Surprise and Delight: the Architecture of Minoru Yamasaki
The Century Plaza Hotel, Los Angeles: 2009 11 Most
In April, the National Trust listed the 1964-1966 Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles as one of
America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.
The Century Plaza Hotel was designed by Japanese American architect Minoru Yamasaki (1912-1986), a celebrated
designer whose work included the 1966-1977 World Trade Center in New York.
A second-generation American, Yamasaki was born in Seattle and earned his way through architecture school at the University of Washington by canning salmon in Alaska during the summer. Experiencing professional discrimination in Seattle, Yamasaki moved to New York in 1934 where he finished his graduate education and joined the firm of Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, designers of the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center. Following World War II, Yamasaki moved to Detroit where he started his own firm, Hellmuth, Yamasaki & Leinweber in 1949
Yamasaki is best known as a “romantic” modernist, using sculptural forms, texture, and ornament during a time when functionalism and “less is more” were the prevailing trends. Yamasaki’s approach to architecture was heavily influenced by a 1954 trip to Japan, India, and Europe and his tours of each place’s historic architecture. Yamasaki was impressed with the serenity of Japanese architecture, the elements of surprise provided by Japan and Europe’s interior courtyards and hidden plazas, and the way buildings like the Taj Mahal and Gothic cathedrals combined massive, monumental spaces and intricate, human-scale ornament. Upon returning to the U.S., Yamasaki strove to bring a sense of excitement, beauty, and serenity to modern architectural design, rejecting the monotony of the glass box and use of materials in their rawest forms.
Yamasaki’s work drew both admiration and criticism. His 1962 U.S. Science Pavilion/Pacific Science Center in Seattle, for example, featured Gothic style metal tracery over slab concrete buildings around an ethereal courtyard of floating pools. Though popular with the public, architecture critics called it a “wedding cake,” branded it weak architecture, and dismissed Yamasaki as a “decorator.” Yamasaki’s 1957 McGregor Memorial Conference Center at Wayne State University with its dramatic triangular projections, skylights, and metal screening, received a standing ovation at its opening, but was demonized by prominent architectural historian Vincent Scully and others as a “twittering aviary.”
Regardless of how one feels about Minoru Yamasaki’s work, many of his buildings proved to be touchstones of the modern age. Yamasaki’s design for the 1956 Lambert-St. Louis Municipal Air Terminal in St. Louis, with its groin vaulted ceiling and massive expanses of glass, became the new standard in air terminal design, creating a visual language that many Americans would instantly recognize as “airport.”
Yamasaki’s 1954-1956 Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis won an American Institute of Architects award, but quickly became a national symbol of the failures of urban renewal. An austere high-rise development in line with the architecture typical of the age, the complex was demolished in 1976, only twenty years after it was constructed. Pruitt-Igoe, like hundreds of other housing complexes like it around the nation, was reviled as a social and architectural failures. The dramatic demolition of Pruitt-Igoe is credited as the beginning of the move away from the Modern design aesthetic in the United States and the beginning of Postmodernism.
No discussion of Minoru Yamasaki’s work could ignore the fate of his best known commission, the 1966-1977 World Trade Center in New York. In talking about the project, Yamasaki saw the World Trade Center as the epitome of man’s belief in humanity, individual dignity, and cooperation and a symbol of world peace. To others, however, the complex was a powerful symbol of Western capitalism and a target for violence. Even after its destruction by terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center remains one of the world’s most recognized and highly charged architectural landmarks.
Minoru Yamasaki’s architecture lives on in many communities in the United States. Learn more about Minoru Yamasaki, his vision, and his work through the links below.
Learn More
“The Road to Xanadu,” Time
Minoru Yamasaki, HistoryLink: the Free Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History
“Minoru Yamasaki, World Class Architect,” Detroit News
Minoru Yamasaki Oral History, Smithsonian Archive of American Art
