Famed architect Minoru Yamasaki was born on December 1, , in Seattle. His parents, John T. and Hana Yamasaki, had emigrated from Japan and barely made ends meet working as, respectively, a purchasing agent and pianist. The family lived in Seattle’s Yesler neighborhood and Yamasaki attended Garfield High School, graduating in
Inspired to follow a career in architecture after a visit from his uncle, Koken Ito, who was an architect, Yamasaki enrolled at the University of Washington, and graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in architecture in the summer of Like many under-privileged students, to afford tuition he spent the summers working; for Yamasaki, it was five years in Alaska Canneries.
Upon graduation Yamasaki left Seattle to seek a position with an architectural firm in New York City. However, the Depression made it impossible for him to find work, and instead he enrolled in the graduate program at New York University where he obtained a master&#;s degree in architecture (). As a student in he won the prestigious Paris Prize for an architectural scholarship to the Ecole in Paris, the first University of Washington graduate to do so. However due to political events around the
Minoru Yamasaki ()
The architect of Pruitt-Igoe and the World Trade Center survived a life of racial discrimination and blame laid for the demise of the Modernist dream – but did not live to see the revisionist movement that asserts the underfunded Pruitt-Igoe’s fate was predetermined
Minoru Yamasaki illustration by Marianna Gefen
Illustration by Marianna Gefen
Minoru Yamasaki embodied the American dream while feeling the sting of endemic racism. He achieved professional success and international fame as a minority architect, whose ‘otherness’ marked him as a permanent outsider to the East Coast-oriented architectural culture of postwar America. Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, as a poor child of Japanese immigrants, he suffered routine racial discrimination from an early age. Growing up he was taught to accept these episodes passively, with magnanimity. ‘A word that I heard over and over again whenever there would be an incident or a slight was shikataganai, which means “it can’t be helped”’, he told a Time magazine interviewer. In his autobiography, A Life in Architecture, he elaborated ‘I know from personal experience how prejudice and
Minoru Yamasaki: The Fragility of Architecture
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His work – more than buildings in the span of 30 years – was lauded by critics and colleagues, cited for international design awards, and landed the architect on the cover of Time. But today, even practitioners and aficionados might be challenged to name one of Minoru Yamasaki's buildings beyond his two most infamous creations that no longer exist: the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis and New York’s World Trade Center towers. Paul Kidder explores this complex architect and his work in a new book, Minoru Yamasaki and the Fragility of Architecture (Routledge).
Kidder, a professor of philosophy at Seattle University, provides a fresh, sobering assessment not only of Yamasaki's architecture but the man himself: his challenges, triumphs, and contradictions, as well as the fragility of architectural achievement. The loss of this architect’s most famous buildings suggests the growing scope of architecture’s fragility, especially today, when real-estate investment often augers against preservation of even late-modern works. Yet, paradoxically, Yam
Minoru Yamasaki
Biography
Master architect Minoru Yamasaki () was a first-generation Japanese American (or Nissei) born in Seattle, Washington. Yamasaki studied architecture at the University of Washington, spending his summers working at an Alaska cannery to pay his tuition. He joined the Detroit firm of Smith, Hinchman & Grylls as head of design in An important commission that came in during those years was for an annex to the Federal Reserve Branch Bank in Detroit. The “annex,” really a much larger building that dwarfed the original branch bank next door, became downtown Detroit’s first major post-war building and first major International Style building. In he and two other former Smith, Hinchman & Grylls employees established their own firm, Leinweber, Yamasaki & Hellmuth, with offices in Detroit and St. Louis.
In the firm received the commission to design the Lambert-St. Louis Municipal Air Terminal, the first work for which Yamasaki received critical acclaim. The design had few detractors and won the AIA First Honor Award. Shortly after the establishment of Yamasaki & Leinweber, the firm received a commission for the U. S. Cons
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