On this solemn day of remembrance twenty years since that fateful day on September 11, 2001, I want to write a bit about the brilliant architect, Seattle-born and raised Minoru Yamasaki, who designed the iconic World Trade Center Twin Towers in New York City.
“Minoru Yamasaki.” Drawing. ML. 2021.
I was absolutely bowled over to learn that the person who designed the World Trade Center, Minoru Yamasaki, was the same architect of three well-known buildings in my hometown of Seattle—buildings that I have seen for most of my life in one way or another—the IBM Building and Rainier Tower, (kitty corner from each other on Fifth Avenue and University Street,) and the Pacific Science Center at the Seattle Center (originally built as the U.S. Science Pavilion for the historic 1962 Seattle World’s Fair.
These buildings are recognized as key works in Yamasaki’s long architectural career.
It was not too many years after the events of 9/11 that I somehow learned that the IBM Building on Fifth and Seneca in downtown Seattle, built in 1963 was designed by the architect of the World Trade Center (I did not yet know Yamasaki’s name.) Yes, I could now see the resemblance. The same base structure with simple arched openings topped with graceful geometric motifs that translate into soaring, narrow, vertical lines that go all the way to the top of the 20-story building. Clean style.
IBM Building, Fifth and Seneca, Seattle. 1963. (ML photo 2021.) This 20-story building is considered a precursor to the design of the World Trade Center, (built in 1971) featuring soaring vertical lines and distinctive intersecting geometric shapes.
A real surprise to me was to learn Yamasaki also designed the 41-story Rainier Tower (Fifth and University) in 1977. The Rainier Tower has always been a unique building in the downtown core because of its narrow, inverted base.
Architecture in Seattle. Rainier Square on the right, built 1977, designed by Minoru Yamasaki, who designed the World Trade Center in New York City. Seattle has a few buildings designed by Yamasaki including the IBM building nearby. Rainier Square Tower, completed in 2021. Background, is the Skinner Building, 1926 and the taller Washington Athletic Club, 1930. (ML photo 2019.)
Then I learned that Yamasaki had also designed the Pacific Science Center (1962) with its vaulted open ribbed Gothic-inspired arches rising from serene reflecting water pools in a courtyard surrounded by a collection of related buildings. Originally called the U.S. Science Pavilion, the U.S. Government commissioned Yamasaki to build this pavilion that would be one of the hallmarks of the World’s Fair that was dedicated to science and to the future. This structure is my favorite of Yamasaki’s Seattle buildings because of the arches and the reflecting pools.
Arches, Pacific Science Center, 1962. ML Photograph 2014.
Once I knew the connection—that the architect of the World Trade Center to these buildings in Seattle was the same person, my interest and my curiosity in the work of Minoru Yamasaki was peaked. I wanted to know more.
Who was Minoru Yamasaki as a person?
What was it that inspired Yamasaki to create such beauty that has such a presence in the history of this city of Seattle and of the nation by virtue of being an architect?
And why is Minoru Yamasaki, one of the hand full of modern architects of the last century to be featured on the cover of Time Magazine, not well known today especially because of his esteem as a modern, contemporary architect?
I am learning the answers to my questions slowly through research and connecting the dots. I will share a little bit of my findings here.
Minoru Yamasaki was born in Seattle on December 1 in 1912 to John Tsunejiro Yamasaki and Hana Yamasaki, “Issei” Japanese immigrants, (Issei are born in Japan and the first generation to immigrate to the Americas.) Their son, Minoru, was “Nissei,” as he was the first generation born in the Americas to Issei.
I want to give a little context to the early years of Yamasaki as the context to the great architect of which he would become.
In the first years of his life, Minoru and his family lived on Yesler Way in the First Hill neighborhood of Seattle in a turn-of-the-century wooden structure that had no hot water or indoor plumbing and was precariously situated on the top slope of Yesler. Have you heard of the term “Skid Row?” That term originated in Seattle at the turn of the 20th century as loggers would topple trees and slide them down Yesler Way to the wood processors in Pioneer Square. Thus the term, “Skid Row.” Skid Row would come to be a phrase that refers to an impoverished district, decay, and urban blight. That pretty much describes the early home setting of a man who would become a world-renowned architect of elegant built environments.
Arches, Pacific Science Center, Seattle. Watercolor and gouache on paper. 4x6.” 2020.
In spite of these early years of economic hardship experienced by his family, hardship shared with other immigrants and low-income wage earners of the day, Minoru had a happy childhood riding his bike around the neighborhood taking in the gorgeous natural landscape of Seattle and its ever-present view of Mount Rainier.
Even though his childhood was happy in spite of the difficult experiences of an immigrant family, and specifically being an immigrant family of Japanese descent, an ethnic population that experienced a great deal of discrimination and eventual incarceration of Issei and Nissei and their descendants on the West Coast during World War II, Minoru carried the deep wounds of racial discrimination throughout his life. He felt himself an outsider.
Upon reflecting on his childhood, Minoru said, “I had been born and gone to school, much as any other youth lives in America. I was different, however. I had been stamped at birth by uncontrollable circumstances.” Minoru said the prejudice he experienced as a child “hurt me deeply.”
Coupled with the pains of discrimination and economic hardship, Minoru ("bearing fruit") Yamasaki (roughly, "mountain ledge with great view") also knew of his innate gifts.
“I had been blessed with certain natural gifts, but I knew that it would take hard work and steady application if I were to develop and use these in a way that would make my life meaningful to both me and those around me. This became my philosophy and goal.”
Minoru Yamasaki graduated from Garfield High School on Capitol Hill in Seattle in 1929 and then went on to study architecture at the University of Washington in Seattle. Other great architects that made an impact on the city of Seattle also came from this school, notably, Paul Thiry, (UW class of ‘34) the chief architect of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, and of where Yamasaki would contribute one of his great works, the U.S. Science Pavilion (I will be writing more of the fair in my next blog.)
Solidly grounded in Seattle from birth until graduation from the UW in 1934, Yamasaki would set course on the isle of Manhattan, and venture to New York City. Eventually his work would take him to Detroit, Michigan when he because the principal in his own firm.
There are distinctive features in Yamasaki’s Seattle buildings and the World Trade Center, such as soaring vertical lines and geometric motifs that express themselves in a minimalist yet modern sense. The sensibility to me is modern, yet there is zen-like feeling to Yamasaki’s buildings. In a way, I feel I can sense his spirit in these works.
One of my favorite structures of Yamasaki is the U.S. Science Pavilion, designed for the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair. The soaring arches for me are as iconic as the Space Needle, also constructed for the World’s Fair. The pavilion was commissioned by the U.S. Government as a response to the tensions that existed at the height of the cold war between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. (now Russia.) The race to space fueled this tension and the U.S.S.R. was the first to have reached space with Sputnik in 1957. President Kennedy upped the anti in 1961 by saying "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project...will be more exciting, or more impressive to mankind, or more important...and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish...” As a matter of fact, it was President Kennedy that officially signaled the opening of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair on April 21, 1962.
Time Magazine, January 18, 1963.
“Though the Pavilion was devoted to showing modern science, it looked as if it could have been the setting from a poem by Coleridge. From any angle it cast a spell. It had reflecting pools, stage-set lighting, delicate bridges, six buildings decorated with Gothic tracery. Inside, it subtly lured visitors along, stopped them just where the designer intended that they should pause and look. Probably no building put up in 1962 caused such a world of comment or brought into action so many cameras. Professional critics found dreadful flaws, but to almost everyone else the U.S. Science Pavilion, that pleasure dome of the Space Age at Seattle's Century "21" Exposition, was a modern Xanadu, built for their delight, a declaration of independence from the machine-made monotony of so much of modern architecture.” Time Magazine, January 18, 1963.
Yamasaki practiced an architecture of "humanism."
The concept of humanism goes back to the Greeks, where the Grecian architects felt that the human being was the highest being in the universe, therefore the human body was the base of the mathematical units and proportions. The Greeks, thus, built their buildings with these human proportions in mind. The Greeks derived equations of proportions so that their buildings replicated these proportions.
Pacific Science Center, Reflective Pool, Seattle. Minoru Yamasaki. 1962. Photo. ML 2018.
The Humanism style was revived during the Italian Renaissance of the 14th and 15th centuries. Yamasaki said "Humanism in architecture is the understanding that architecture centers on and arises from the physical, emotional and spiritual needs of man, that his prime purpose is to fulfill that need as ideally as is possible within the limits of a physical environment."
Two of these buildings in downtown Seattle were designed by Minoru Yamasaki. Top-The IBM Building (1963.) Lower Left-Rainier Tower with inverted base (1977.)
Yamasaki also believed a building “must be like a human being. It must have a wholeness about it.”
In 1960 to an invited speech given to the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, titled "A Humanist Architecture," Yamasaki said:
"This humanist architecture should strive to achieve the following goals:
To enhance the enjoyment of life through beauty and delight.
To be uplifting so that we can reflect the nobility to which man aspires.
To give order, and through order, a background of serenity for the complex activity of modern life.
To be truthful. [A building' must have an intrinsic clarity of structure which is natural and inevitable for the purpose if fulfills.
To have full understanding of and fidelity to our technological processes...so that our architecture will be based on, and thus be symbolic of the great advances in society made possible through industrialization.
To be in scale with man so that he is at all times secure and happy in his environment and intimately related to it."
Arches, U.S. Science Pavilion, 1962 (Pacific Science Center.) Watercolor on paper, 4x6.: 2021.
Simple, geometrics, elegant. Silhouettes in the sky.
Some of Yamasaki's favorite constructions are the Taj Mahal in India and St. Mark's Piazza in Venice, Italy. "The silhouette in the sky" was what Yamasaki loved about these structures and what he sought to express in his own architectural designs.
Yamasaki would repeat this often in his talks as much as his professed desire to achieve three self-explanatory principals he called "serenity, surprise, and delight" in his work.
Interestingly, a visitor to the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair was from the Port Authority in New York City. The Port Authority wanted to build the largest building in the world, The World Trade Center. Impressed by Yamasaki’s U.S. Science Pavilion, Yamasaki was invited to compete for the project.
“Tozzoli had been sent to visit the Seattle World’s Fair, where he was singularly impressed by the way Yamasaki’s Science Pavilion conveyed a sense of “warmth and human scale so rarely found in modern architecture.
While Yamasaki may have seemed an unlikely choice in a field of better-known architects, Tobin and Tozzoli were looking for something specific. They did not want a masterpiece, they wanted a pragmatic, popular building designed by an architect with whom they could work. Tobin and Tozzoli saw in Yamasaki an appetite for grand achievement balanced with accessible appeal and a reputation for working well with clients. In the context of the World Trade Center competition, the fact that Yamasaki was perceived as existing on the margins of the architectural establishment likely worked in his favor. While Yamasaki had been maligned by his peers for the populism of his recent work, it was precisely that ability to resonate with a public that positioned him perfectly to get the most import- ant commission of his career. As his former employer and genius committee member Wallace Harrison would later tell a reporter, Yamasaki “understood what people need in architecture.” - “Sandfuture,” by Justin Beal
NYC, Lower Fifth Avenue, 1991. Photo: ML.
The Manhattan skyline viewed from a train. The Twin Towers, that would be on the left, are missing from the skyline. ML photo. 2018.
Ironically, the Twin Towers would have an adversarial effect on the reputation of Yamasaki. As a matter of fact, the towers actually hurt his professional reputation. What made Yamasaki a great architect was his grasp of the human connection to his structures. The challenge of the Twin Towers, dreamed by the people that commissioned Yamasaki, to be the biggest building in the world, challenged Yamasaki’s design instincts of the human scale.
I believe that the World Trade Center Twin Towers do represent the human experience. For their enormous scale, they are in the “humanist” category in my mind. When I think of the World Trade Center post 9/11, I think of the human lives lost in that tragic event, 2977 lives. I think of the shock and horror the entire world felt watching those towers fall, knowing that lives were lost. I think of how the world has changed for humanity and how fragile everything seems to be – even the largest building in the world can come tumbling down in a matter of minutes.
Minoru Yamasaki felt deeply about the human relationship to the environment and to the sensibility of connection to buildings. In the end, I do believe Yamasaki succeeded in his creation of the World Trade Center Twin Towers. Humanity is now associated with those towers, now gone to live as a memory and part of world history.
“The World Trade Center is a living symbol of man’s dedication to world peace . . . a representation of man’s belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his beliefs in the cooperation of men, and through cooperation, his ability to find greatness.” —Minoru Yamasaki, Chief Architect of the World Trade Center, remarks at opening ceremonies and dedication April 4, 1973.
These words are now inscribed at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum in New York City.
Lower Manhattan seen from the Brooklyn Bridge. The Freedom Tower (center, blue) sits where the World Trade Center once stood. (ML photo 2019.)
Minoru Yamasaki passed in 1986 and was spared seeing his monumental accomplishment, the World Trade Center, taken down by terrorism in 2001.
Minoru Yamasaki. A hometown boy who grew up in Seattle of immigrant parents who would go on to design a world-renowned landmark of international trade and commerce centered in one of the world’s great capital cities that is now a symbol of the remembrance of life. A symbol of humanity. Humanism.
Never forget.
Mary Lamery is a lifelong resident of Seattle, Washington, USA and native of the Pacific Northwest. Lamery paints regional landscape and makes drawings in a manner that leans towards 19th century French Impressionism.
Her landscapes and drawings invite the viewer to add to the backstory of the composition through personal identification with the paintings and story telling of the experience.
Follow Mary on Instagram.