Architecture: Big Bad Buildings

Minoru Yamasaki will forever be remembered alongside America’s most profound architectural disaster. Whatever he was before 2001—which was dead, maligned, and mainly sliding away into obscurity—he is forever after the designer of the most ambitious modern structure ever to end up as a gaping hole. The World Trade Center, at this point, has been sufficiently eulogized, and the rebuilding process has brought a healthy dose of controversy to a city that seemed on pause while the wreckage was being cleared. But before closing the book on Yamasaki and his work, one last review of his career bestows upon him another spurious honor: possibly the most disastrous (and short-lived) legacy of 20th century American architecture. Yamasaki’s tale is a true American success story that not only ended in an immense tragedy, but was punctuated by numerous other disasters throughout his career. His buildings might be uninteresting, but his spectacular failures bring out the uncanny coalescence between Yamasaki’s work and the major controversies and programs of the last half-century.

Long before 2001, Yamasaki had already been implicated in the greatest disaster in the history of modern architecture. His Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis was razed to the ground in 1972, just seventeen years after its completion. The award-winning project had been heralded as a revolution in low-cost, high-density housing; in 1951, the firm of Hellmuth, Yamasaki, & Leinweber applied for a patent for the building-type that would be emulated in so many cities. But the 33 eleven-story slabs, a housing battalion in tight formation, rapidly became a nucleus of crime and vandalism—a living, or maybe staggering, symbol of the failures of the urban renewal then called slum clearance. The architect who spoke against the architectural monument and for satisfying, through design, society’s paramount “need for pleasant and useful space in which to live and work” regretted already in 1955 the mistake of placing slab buildings opposite one another, creating a space that seemed endless glass and brick, and not grass and sky. By the following year, Pruitt-Igoe was, in his own word, a “tragedy.” He had “designed a housing project, not a community.” In 1965, when the city of St. Louis decided to pump five million dollars into the projects, in a desperate attempt to save them, Yamasaki blamed the disaster on the frugality and demands of the Public Housing Administration, as well as the nature of its inhabitants: “I never thought people were that destructive.”

The people, or Pruitt-Igoeans, as the literature christened them, had been forced out of St. Louis’s historical slums, acres of deteriorated 19th century housing stock, and shuttled into Yamasaki’s one prefabricated slum. Though Pruitt-Igoe opened by Supreme Court decision as an integrated project, it quickly became exclusively black. The vast majority of its households were headed by women, depended on public assistance, and included an average of four minors. Cut off from the rest of the city and its resources, families that ended up in this ghetto would have preferred to live elsewhere but were simply too big or too poor; they had no choice. So while St. Louis suffered from an extreme shortage of low-cost housing, Pruitt-Igoe’s almost 2,800 units averaged a 20 to 25 percent vacancy rate throughout its existence (the national average for public housing was 5 percent). Its “modern amenities” hailed in a 1951 Architectural Forum article were soon experienced through the looking glass by project residents. Exposed steam pipes scalded children. Novel skip-stop elevators (they stopped on the 4th, 7th, and 10th floors), outdoor corridors (“breezeways”), and laundry rooms throughout the building were havens for muggers, rapists, public urinators, and later also drug dealers. The fields between buildings were planted with garbage and broken glass.

While 11,000 people had no choice but to remain in Pruitt-Igoe, the project spawned a grand jury investigation, special committees, sociological studies, and expensive attempts at renovation. Pruitt-Igoe became a laboratory for the study of America’s urban crisis. Though the project’s failure was more extreme, more visible than most, there was no fundamental difference between Pruitt-Igoe and every other site for the punishment-by-architecture that by and large characterized postwar public housing efforts. To be sure, most of these projects were not designed by celebrated architects.

By 1965, Yamasaki lamented publicly that Pruitt-Igoe was “a job I wish I hadn’t done.” It was spectacularly undone not long afterwards. The first building was imploded on July 15, 1972. The following year the site was fenced off and then torn down, the remaining inhabitants relocated to other (comparable, if less infamous) projects. The Pruitt-Igoe site today at 34 vacant acres remains one of the largest development sites in St. Louis.

In Yamasaki’s 1979 autobiography, A Life in Architecture, he admits more than anyone would care to know about his private life, but makes a glaring omission in his inventory of major projects: it was as if Pruitt-Igoe had never happened. Not a peep about it, aside from an allusion to some buildings that were “just plain bad,” but in the end acted as “forceful reminders that we must do more carefully thought-out work in succeeding commissions.” Lest we come to suspect that Yamasaki is whitewashing his career, he admits to other early failures. A building commissioned in 1951 by the Department of Defense was built without a sprinkler system, and then burned in a spectacular fire. That building, the U.S. Military Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri, housed 38 million individual service records and 4,000 employees. When it was completed in 1956, the six-story concrete and aluminum behemoth was one of the twenty largest buildings in the world.

Less than twenty years later, in July 1973, a fire tore through the building, burning out of control for more than two days. It was the weekend of the official end of the draft, and the news was all bombs and impeachment. Over the previous two years, the Records Center had reported a dozen small fires, all started intentionally. This one, set shortly after midnight on July 12, appeared to be another case of arson. No one died in the blaze, set when only 50 employees were on duty, but sixteen to eighteen million military personnel files, many of them irreplaceable, were lost. Today, the Personnel Records Center informs those seeking information that, as a result of the fire, it cannot provide access to 80 percent of army files on personnel discharged between 1912 and 1960, as well as 75 percent of air force personnel discharged between 1947 and 1964. Information about hundreds of thousands of veterans vanished from the face of the earth. The building survived. 

We might expect to find reason for these professional failures in the misfortune of Yamasaki’s private life. Not surprisingly, the architect’s personal history was punctuated by its own string of disasters. He faced the harsh reality of being a nisei during World War II (relocated to the East Coast, Yamasaki escaped internment) and barely escaped death from a bleeding ulcer (just before completion of the Records Center and Pruitt-Igoe). He left his wife and three children, remarried, married again (a Japanese mail-order bride), and then finally remarried his first wife. Somewhere in between was a period of dismal health involving four operations in five months which left Yamasaki addicted to synthetic morphine. But other 20th century American architects were touched by scandal and personal misfortune without detriment to their designs. Frank Lloyd Wright’s private life was far more tumultuous, but equally not to blame for any poorly aging masterworks. Through all these failures, Yamasaki’s authorship is not in question. Instead, the architect and his work were the agents through which powerful forces gave shape to our world.

If Yamasaki sometimes seemed a divining rod for the unlucky collision of history and architecture, it is because he unwittingly channeled weighty corporate and political forces through his choice of projects—the uneventful as much as the disastrous. For instance, Yamasaki’s authorship of two Saudi Arabian airports and one Saudi Monetary Agency Head Office is long forgotten. In the mid-1970s, the Saudis waited three whole years for Yamasaki to wrap up work in lower Manhattan so that he could come and attend to their architectural needs. While the prestigious commission for the central bank and new airports might have gone to any number of architects, the Saudi government insisted on Yamasaki’s team. The Dhahran airport terminal he had built for them way back in 1961 was, as the architect told it, “one of the few foreign-designed buildings that the Saudis felt reflected their history and culture.” The US and Saudi Arabia, two countries which we’ve recently come to misconstrue as polar opposites, both saw their values embodied in Yamasaki’s work—so much for a clash of civilizations.

When it was just a plan, the World Trade Center led one architectural journal to ask: “est-il le premier édifice du XXIème siècle?” The edifice made it, battered and reviled, just short of two years into the century it was to inaugurate. Yamasaki and his firm came up with the plan for the iconic twin towers (which the architect had envisioned at 80 to 90 stories tall), but only after scrapping 105 different proposals in the design process. These were submitted to the Port Authority, who had co-opted the original idea for the center from David Rockefeller and turned it into a far more ambitious project. The architectural work was shared with the firm Emery Roth and Sons, another corporate favorite, while a structural engineer had to figure out how to hold the towers up and how to compose their interior structure. As work progressed and complications arose, the Port Authority focused on keeping costs down. Investigations since September 11, 2001, have found that cheap and faulty fireproofing in the towers failed to retard the fires that started when the fuel of the two planes ignited. The escape stairways, which had been placed all together in the central cores of the towers to maximize rentable space, were with one exception taken out immediately by the impact of the planes. Enclosed with light gypsum panels instead of solid concrete and masonry, they were unprotected from the blow. The compromised evacuation routes meant that hardly anyone in the floors above the impact zone survived the plane crashes. At the same time, other features prevented the towers from tipping over and saved thousands of lives. The flaws and virtues of construction cannot be attributed solely to Yamasaki, but he sacrificed his plans, his health, and his vision in order to take part in what was, for a time, another great American success story: a giant real estate speculation project. Another architect might have refused to make the compromises that went into the World Trade Center, might have demanded more control of the centrifugal project, and might not have succeeded in holding on to his commission.

Yamasaki saw a direct relationship between the size of the towers and “a society such as ours, which is one of large-scale and grand achievements.” The architect, who died in 1986, was proud to have worked so hard to create the Twin Towers and to share, personally and professionally, in all their glory. Yamasaki had to work five summers pushing giant salmon onto cannery assembly lines to finance his study of architecture. In New York during the depression, he taught watercolor classes and wrapped porcelain dishes while continuing his studies at night. Years of hard work finally led to a chief designer position at a Detroit firm, and then Yamasaki established his own firm in 1949. To head his own fifty-person studio and to be accepted by America’s infrastructural establishment were truly the marks of success. Yamasaki’s designs, a sort of corporate gothic, articulated the will of the institutions that commissioned them. It was an honor to have IBM, Consolidated Gas, the Defense Department, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey as his clients, even if they wanted their buildings with no fire sprinklers, or in a no man’s land, or too tall. “Since they were the client,” he said of the Records Building in St. Louis, “we went along with their option.” Yamasaki’s firm was selected for the design of the World Trade Center precisely because he could be counted on to be agreeable, to accommodate the developer’s demands. It gave him ulcers, but Yamasaki made real the visions of America’s leaders—and left everyone else to suffer the consequences.

Once, early in his career, Yamasaki was personally and physically touched by the failures and successes of his designs. In his autobiography he recounts an anecdote from the early days of his first studio in Detroit:

To divide the loft into smaller office spaces we had built temporary partitions that were rather unstable because we didn’t want to drive too many nails into the floors and ceilings of a rented office. On one occasion, representatives of the Chrysler Corporation were coming to visit the office to interview us as possible designers of their proposed engineering complex in Troy. We had cleaned up the office and everyone was quietly working when they arrived, for the staff realized the importance of our visitors and the significance of the project that could result from that meeting. Suddenly, one of the partitions broke loose and crashed to the floor, making the loudest possible noise. I was terribly embarrassed and horrified, but fortunately our visitors were understanding enough to tease me about not being able to keep my own office walls standing. It is amusing now as I look back, but I did not think it was at all funny at the time. In spite of that incident, we got the commission.

In a lucky break for all of us, a bad year for the automotive industry forced the cancellation of the project. Yamasaki’s “handsome, workable solution” to a production facility that was to accommodate 25,000 workers was never built. But we can rest assured that had it been, his clients would have been immensely pleased with the good value and inoffensive design of the structure, at least for a time.

In a way, Minoru Yamasaki did everything right. He was ambitious but humble. The architect started with nothing and became a wealthy man, head of a successful business. He cooperated with his clients, responded to their needs and preferences, and always cut costs when he could. He was diplomatic—he even designed the U.S. pavilions at two World’s Fairs. As a businessman, he was beyond reproach. But Yamasaki’s buildings tell another story, a cautionary tale as we enter a new century of construction. What legacy has he left us, now that not even his great accomplishment remains? Architecture, in the end, is accountable to more than the client and the bottom line. If they are to be loved and respected, and if they are to last, our buildings must answer in form and function to all of us who look upon and live inside them.

SIDEBAR: Works by Minoru Yamasaki

National Personnel Records Center, Overland, Missouri

Commissioned: 1951

Completed: 1955

Overcome by fire 12 July 1973

Employees: 4,000

Acreage: nearly 5

Pruitt-Igoe Houses, St. Louis, Missouri

Commissioned: 1951

Completed: 1954

Dynamited 15 July 1972

Capacity: 12,000 residents

Acreage: 55 acres (34 still vacant)

World Trade Center, New York, New York

Commissioned: 1962

Completed: 1976

Bombed from parking garage 26 February 1993

Casualties: 6

Hit by airplanes 11 September 2001

Casualties: 2,823

Workers: 50,000

Acreage: 16 acres, redevelopment to be determined