in the name of Reason” (Libeskind 1992, 82).

If one is inclined to call post-structuralists who reject the very possibility of conceptual truth believers in nothing, or nihilists, Nietzsche long ago anticipated the charge and reversed it, for if conceptual truths are chimerical constructions, it is those who believe in them who are the believers in “nothings.” In the case of Libeskind, it would be particularly mistaken, for a different reason, to call his perspective nihilist, for his nominalism has historical roots older than Nietzsche’s thought, harkening back to medieval nominalism, which was a theological position, holding that no human concepts can begin to embrace the infinite majesty of the divine. The absence that Libeskind seeks to communicate in his work is redolent with the mysteries at the heart of experiences of nothingness and loss. This powerful dimension of his approach, fully apparent in his Jewish Museum Berlin (1999) and Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, England (2001), explains his appeal to the commission charged with selecting an architect to plan the new World Trade Center site, an appeal augmented by his own family history of loss and survival in the Holocaust. His selection ensured that the memorial dimension of the redevelopment would be unquestionably authentic and profound, while the architectural aesthetic would be cutting-edge.

Jewish Museum Berlin by Daniel Libeskind

Photo: Jorge Royan

Photo: Jorge Royan

But although the theories of Libeskind and other deconstructivists condemn the violence of ideologues, and while their suitability to the memorializing of loss is undeniable, it is also true that what they want to do to the Western intellectual tradition is a thoroughgoing kind of theoretical violence, and while the architecture of the movement is overwhelmingly powerful in memorializing the victims of violence, it arguably does so, in part, by memorializing the violence. As deconstructivist architecture was becoming a major trend in the 1980s, the prominent American architect Moshe Safdie began speaking out against what he perceived as the violence of its imagery.

On first seeing a photograph of the collapsed Nimitz Freeway in Oakland, California destroyed by the 1989 earthquake, I was shocked to realize that here was a “structure” that embodied, via extraordinary natural violence, the closest real-life manifestation of architectural Deconstructivism I had seen. I do not make the analogy with human tragedy lightly, but I am convinced that the striking physical resemblance found here begs several fundamental questions. Why have some artists and architects endeavored to perpetuate, magnify, document, even celebrate the violence surrounding us?… In architecture, we have recently sought to create – in the imagery of violently colliding forms – analogies to the random spatial experience associated with explosion and collapse. Disruptions we observe in nature when systems move out of equilibrium have provided profound inspiration.

(Safdie 2009, 10–11)

Our age is one of unprecedented violence, Safdie observes, and there is undeniably a kind of truthfulness in acknowledging the fact. But the further question regards the creative response to that violence. Our media fixate on violence with ambiguous results – expressing shock while feeding public fascination, condemning the actions of perpetrators while enlarging their fame.

This complex of motivations Safdie connects with the concept of hubris, a word that he employs with both ancient and modern connotations. The modern sense is, of course, the quality of pride; but the ancient Greek usage indicated specific forms of violence and intimidation (including sexual assault and shaming) prohibited by law (Fisher 2003). Safdie sees this hubris reproduced in architecture that mimics disruptive forces in order to disrupt the expectations of users. It is a question not of the reality of the violence suggested but of the artistic response.

To be sure, the world has always been filled with violence. Nevertheless, and perhaps in response, I feel increasingly committed to a search for calmness and serenity in my own work. The more surrounded I become with acts of hubris, the greater my search for serenity – its opposite, and, I hope, antidote.

(2009, 11)

Obviously, the words could have been spoken by Yamasaki.

A different take on the implications of postmodern theory, based in the thought of the Italian postmodern thinker Gianni Vattimo, has a different kind of connection to Yamasaki and the theme of fragility. Vattimo draws from the failures of rationalism the necessity of an exploratory, nonassertive “weak thought” that diligently examines the contours of experience while refusing to make the kind of pronouncements that would aspire to the status of doctrines or truths. Again the assumption is that belief in truths is at the core of all justifications of the harms that individuals and nations perpetrate on one another. His thought has been appropriated into the advocacy of a “weak architecture,” defined in a variety of ways but in an especially relevant form by Juhani Pallasmaa, who argues, in words that might be thought to echo Yamasaki, that cultural aspirations to domination produce architecture designed to have a powerful visual image and impact, whereas cultural aspirations that seek alternatives to domination might produce an architecture that communicates in a sensitive manner, engaging all of the powers of perception, and especially the immediacy of the tactile imagination. Works by Alvar Aalto, Peter Zumthor, and Steven Holl exhibit some of the qualities that Pallasmaa favors, with the multi-sensuality of gardens (he mentions Lawrence Halprin) serving also as a model (Pallasmaa 2000). With the danger of the term “weak” being taken in a literally structural sense, Pallasmaa proposes instead “fragile architecture,” seeking, then, the kind of positive connotations of that term that I have associated with Yamasaki’s delicacy but pursuing them with postmodern intentions of indirection and discontinuity that repudiate the assumptions grounding, among other things, Yamasaki’s modernist humanism.

References

Aslet, Clive, et al. 1988. The New Classicism in Architecture and Urbanism. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Blake, Peter. 1977. Form Follows Fiasco: Why Modern Architecture Hasn’t Worked. Boston: Little, Brown.

Coyne, Richard. 2011. Derrida for Architects. Milton Park, Abingdon: Routledge.

Descartes, René. 1931. “Discourse on Method.” In The Philosophical Works of Descartes. Vol. 1. Translated by E.S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Descombes, Vincent. 1980. Modern French Philosophy. Translated by L. Scott-Fox and J.M. Harding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fisher, Nick. 2003. “The Law of hubris in Athens.” In Nomos: Essays in Athenian Law, Politics, and Society, edited by P. Cartledge, P. Millett, and S. Todd, 123–8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fontana-Giusti, Gordana. 2013. Foucault for Architects. Milton Park, Abingdon: Routledge.

Gratz, Roberta Brandes. 2010. The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. New York: Nation Books.

Jencks, Charles, editor. 1980. Post-Modernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture. London: Academy Editions.

Jencks, Charles. 1991. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. New York: Rizzoli.

Libeskind, Daniel. 1992. “Between the Lines: The Jewish Museum, Berlin.” Research in Phenomenology 22: 82–7.

Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by G. Bennington and B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2006. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” In The Nietzsche Reader, edited by K.A. Pearson and D. Large. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Pallasmaa, Juhani. 2000. “Hapticity and Time: Notes on Fragile Architecture.” Architectural Review 207, no. 1239 (May): 78–84.

Safdie, Moshe. 2009. “The Medium and Language of Architecture.” In Moshe Safdie. Vol. 1, edited by W. Kohn and D. Murphy. Mulgrave/Melbourne: Images Publishing Group.

Venturi, Robert. 2002. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York: The Museum of Modern Art.

Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Inc. n.d. “Fisher and Bendheim Halls, Princeton University.” Project Description. http://venturiscottbrown.org/pdfs/PrincetonFisherBendheimHalls01.pdf.

Wolfe, Tom. 1981. From Bauhaus to Our House. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1981. Letter to David Lawrence, Jr., December 21, 1981. Walter P. Reuther Library Minoru Yamasaki Papers, Wayne State University, Box 16, Folder 11.

Chapter 11
The question of preservation

Buildings are designed with a particular life span in mind, though the designers’ projections may contain more hopes than knowledge. Buildings will last a certain number of years on the strength of their materials and construction, their basic functionality, and their luck in escaping destruction through conflict or natural catastrophe. But there is a moment at which every building approaches a tipping point: the decision will need to be made as to whether to preserve or replace it. That is part of the fragility of architecture. In the face of this fragility, one may ask what force is most crucial to preserving an architectural work beyond that moment of decision? I would answer: it must be loved. How much love, how deep, by whom and how many vary greatly with circumstances, so that the meaning of “loved” must necessarily be vague. Yet the claim is not an expression of airy romantic sentiments so much as a simple empirical observation: buildings tend to last when there are enough people with enough influence and resources who want them to last. If they are somewhat admired by some people, they have something of a chance of being preserved; if they are deeply loved by many, the chances are much better.

There need not be any shame in a building living its allotted days of usefulness and passing into memory, as mortal creatures do. Glory or beauty can be of one’s time and for one’s time while counting as no less than a stellar achievement. But there is, of course, a special distinction in being selected for preservation. It says that there is love of an architectural creation that spans generations, that it is worth taking the trouble to make a gift of the past to the future, bequeathing not just a memory but a tangible legacy. The specific reasons for doing so will, again, vary in specific instances. A building may have a timeless quality or may constitute an exemplary representative of the architecture of its day; it may contain artistry in exceptional abundance or of a unique kind; it may mark historical events, serving as their lasting emblem; or any number of other reasons. It is an exceptional honor to an architect (or the legacy of an architect) when, out of this great congeries of motives, his or her works are designated for ongoing restoration and maintenance.

The reputation of an architect, then, need not rest solely on the question of preservation, and yet that question focuses the matter of an architect’s significance rather efficiently. If the works are preserved, they have been judged worth preserving, with reasons supporting that judgment. Where buildings have been demolished or left to ruin, there are equally discernable reasons for the dissatisfaction or neglect that has led to those actions. Max Page has pointed out that in our day the whole question of historic preservation may well need to be rethought in light of the crisis of climate change, given that both demolition and construction emit large quantities of greenhouse gases. We may need to simply save as many buildings as possible for as long as possible, regardless of their particular merits (Page 2016, 16–18). Such a mentality, however, is as yet far from common, and preservationism remains a field where a specific case must be made for each candidate under consideration.

There are many Yamasaki buildings that survive today on their inherent strength and suitability to their circumstances without the help of preservationists. For example, Steven Spehn, director of facilities at Carleton College, has described the several Yamasaki buildings on his campus as “good, strong buildings,” not needing, for the most part, special attention. After more than 50 years since its completion, Carleton’s 1961 Olin Hall of Science needed repairs to the cast-concrete decorative elements of its façade but was otherwise sound. When the decision was made to expand and update the college’s science facilities, it was a newer building, Mudd Hall, that was selected for demolition to make way for a new Integrated Science Facility, which the architects of EYP designed to incorporate the back of Olin, and most of its Romanesque tracery, into an interior atrium of the new building.

Many of Yamasaki’s works continue to be sources of pride and pleasure for those who use them. Visiting the Michigan State Medical Society building, I notice a copy of Yamasaki’s A Life in Architecture displayed in the waiting room and am met there by a staff eager to share their praise for their workspace. At Yamasaki’s American Concrete Institute building in Detroit, a manager exclaims, “We love the building!” A faculty member in the Arts and Crafts Society building describes her pleasure in having an office that opens out on its own private garden. As I look around the lobby of the 1976 Toledo Government Center, a staff member notices and says, “It’s a wonderful building, isn’t it?” Standing with a security guard at the base of the Rainier Tower, as we gaze up together, he remarks, “Pretty awesome!” I ask a faculty member in William James Hall, “How does the building work for you?” “Love it!” Children can be seen exploring the terraces of the Pacific Science Center with as much glee as they ever did. On a warm evening, Princeton students congregate around the large pool containing the Fountain of Freedom outside of Robertson Hall. Such signs of appreciation, though anecdotal, are so common as to seem unavoidable – a remarkable phenomenon, given the age of the buildings and the relative indifference that the critical establishment feels toward them.

The satisfaction and pride expressed by the users of these buildings is the kind that can motivate preservation efforts. The feelings are particular, of course, to the individual structures and the people who live and work within and among them, yet there are certain general patterns that one can identify. In the great ritual spaces such as the synagogues in Michigan and Illinois, there is a clear appreciation of the artistic ambition that Yamasaki brought to their design, an appreciation augmented by the communal history that has been built up in these spaces over the decades. The airports in Dhahran and St. Louis reflect an equal, though different, kind of artistic and structural ambition, trying to bring a rare degree of symbolic depth to projects that would normally be dully functionalist. It is perhaps for their success in altering the very archetype of the airport that they are the only two Yamasaki buildings to make it into Phaidon Press’s massive atlas of twentieth-century world architecture (Terragni et al. 2012).

In a building such as the offices of the American Concrete Institute (now home of the nonprofit EcoWorks), what perhaps stands out most is that an architect would bring so much design innovation to such a small and typical project; and similarly, in some of the early schools and churches, that he would invest so much architectural and pedagogical thinking into such a small budget. Then there are the minor projects that derive their significance more from their association with the architect than by their inherent qualities. A small building on a triangular lot in Royal Oak, Michigan, originally a pharmacy building (sporting the innovation of a drive-up window) and later the offices of Know Advertising, bears a plaque outside the entrance announcing that it is a Yamasaki design of 1955. There are early houses, as well, that garner attention and care because they are his, though they may not stand out in other respects.

Land’s Pharmacy/Know Advertising

These various sorts of motivations are discernable in cases where Yamasaki buildings have been spared from demolition and/or have been restored. St. Louis’s Lambert Airport was already undergoing a 70 million-dollar renovation when, on Good Friday 2011, it was hit by the strongest tornado the area had seen in 40 years. In the response to the extensive damage, there was no doubting that repairs should be made and renovation should continue (Rust 2016, 270–2). At Wayne State University the McGregor Memorial Conference Center pool and sculpture garden were restored to their original state and rededicated on May 1, 2013 (Wayne State University n.d.). This splendid restoration reveals to a new generation the complementary relationship between this space and the building that stands above it. Plans continue to do the same for the pool that originally surrounded the DeRoy Auditorium. Cases such as these show how certain of Yamasaki’s designs have managed to garner ongoing or renewed enthusiasm and support.

The case of the Century Plaza Hotel provides a more complicated example. Real estate investor Michael Rosenfeld, who planned to demolish the hotel and replace it with new development, was perhaps surprised to see a strong grassroots movement arise to prevent it from happening. After months of negotiation he ultimately agreed not only to save the hotel but to undertake a major renovation – part of a $2.5 billion investment that adds two curvaceous residential towers to the site. The motion picture artist Diane Keaton, a trustee with the National Trust for Historic Preservation and a leader in the effort to save the building, said, when Rosenfeld announced his intention to preserve the Century Plaza, “I am so glad that everyone came together and found a way to preserve this architectural gem. You see? It can be done. Development and preservation are not mutually exclusive” (Groves 2010). There were clearly historical reasons to save the Century Plaza. It had served, for decades, as a popular pied-à-terre for celebrities and foreign dignitaries. Presidents had made visits there – President Ronald Reagan so often that journalists came to call it his “Western White House.” But there were design features that made it appealing to these prominent people – the elegant curve of its floor plan (done, in part, to keep the hallways from seeming endless), the delicate balustrades of its balconies, the shimmering metal panels on the exterior, still vibrant after decades of use. The architectural success of the hotel can be credited with earning Yamasaki the commission to design, in the mid-1970s, office space near the hotel, which he conceived as a pair of triangular buildings – twin towers – which, in angling toward each other, complement the curve of the hotel.

Century Plaza Hotel

If the Century Plaza Hotel can be taken as a test case, then the outlook for preservation of Yamasaki buildings shows signs of promise. But a more accurate test might be the Reynolds Metals Sales office outside of Detroit. It has not been in continuous use, having been altered to function as a fitness center and then, in more recent years, standing vacant. It has no glamorous history of famous occupants behind it; its distinction is almost entirely architectural, and historical within the narrow field of the history of modernism. If such a building would be preserved the reason would likely have to be a recognition of its architectural merits and its status as part of Yamasaki’s legacy.

Reynolds Metals Regional Sales Office

Meanwhile, there are cases that bear darker omens. A prime example is the story of the offices of Minoru Yamasaki and Associates in Troy, Michigan, where many of the architect’s most famous projects, including the World Trade Center, were designed. To one unfamiliar with the architect, the office building would not stand out, as it was one of his more minimalist designs, but as I have noted, there is significance in the fact that he chose low-profile, minimalist designs for the buildings he would occupy most: his office and his home. They are distillations of what Gyure calls the “Miesian-Japanese synthesis” that can be found at the core of so much of his work. To value the office building would be to value that distillation (which implies a relation of this design to his others) and to value it historically, as the place where so many of his designs came to life. Were a widespread and unequivocal value placed on Yamasaki’s legacy generally, the case for saving this building, a case that failed, would be easier to make.

The examples vary, then, in both their circumstances and their outcomes, but they tend to circle around similar issues, and especially the questions of historical importance and artistic merit. In both of these respects, any effort to protect Yamasaki’s legacy becomes embroiled with more general questions regarding the preservation of modern architecture of all kinds, and so helps to highlight those questions.

Historical grounds for preservation

Recent years have seen growth in the movement to preserve modern architecture. The organization Documention and Conservation of the Modern Movement, or “Docomomo,” is a prime example of the kind of coordinating work that architects, scholars, and preservationists can do to establish centers of advocacy at many levels: internationally, nationally, and through regional chapters. Yamasaki’s work has been a point of focus for the national organization, particularly through the writing and lectures of its founding president, Theodore Prudon. Organizations such as Michigan Modern have done similar work on a local scale.

The case for preservation that such organizations aim to make involves unique dilemmas. For much of architecture’s history, the value of persisting through time figured into the very conception of projects. Buildings that have lasted centuries have done so, in part, because they were meant to last in that way and because people who admire the buildings wanted to honor their inherent aspirations to immortality by preserving and restoring them. But modernism, by its very nature, turned away from history, riding into popular acceptance with a radical call to replace the old with the new, the antiquated design with something sleek and shiny, the outmoded technologies with state-of-the-art mechanics. As the buildings of the twentieth century themselves migrate from these latter categories to the former ones, is there an organic case to be made for their preservation, or do the principles that gave birth to these stunningly novel structures equally justify their relatively early demise? When the campaigns of preservationists gained momentum beginning in the late 1950s, it was the modernists, with their tear-it-down mentality, that they principally had to oppose. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, it is difficult to know to what extent the preservation of modernism is to be advocated on the same grounds of tradition and character that were used for nineteenth-century buildings or whether a different kind of case must be made. There is the question, too, as to whether modernist preservationists and the earlier kinds of preservationists can be allies or whether they will continue to have different interests and values (Prudon 2008, viii and Ch. 5).

The spirit of preservation was alive and well in the popular resistance to the construction of the World Trade Center. Stirred by the business owners of “Radio Row” (so called because of the many small electronics shops there), a highly vocal protest was mounted against the condemnation of the blocks, with signs and placards decrying the Port Authority’s attack on small business and the threat to human-scaled street life in the area (Glanz and Lipton 2003, Ch. 3). Troubled by the controversy, Yamasaki walked the blocks that were to be condemned, his response reflecting characteristic urban-renewal sensibilities: nothing of great architectural value would be lost, he thought, and the businesses could be moved without too much distress (1979, 112).

In 1974, Yamasaki was surprised to find himself in a head-on confrontation with preservationists over the construction of the Rainier Bank Tower and Plaza in Seattle, to be built on property owned by the University of Washington and ultimately under the authority of the university’s board of regents. Civic activists, including the prominent architect, artist, and University of Washington professor Victor Steinbrueck, had made great strides in garnering public and official support for the preservation of the city’s historic Pike Place Market and Pioneer Square neighborhood, both of which had been slated for drastic urban renewal makeovers. Now the preservationists’ sights turned to the Rainier Plaza project, which proposed demolition of a massive three-building complex, the White-Henry-Stuart building, constructed between 1908 and 1915 and featuring that era’s stately brickwork and terra-cotta ornamentation (similar to the surviving Cobb Building across the street). Yamasaki’s vision for the plaza had no place for the preservation of such buildings. It was to be a completely modern complex, with the unique opening-up of the tower’s base enhancing the open feeling of the entire block and the low profile of the retail spaces in the plaza heightening the drama of the skyscraper on the pedestal (Hines 1980, 364–75). The original site plan drawings for the project include more landscaping and greenery than was eventually realized. The retail spaces that actually emerged had more the feel of a shopping mall than an urban open space, in part because they were part of a trend in downtown revitalization efforts at the time: to create in urban centers the same mall-shopping experience that people were enjoying in the suburbs.

The Cobb Building by Howells and Stokes

But the activist voices were making a different case for downtown revitalization. As Jane Jacobs articulated in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the appeal of cities is to be found in the ways they differ from suburbs, and this has to do, above all, with streets made lively and interesting by the presence of storefronts, cultural venues, and residences that come right up to the sidewalks and interact with them. Old buildings, it was argued, do this better than the modern ones, such that the aims of revitalization and preservation can go hand in hand. This case was made to the university regents by an organization of Seattle activists and received enough sympathy for the board to ask Yamasaki to weigh in on the possibility of revising the plan to include preservation of the historic building.

The architect’s July 9 letter to the regents expresses surprise at the support that the older buildings were receiving, as they “do not enhance in any way the experience which should be fundamental to man during the time he spends in the city.” That experience is grounded in life-enhancing open spaces. Drawing comparison with several great public spaces in New York City, he laments that in the university’s metropolitan tract, only the small plaza at the base of his own IBM building provides any relief from the heavy density of this urban core. In contrast to the dull repetition of the buildings that currently lined the streets, the openness created by Rainier’s thin base, along with the greenery of the new landscaping, will provide a “complete and delightful surprise” as one walks along the street. Saving the White-Henry-Stuart Building for historic purposes, he writes, “would be a useless gesture,” because it possesses neither graceful proportions nor elegant materials. It does not stand out. Buildings like it are plentiful in cities throughout the country (Yamasaki 1974).

By this time the controversy had generated enough heat to earn it national attention, and Wolf von Eckardt, writing for the Washington Post in late July, sided vigorously with the activists, attacking both the concept of the project and Yamasaki’s design for it. Von Eckardt compared the tower’s “free-form perch, veneered in beige marble and gracelessly curving outward” to outdated Detroit automobile styling. He charged that the last block in Seattle where “pleasantly scaled buildings add up to an attractive and elegant shopping street” was to be wrecked to reproduce the slick, mawkish, concrete-heavy monotony of a suburban mall (Hines 1980, 376).

Three months later, Ada Louise Huxtable weighed in, cranking up the invective even further. Like von Eckardt, she took the opportunity to attack the project both for its aesthetics and its wrongheaded urbanism. Its design was “strictly deadpan dreadful – gimmicks masquerading as graces.” Echoing Jacobs and similar activists, she decried the Rainier Plaza design’s weddedness to clichéd ideas of “open space” that had by now proven themselves to be destroyers of the tight-knit interactions that give cities their lifeblood. The project, she suggests, is not so much being built as being perpetrated. “The name of this discredited architectural game is scalelessness, discontinuity, inhumanity and crimes against urban nature” (Huxtable 1974).

For a second time, Yamasaki was moved to send a response to Huxtable. He was stunned by the tone of the piece, which seemed to him so emotional as to sound like it was settling a personal vendetta. In making this point he compares her to a colleague that he did indeed believe to be motivated by a personal grudge, one who had been a classmate of his, whom he had invited, out of sympathy, to work for him as a designer some years earlier but whose contributions Yamasaki ultimately found wanting, ending in the designer’s dismissal and return to Seattle. Since that day, Yamasaki writes, this architect (whom he does not name, but is quite possibly Victor Steinbrueck) had done nothing but criticize Seattle buildings, especially Yamasaki’s buildings (Steinbrueck 1956; Yamasaki 1978). But what sort of similar grudge could Huxtable have? Why single out his projects as criminal and inhuman when so many more dreadful and thoughtless projects were being constructed all across the nation? His letter defends his project to her in terms similar to his case to the Board of Regents: the older buildings do not actually activate the street; they are dull, with an ugly courtyard. His own design attempts to bring to Seattle a beloved public space like (once again) Rockefeller Center (Yamasaki n.d.).

In all of these reactions one can see how deeply the modernist urban development assumptions were rooted in Yamasaki’s thinking, and particularly the notion of obsolescence, which is not the same as being worn out, dilapidated. Buildings exceed their time relative to what may replace them, the value added by new structures, the money to be made in the process (see Abramson 2016). There is nothing intrinsically valuable about old buildings, Yamasaki clearly believed; one should never preserve them out of historical interest alone. There is nothing intrinsically valuable about urban density, either – in fact it can be oppressive, requiring spaces that offer relief. The great thing about New York City is not its street life per se but its parks and plazas that offer stages for public life and communal celebration (Seattle Times 1974). He could grasp the idea of urban vitality but saw it in the new rather than the old. He could name many historical buildings that he would want to save but couldn’t wrap his head around the idea that one might want to save historic buildings simply to maintain a mixture of the old and the new.

The irony, of course, is that the question now applies to Yamasaki’s creations themselves. They have a central role in the history of mid-century modernism, while the larger history that surrounds their fate is as fundamental to the American story as one could wish. But is this importance sufficient to preserve the actual buildings and not just their memory?

Grounds in artistic merit

An architect and university professor in the field expressed to me his lack of enthusiasm for Yamasaki’s work but then qualified his views by saying, “these issues really come down to matters of taste.” That is a rare statement to hear on the subject, and a refreshing one, given how much moralistic rhetoric is expended, in the world of architectural criticism, to mask simple aesthetic preferences. The question of taste comes to the fore in Yamasaki’s claim that the decision whether to preserve buildings should rest on their artistic merits. In the debate over the Rainier Tower and Plaza, his central line of argument was that the new development would be beautiful, erasing aspects of the existing structures that are ugly. In this claim he was expressing his own taste for the new but also his conviction that public tastes would land on his side or come around to it eventually.

The question of aesthetic preferences is also present in Yamasaki’s consternation over Huxtable’s attacks. Why could she not simply say that his designs did not suit her taste? Why was it necessary to single him out so vindictively as the target of insults framed in the language of destiny and moral rectitude? The situation is clearly one where tastes are involved, but in his puzzlement Yamasaki was perhaps missing how difficult it is to disentangle artistic merit from historical significance and political values. He was correct in his suspicion that Huxtable bore a grudge, but it was not a grudge against him personally (as she tried to reassure him) (Huxtable 1975). It was rather a frustration with herself that she expressed to Robert Campbell in a 1993 interview, when asked if she had any regrets regarding her judgments over the course of her 14-year career as architecture critic for the New York Times:

The only thing I really screwed up on was Yamasaki, because it was shortly after I came to the Times. He was doing a new kind of work, I thought, quite early on – you see, this was the ’60s – that was going to lead us out of the traps of Modernism. Actually, it turned out to be a bunch of clichés.

(Campbell 1993)

She had not merely looked to Yamasaki for a certain style that may be suited to one’s taste or not; she looked to him to be an important leader in the evolution of modernism. The added level of irritation in her harsh assessments of his later works, then, derives from a particular disappointment: that Yamasaki’s aesthetic did not command the following that she had expected of it – and that, in her ultimate estimation, it lacked sufficient originality and seriousness to do so.

The impact that Huxtable had looked for was indeed something to which Yamasaki aspired. His convictions regarding the purpose of architecture, its role in modern life, were voiced with the intention of changing the way things were done. Like some of the most ambitious architects in the nation’s history, he wanted to define an American architecture, one that would be widely recognized as embodying American ideals and doing so beautifully.

Rainier Tower

Photo: Balthazar Korab

The Rainier Tower continues today to appear on lists of the Seattle’s most “iconic” buildings (though not without persistent objections from detractors). Rainier Plaza functioned for years as a viable space for restaurants and retail stores but never attained the same kind of recognition as a valuable work of architecture. As a low-density use faced with steeply rising real estate values, it became vulnerable and has now been razed and replaced with a new office tower (designed by Yamasaki’s one-time collaborating firm, NBBJ) that narrows from its base upwards, in something of a reverse of Yamasaki’s pedestal. One can interpret the plaza’s death sentence as a judgment of taste: the tower passed an aesthetic test that the plaza did not; but there is also an urban-historical dimension at work. Critics of the mall-centric approach to downtown retail seem to have won the day; it is more widely believed today that downtowns have their appeal in the ways that differ from suburbia, that there is really a different set of desires that draw one to the urban retail experience.

Will the public continue to support Yamasaki’s artistic vision? Can the values of serenity, surprise, and delight capture the imagination sufficiently to muster grassroots support for preservation when push comes to shove? The aesthetic of elegance and peace clearly has widespread appeal. Americans enjoy powerful but elegant arts. People like ballet, for example, an art where incredible feats of strength and control are put in the service of supremely graceful movement. Yet it is also true that more people like American football, where most exhibitions of strength are of the brute-force variety and where only the most remarkable feats of skill are compared to ballet. Yamasaki’s aesthetic does have public appeal, and the public could perhaps be persuaded to find more appeal than it presently does, but, given the state of public tastes, there are likely to be limits on how much one can expect to expand his support on artistic merit alone.

The presence of Yamasaki

In this study I have been making a multifaceted case for Yamasaki’s significance. Now I would suggest that this multiform importance may be translated into an equally multiform case for the preservation of his works. But rather than draw this case out in detail, which would involve much repetition of what I have argued already, perhaps I can simply point to a quality that formed the central motivation, from the beginning, for the study itself: the presence of Yamasaki. Yamasaki is present in contemporary America, as well as other parts of the world, in such forms that we would benefit from maintaining and cultivating that presence.

In saying this I certainly have in mind the presence, in many cities, of his surviving buildings that continue to communicate their intentions to those who use them, buildings that are enjoyed and admired as they always were. But I mean also the manner in which Yamasaki is present in those buildings, or through them, for he was an auteur in a highly collaborative field, an innovator in a profession dominated by derivations, an artist who put a recognizable stamp on things to a degree that most architects do not. The very proportions of his own body are expressed in the narrow ratios of his modules and window frames. While we can recognize his influence and his style in many buildings by others, in preserving the originals we preserve the origins, the originators, of that style, which originals offer more to discover and appreciate than the buildings that are derived from them.

The man who is present in these buildings was one who puzzled over architectural problems that remain present – still at stake, still argued, still in need of creative insight and exploration. Architecture remains torn between the inspiration of the founders of modernism and a now dizzying variety of explorations into alternative directions. Yamasaki worked within that kind of tension, wrestling with questions of architectural meaning, purpose, and style with which every architect must continue to wrestle. His attempts – both the successes and the failures – illuminate possibilities, sometimes unexpected possibilities, in that difficult process of deliberation. Out of his story and his many experiments may come, even today, inspirations – perhaps possibilities that are new because they have been long overlooked. Such inspirations occur most often in direct encounters with the works themselves, moving through their halls, feeling the scale of one’s body in their spaces, breathing the air and hearing the sounds that their walls enclose.

Nowhere is the presence of Yamasaki’s legacy felt more palpably than in Detroit, where an architectural firm bearing his name and claiming lineage from his original firm has set up operations in the historic Fisher building near the campus of Wayne State University. The legacy of Yamasaki in Detroit is part of the city’s collective memory of a time when it set the standard for architectural innovation in America, a memory that is vital to a city seeking to reimagine itself and its future.

Yamasaki was a person who was battered and buoyed by dynamics of American politics and culture that remain present among us: prejudice, fear, exclusion, violence, but also resources, ingenuity, and opportunity that can produce dramatic tales of improbable success. His buildings that remain among us are testimonies to the story of obstacles and their overcoming that his life embodied and that so many people of similar background and disposition continue to embody.

Yamasaki is present, finally, in the corners of countless hearts, where one can go to visit emotional places of sadness and loss, the kind of tragedy that changes everything and calls upon us to reflect on what is most important in life. Since September 11, 2001, we have learned well how to occupy those corners of the heart with moods of mourning and resilience, but in exploring the wider works of the architect we may learn to fill out this sadness with the qualities of joy that are nested in atmospheres of healing tranquility, qualities that await discovery in every product of his hands that remains.

Buildings are uncanny things. They can function as nothing more than a tool or an appliance, used for a time for particular purposes, then left aside, bought and sold on the market like any piece of merchandise. But as they provide the chambers in which we live out the meaning of our lives, and as the shapes of their features contour the form of that meaning-seeking, we can come to relate to them not only as living things but as intimates. In serving as companions to our story they can become the symbolic repositories of its significance, every part of them invested with feeling. And as they serve and bear this wealth of meaning, they can carry that meaning beyond us, for they frequently outlive us, like old trees that survive generations, providing a permanence that adds weight to the stories they carry.

And yet, like old trees, buildings are susceptible to the ravages of nature and human wiles. Reflecting on the life of buildings, we can think of all those structures that we have seen go derelict and the many that have been swept away, and in such reflections the two sides of the significance of Yamasaki’s buildings – their aspirations to gentle, graceful, intimate beauty and their mortal, sometimes tragic, fate – seem to come together, for what is more achingly beautiful than the gentle glories of this world felt with a full sense of their passing? Tales of the destruction of buildings, as they recall the surprising fragility of architecture, can evoke a deeper, more heartfelt sense of what is precious about them. “Precious” is one of those words that is used in architecture as an insult, a word that many critics would not hesitate to attach to the works of Yamasaki, seeing in that word another descriptor of his superficiality. Yet is it not among the most profound of existential truths that one may ponder – that life is precious? Is it not in our openness to this truth that we are most in tune with what is rich and beautiful in this world?

References

Abramson, Daniel M. 2016. Obsolescence: An Architectural History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Campbell, Robert. 1993. “The Shape of Architecture Bothers a Trusted Critic: A Doyenne of Design Laments a Swing toward Pessimism.” The Boston Globe, January 24.

Glanz, James and Lipton, Eric. 2003. City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center. New York: Time Books.

Groves, Martha. 2010. “Deal Spares Century Plaza Hotel from Wrecking Ball.” Los Angeles Times, February 11.

Hines, Neal O. 1980. Denny’s Knoll: A History of the Metropolitan Tract of the University of Washington. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.

Huxtable, Ada Louise. 1974. “Surviving Downtown ‘Progress’.” New York Times, October 20.

Huxtable, Ada Louise. 1975. Note from Ada Louise Huxtable to Yamasaki, July 8, 1975. Walter P. Reuther Library Minoru Yamasaki Papers, Wayne State University, Box 13, Folder 22.

Page, Max. 2016. Why Preservation Matters. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Prudon, Theodore H.M. 2008. Preservation of Modern Architecture. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Rust, Daniel L. 2016. The Aerial Crossroads of America: St. Louis’s Lambert Airport. St. Louis: Missouri History Museum Press.

Seattle Times. 1974. “Yamasaki ‘Surprised’,” Seattle Times, July 28.

Steinbrueck, Victor. 1956. Letter to Minoru Yamasaki, October 19, 1956. Walter P. Reuther Library Minoru Yamasaki Papers, Wayne State University, Box 4, Folder 6.

Terragni, E., et al. 2012. 20th-Century World Architecture: The Phaidon Atlas. Edited by E. Terragni, H. Thomas, and E. de Silva. London: The Phaidon Press.

Wayne State University. n.d. http://yamasaki.wayne.edu/restoration/mayrededication.html.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1974. Letter to the University of Washington Board of Regents, July 9, 1974. Walter P. Reuther Library Minoru Yamasaki Papers, Wayne State University, Box 14, Folder 7.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1978. Letter to Victor Steinbrueck, February 3, 1978. Walter P. Reuther Library Minoru Yamasaki Papers, Wayne State University, Box 15, Folder 14.

Yamasaki, Minoru. 1979. A Life in Architecture. New York: Weatherhill.

Yamasaki, Minoru. n.d. Letter to Ada Louise Huxtable. Walter P. Reuther Library Minoru Yamasaki Papers, Wayne State University, Box 26, Folder 28.

Photo credits

Archives of Michigan

Page 34: Kobe Consulate, MS 2010–5, Yamasaki Inc. Architectural Firm Records.

Caleb Hou, Designer

Page 164.

Getty Images

Page 183, Spencer Platt.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Carol M. Highsmith Archive: Page 179, LC-HS503–5048; Page 181, LC-HS503–1199; Page 214, LC-DIG-highsm-51141, LC-DIG-highsm-28238.

Balthazar Korab Collection: Page 7, F1295, no. 8; Page 9, F1349, no. 1, F1345, no. 7; Page 18, F1366, no. 10; Page 32, F1366, no. 12; Page 41, F1366, no. 5; Page 61, F1338, no. 7; Page 69, F1317, no. 20, F1317, no. 24; Page 95, F1351, no. 15; Page 97, F1324, no. 8; Page 98, F1324, no. 8; Page 99, F2307 no. 2, F1300, no. 10; Page 108, F1344, no. 17; Page 127, F1317, no. 10; Page 131, F1716, no. 3; Page 144, F1314, no. 6; Page 177, F1705 no. 10; Page 178, F1702, no. 1; Page 190, F1702, no. 5; Page 204, F1711, no. 8; Page 208, F1705, no. 2; Page 247, F1316, no. 9.

Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum

Page 137, Jay Godwin.

United States Government

U.S. Air Force: Page 216, Dennis Gould.

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development: Page 4.

U.S. Geological Survey: Page 46.

U.S. Navy: Page 184, Eric J. Tilford.

University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections

Page 21, Minoru Yamasaki UW 40914; Page 22, Minoru Yamasaki UW 40915; Page 23, Charles Lawrence, UW 40916.

Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Minoru Yamasaki Papers:

Page 51, 35152 (Pruitt-Igoe group); Page 133, 35710 (LBJ)

Wikimedia Creative Commons Licenses:

Attribution 2.0: Page 8, Michael R. Allen; Page 64, Benjamin Lipsman;

Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic: Page 116, Dustin M. Ramsey;

Attribution Share-alike 3.0 unported: Page 226, David Shankbone; Pages 229 and 230, Jorge Royan;

Attribution 4.0: Page 208, Adli Wahid;

4.0 International: Page 101, Suicasmo; Page 115, Beyond My Ken; Page 204, Luca Aless.

Cover photo: McGregor Sculpture Garden at Wayne State University, with foreground sculpture, Assunta, by George Kolbe.

Index

Al-Masjid Al-Harām mosque 207, 208

American Concrete Institute/Ecoworks 91, 93, 94, 157, 236

anti-Asian prejudice 25–7, 29, 31, 42, 135–6

AT&T Building/550 Madison Avenue 225, 226

Bacon, Francis 85, 87

Bauer, Catherine see Wurster, Catherine Bauer

Bauhaus, The 25, 108, 126, 160

Beaux Arts tradition 25, 86

Bertoia, Harry 159

bin Laden, Osama 206

Birmingham Unitarian Church 31

Brancusi, Constantin 106

Bristol, Katherine 50

Brown, Keith 12, 75

brutalism 154

Bunshaft, Gordon 39, 119, 132–3, 135–6

Butler University 14, 147, 149–50, 152

Campbell, Robert 8, 119, 246

Carleton College 147; Goodhue Hall 147, 149; Olin Hall of Science 128, 149, 236; West Gymnasium 107, 110

Cathedral of Christ the Savior 211

Century Plaza Hotel 10, 10, 238–40, 239

Century 21 Exhibition 25, 35, 38

De Tocqueville, Alexis 141–2

deconstructivist architecture 16, 228–31

democracy 13, 141–3

Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts/College for Creative Studies 91, 91, 92, 147, 236–7

Dhahran International Airport/King Abdulaziz Air Base 96–9, 97, 98, 100, 237

Documentation and Conservation of the Modern Movement (Docomomo) 11, 241

Doges Palace 100–2, 101, 203

DuSell, D. Lee 73, 99

Eastern Airlines Terminal 8, 9

Emerson, Ralph Waldo 67–8, 132

ethics 121–3

Farnsworth House 64, 65–6, 68, 70–1, 75, 126

Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Detroit Branch 30, 30

Federal Science Pavilion/Pacific Science Center 25, 39, 70, 105 – 7, 128, 200, 237; design of 70, 91, 102–5, 127, 197; reception of 35, 38

First Church of Christ, Scientist, Town and Country 114, 114

First United Methodist Church, Warren 171, 172, 193, 194

Fisher Building, Princeton 224–8, 227, 228

Fishman, Robert 50–2, 57

Fitch, James Marston 66

fragility: concept of 12, 57–8; in architecture 12–15, 135, 171, 231–2, 235, 251

Giedion, Sigfried 80, 86

Goldberger, Paul 3, 213

Gropius, Walter 6, 25, 39, 89

Grosse Point University School/University Liggett School 146, 147, 172

Ground Zero 3, 182, 185, 202, 209–11, 214

Guthard, Henry 12, 75, 100

Gyure, Dale Allen 11, 68, 241

Halprin, Lawrence 194, 232

Heath, William Womack 132–5

Helmuth, George 30–1, 37, 59

Holl, Steven 12, 232

Holy Ghost School/Harvest Church 31

humanism 26–7, 78–83

Huxtable, Ada Louise 55, 119, 125–6, 134–5, 163, 246; on Pruitt-Igoe 55, 60; on Rainier Tower 161, 244–5; on World Trade Center 180–1

IBM Building, Seattle 106, 129–30, 130, 159, 244

International Style 108, 113, 120, 142, 154, 160, 224

Irwin Library see Butler University

Islamic architecture 94–100

Jacobs, Jane 4–5, 50, 54, 56–7, 59–60, 243–4

Japanese Cultural and Trade Center, San Francisco 43, 43, 92, 95

Japanese culture 15, 34–5, 41–4; in architecture 34–5, 88–94, 135–6, 241

Jencks, Charles 4, 50, 60, 220

Jewish Museum, Berlin 229, 229, 230

John Cochran Garden Apartments 8, 8, 30–1

Johnson, Lady Bird 132, 136

Johnson, Lyndon Baines 132–4, 133, 136

Johnson, Philip 39, 80, 82, 89, 108, 113, 132–3, 225, 226

Kassabaum, George 37

Keaton, Diane 239

Kerr, Laurie 207–9

King Abdulaziz International Airport 7

Koenig, Fritz 176

Koolhaas, Rem 186–7

Lambert International Airport 5, 31–4, 33, 35, 37, 107, 238

Land’s Pharmacy/Know Advertising 237, 238

Le Corbusier 6, 25, 34, 70–1, 86, 124, 136; and urban design 48–50, 52–3

Lefevbre, Henri 82

Libeskind, Daniel 212, 228–30, 229, 230

Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum 132–8, 137

Lyotard, Jean-François 222–4

M&T Bank, Buffalo 106, 108, 159, 225

masculism 132–6

McGregor Memorial Conference Center see Wayne State University

Meehan, Eugene 55–7, 60

Meishusama Hall 43, 197, 199, 200

Michigan Consolidated Gas Company Building/One Woodward Avenue 119, 120, 129, 129, 157, 158

Michigan State Medical Society 106, 109, 110 236

Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 6, 25, 65–9, 72–3, 81, 108, 203–4, 225, 241; see also Farnsworth House

Military Personnel Records facility, St. Louis 167–173, 168, 170

Minoru Yamasaki and Associates office 9, 9, 92, 240

modernism: in architecture 10–11, 48–9, 65–6, 113, 116, 124–6, 141–2, 241–2; in architectural education 25; critique of 219–22; Yamasaki’s interpretation of 5–7, 13, 72–3, 86–8, 119–22, 162

Mohammed, Khalid Sheikh 206–7

Mondrian, Piet 65, 126

New Formalism 108–16, 154, 200

New York City Port Authority 3, 38–40, 174–6, 180–1, 186, 202, 242

Newman, Oscar 54–5, 60

Nietzsche, Friedrich 222–3, 229

North Shore Congregation Israel Synagogue 79, 193–4, 195, 196

Northminster Presbyterian Church 91–2, 94

Northwestern National Life Building/Voya Financial 107, 112, 114–16, 197–201, 201

Obata, Gyo 12, 31, 37, 100

Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music 76, 79, 90, 91, 113, 147–50, 150, 151; King Building 148, 149

Oral Roberts University 114–16, 116

Oregon State Capitol 28, 28

Pacific Science Center see Federal Science Pavilion

Page, Max 236

Pallasmaa, Juhani 232

Parkchester planned community 29, 42

Petit, Philippe 205–6

Pico Della Mirandola, Giovanni 78–80

Plato 66, 141, 163

play in art 163–5

postmodernism 16, 220–32

preservation 8–11, 221, 235–41; grounds for 241–8

Pries, Lionel 23–5

Prudon, Theodore 241

Pruitt-Igoe public housing project 3–5, 8, 13, 31, 46, 47–9, 48, 55–61, 58, 122, 173; design of 49–55; destruction of 4, 4, 55, 220–1

Queen Emma Gardens 60, 61

Rainier Bank Tower 75–8, 77, 80, 161, 237, 242–8, 247

Reynolds Metals Regional Sales Office 68–70, 69, 119, 127, 127, 157, 240, 240

Robertson, Leslie E. 12, 126, 185–6, 205

Robertson Hall, Princeton 107, 111, 133, 151, 153, 161, 237; and LBJ Presidential Library 132, 136; and Fisher and Bendheim Halls 227–8, 228

Saarinen, Eero 145

Safdie, Moshe 230–1

Salvucci Towers 203–4, 204

Sampson Naval Station 29, 193

Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency 99–100, 99

Scott, Geoffrey 80–3, 121

Scott Brown, Denise 225–8, 227, 228

September 11 attacks 1–3, 13, 41, 182–6, 183, 184, 206–11, 214; memorials 2, 202–3, 214, 215, 216

Skilling, John 126, 129–30, 174

Snohomish County Courthouse Annex 114, 115

St. Malo 211, 213

Steinbrueck, Victor 242, 245

Stone, Edward Durrell 39, 108, 113–14, 161, 161; engineering and divided representation 123–7; role in Yamasaki’s architecture 14, 31–2, 39, 67–8, 75, 82, 131–2, 174, 203; structural 10–11, 24, 81, 87–8, 185–6

symbolism: nature of 189–93; religious 192–200; of World Trade Center 189–93, 202–10

Taj Mahal 34, 72–3, 143

Taj Mahal Medical Center, Irvine 114, 115

Temple Beth-El 79, 193–7, 196, 198

Time Magazine 7, 37, 114

Tobin, Austin 181, 202

Tozzoli, Guy 38, 202

tradition in architecture 6–7, 24, 71, 85–8, 113, 124–5, 222–5

Trump, Donald 212–13

Twin Towers Alliance 211–12

Twin Towers II 212–13, 213

United States Consulate, Kobe 34–5, 34, 43, 90, 113, 143

United States Embassy, London 145

University Liggett School see Grosse Point University School

University of Washington 20–5, 28, 154–5, 155, 156 242–4

Vattimo, Gianni 231–2

Venturi, Robert 220–1, 225–8, 227, 228

von Eckardt, Wolf 180, 244

Wayne State University 12, 35, 102–4, 147, 249; College of Education Building 102, 104, 165; DeRoy Auditorium 102, 103, 238; McGregor Memorial Conference Center 6, 35, 36, 68, 69, 73, 74, 75, 102, 147, 238, 250; Prentis Building 102, 103

William James Hall, Harvard University 91, 93, 237

World Agricultural Fair, New Delhi 35, 143–5, 144

World Trade Center 41, 131, 177, 178, 179, 181, 183, 184, 190, 204, 208; commission of 7, 37–40; design of 75–6, 129–32, 174–8; destruction of 1–3, 182–6; rebuilding of 210–14; reception of 40–1, 119, 180–2; symbolism of 189–91, 192–3, 202–10

Wright, Frank Lloyd 72, 89, 141

Wurster, Catherine Bauer 53–4, 56–7, 59

Xiwang Tower, Dalian 225

Yamasaki, Minoru: 18, 32, 41, 51, 133; architectural style 5–7, 66–73, 75–83, 240–1; autobiographical statement 19–20, 25–7, 32, 37, 171; early youth 20; education 20–5; family 20, 29, 31, 37–8; health 26, 37–8, 41, 186; office management 75, 122, 174–5; residence 31, 37–38, 95; work in canneries 25–7, 122, 142–3

Yamasaki, Teruko 29, 31, 37–8, 42