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"…all really inhabited space bears the
essence of the notion of home."
-- Gaston Bachelard
The Poetics of Space
"…death by architecture is intolerable."
-- Mark Wigley
"Insecurity by Design" from After the World Trade
Center: Rethinking New
York City
Since their completion in 1976, the World Trade Center
Towers were iconic, permanent fixtures of the Manhattan skyline,
two giants sprung fully formed out of the ground. Once the tallest
buildings in the world, the Twin Towers were symbols of U.S. dominance
and the reign of global capitalism. Their demise was unthinkable.
It's ironic, if not entirely surprising, that such
an enduring emblem of American economic might was designed by a
Nisei, Minoru Yamasaki, who, although he was not interned, survived
two of America's darkest eras: the Depression and World War II.
Yamasaki's architectural vision for the Towers was an act of hyperbolic
faith in the potential of American society. It also expressed a
profound conviction that buildings provide more than physical shelter:
they are the symbolic homes of our beliefs, values and aspirations.
Oddly enough, this conviction follows the very same logic that motivated
the terrorists who targeted and destroyed the Towers on September
11th, 2001.
Buildings are designed to shelter us, to protect our
relatively fragile bodies from the forces of nature and each other.
As such, they possess not only a physical but psychological presence;
they become extensions of our bodies, part of our identity. As philosopher
Bachelard noted, all inhabited buildings partake of the notion of
"home." Architects orchestrate light, space and temperature
to make us feel sheltered, protected and secure.
According to Columbia University professor Mark Wigley,
it is precisely this sense of security that terrorists seek to undermine.
By destroying our buildings, they diminish our sense of safety.
More potent than the specter of lives lost is the threat the Twin
Towers' destruction poses to our own homes, to our very grounding
in the world. In destroying the World Trade Center, the terrorists
annihilated our (misguided, prideful) belief in our own invincibility.
They reduced the symbolic "home" of our economic and cultural
dominance to a pile of smoking rubble.
Perhaps more than most architects of his time, Yamasaki
understood the symbolic importance of the World Trade Center's design.
From humble beginnings, he rose to a position of success and wealth
-- a real Horatio Alger hero. He was born in Seattle in 1912 to
pianist Hana (Ho) Yamasaki and purchasing agent John Tsunejiro Yamasaki,
and put himself through college working in Alaskan fish canneries
for $50 a month. At an early age, he resolved to escape what he
saw as a life of "uncompromising and personally degrading circumstances"
and follow in the footsteps of his uncle, architect Koken Ito.
Graduating from the University of Washington with
a degree in architecture in 1934, he moved to New York and earned
his Master's degree in night classes at NYU. He then worked his
way up through several blue-chip architectural firms. In 1945, he
accepted a position as head designer at Smith, Hinchman & Grylls
in Detroit, and in 1951 started his own firm, Minoru
Yamasaki & Associates, which is still in business today
(Yamasaki passed away in 1986).
His break-through commission came in 1954 when he
designed the U.S. Consulate in Kobe, Japan. These trips to Japan
profoundly influenced his work. He was especially impressed by the
design of Japanese temples that lead the visitor through a series
of distinctly different environments, incorporating changing light
effects, plant life and water. He decided to create buildings that
provided a series of sensory impressions -- an emotional as well
as physical path -- and a sense of surprise. This Japanese influence
can be seen in his 1958 design for McGregor Center at Detroit's
Wayne State University. With its Japanese-style reflecting pools
and skylights, it won the First Honor Award of the American Institute
of Architects.
In the same year he visited Japan, he also embarked
on an around-the-world trip. His visits to Asia, the Middle East
and Europe impressed upon him the importance of the decorative and
expressive elements that had been lost in streamlined modern architecture.
He was especially inspired by pre-modern and religious buildings:
"I kept realizing that these qualities
that we see in older architecture, such as the play of sun and shadow,
which is…neglected in our modern architecture, was vitally
necessary to the total experience of man in this environment…In
other words, when you see a New England church steeple against the
blue sky…it somehow brings about an aspirational quality,
a sense of reaching for something which is terribly important…"
(Smithsonian
Interview, 1959)
Although schooled in the highly reductive International Style that
had dominated American architecture since the 1930s, Yamasaki's
emphatic belief in the spiritual and above all expressive capacity
of architecture set him apart from his contemporaries. Upon his
return, he sought to transform essentially International Style buildings
with references to the architecture of other cultures. He was particularly
fond of Arabic arches, a design motif that eventually found its
way into the bases of the Twin Towers. He covered the basic modernist
cube with shimmering metals that changed colors as they reflected
light from different directions, and ornate screens and ribs that
added visual and tactile texture. But his interest in these decorative
elements went beyond their effect as surface adornment; he also
thought of them as symbols of cultural pride and heritage. His design
for the Dhahran Air Terminal in Saudi Arabia used a series of low,
repeated Arabic arches as a major design motif, and was so well
received that its image graces the country's currency. Closer to
home, he tried his hand at religious architecture, designing the
soaring space of Temple Beth El in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan to
evoke the shape of the meeting tents of the Israelites.
Yamasaki's "multicultural" style found many supporters
in the U.S. and abroad, but it also elicited scathing critiques,
mostly from the architectural critics of the day. In trying to push
architecture beyond the ascetic confines of modernism, his work
was derided as excessively ornamental. On the other hand, his designs
for the World Trade Center were criticized for being too brutally
minimalist. Caught between the end of high modernism and the birth
of eclectic postmodernism -- currently exemplified by the highly
decorative works of Frank Gehry -- Yamasaki was a pioneer in the
development of today's dominant architectural style, a contribution
for which he has never been fully recognized.
But Yamasaki's interest in the human and cultural aspects of architecture
was not necessarily in tune with the needs and concerns of the buildings'
inhabitants. His first and only foray into low- and middle-income
housing resulted in one of the most maligned buildings in contemporary
history, the Pruitt-Igoe
Public Housing development. The complex was designed with many
areas of public, communal space intended to foster tenant interaction
and a sense of community. However, these impersonal, ownerless spaces
quickly deteriorated into trash- and graffiti-filled zones of drug
activity and violence. Yamasaki was clearly out of touch with the
needs and concerns of Pruitt-Igoe's residents. His design was based
on an abstract, utopian vision of community life rather than a realistic
understanding of what makes a building feel like "home."
Similarly, his design for San Francisco's Japan Center Mall was
intended to create a commercial and cultural home for the residents
of the historic Japanese American neighborhood. True to form, Yamasaki
designed an essentially modern complex with culturally relevant
flourishes: facades that referred to traditional Japanese beam and
post architecture, tiled roofs, and pedestrian walkways shaped like
Japanese foot bridges. The Center opened in 1968, but by the 1980s
had become a haphazard collection of lonely and empty shops and
restaurants, totally enclosed and removed from the life of the streets
and the changing neighborhood around it. The monolithic Center fell
into disuse as the neighborhood's traditionally Japanese American
population departed for the suburbs. Only in recent years, with
an influx of expatriate and immigrant communities from Japan, has
the Center been revitalized as a shopping and dining destination.
Yamasaki's buildings have often been better homes for ideas than
for people. He was skilled at taking an abstract concept and giving
it a grand, exterior form. Unfortunately, this grandeur was often
at the expense of the building's inhabitants, a contradiction dramatically
realized in the September 11th attacks. Architect
Laurie Kerr goes so far as to suggest that Yamasaki's profane
use of sacred Arabic design elements may have played a role in the
targeting of the Twin Towers. It's a suspect argument, but one that
points to the essential contradictions at the heart of Yamasaki's
career. In designing a symbol of globalism, he used cultural motifs
indiscriminately. In trying to humanize architecture, he created
unlivable spaces. Just as America's global domination provokes violent
resistance, Yamasaki's progress was the source of his undoing. In
this sense, he was truly an architect of the American Dream, with
all its aspirations and failures.
Additional reading on Minoru Yamasaki:
"Minoru
Yamasaki, world-class architect," The Detroit News.
Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York's World Trade Center
by Eric Darton. Basic Books, 1999.
Twin Towers: The Life of New York City's World Trade Center
by Angus Kress Gillespie. Rutgers University Press, 1999
After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City
edited by Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin. Routledge, 2002
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