Remembering Minoru Yamasaki, the lead architect of the World Trade Center, through the afterlife of his most famous buildings. thejustinbeal writes
Entrance arches of Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Center with Ideogram sculpture. Photo: Balthazar Korab, Courtesy of Library of Congress I first became aware of Minoru Yamasaki’s work in the summer of 2001, when I was standing at the foot of the World Trade Center wondering how it could be that I had just graduated with a degree in architecture and I had no idea who had designed the Twin Towers.
Water climbs up onto the narrow swath of park on the Hudson River’s east embankment, washing across the four southbound lanes of the West Side Highway, around the landscaped medians and over the northbound lanes before pooling among the trashcans and hydrants on the corner of 27th Street. From there, the tide flows east in the grooves between cobblestones, carried first by capillary action, then forced from behind by the surge.
I spent most of that month underground in a full-body Tyvek suit, tall black rubber boots, a respirator with two hot-pink particulate filter cartridges, a battery-powered headlamp, and elbow-length rubber gloves. The basement vibrated with the buzz of halogen work lights and air filters tethered to gasoline generators on the sidewalk. Each piece of art had been placed in the basement with care, with gloved hands, gentle movements, and attention to surface and structure.
In architecture school, his colleagues called him Sockeye. He was a strong student, but the intellectual environment was isolated and the Beaux-Arts curriculum was quickly becoming outmoded as modernism took hold in Europe. “No one there, not even the teachers, knew what was going on in the architectural world,” Yamasaki recalled. “We didn’t even know about the Barcelona Pavilion.
Architect Minoru Yamasaki on a ladder looking down at a model of the World Trade Center. Photo: Balthazar Korab, Courtesy of Library of Congress Shortly after Yamasaki won the commission, Ada Louise Huxtable, writing in Art in America, quoted an excerpt from a lecture he had given on the Voice of America the previous year.
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