Minoru Yamasaki

At 73 years old, Minoru Yamasaki physical status not available right now. We will update Minoru Yamasaki's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Yamasaki's first major project was the Pruitt–Igoe public housing project in St. Louis in 1955. Despite his love of traditional Japanese design and ornamentation, the buildings of Pruitt–Igoe were stark, modernist concrete structures, severely constricted by a tight budget. The housing project soon experienced so many problems that it was demolished starting in 1972, less than twenty years after its completion. Its destruction would be considered by architectural historian Charles Jencks to be the symbolic end of modernist architecture.

In 1955, he also designed the "sleek" terminal at Lambert–St. Louis International Airport, which led to his 1959 commission to design the Dhahran International Airport in Saudi Arabia. The Dhahran International Airport terminal building was especially well received in Saudi Arabia and was featured on the one riyal bank note. In the 1950s, Yamasaki was commissioned by the Reynolds Company to design an aluminum-wrapped building in Southfield, Michigan, which would "symbolize the auto industry's past and future progress with aluminum." The three-story glass building wrapped in aluminum, known as the Reynolds Metals Company's Great Lakes Sales Headquarters Building, was also supposed to reinforce the company's main product and showcase its admirable characteristics of strength and beauty.

Yamasaki's first widely-acclaimed design was the Pacific Science Center, with its iconic lacy and airy decorative arches. It was constructed by the City of Seattle for the 1962 Seattle World's Fair. The building raised his public profile so much that he was featured on the cover of Time magazine.

In 1962 Yamasaki and his firm were commissioned to design his most well known project; the World Trade Center, with Emery Roth & Sons serving as associate architects. The World Trade Center towers featured many innovative design elements to address many unique challenges at the site. One particular design challenge of the World Trade Center's design related to the efficacy of the elevator system, which became unique in the world when it was first opened for service. Yamasaki employed the fastest elevators at the time, running at 1,700 feet (520 m) per minute. Instead of placing a traditional large cluster of full-height elevator shafts in the core of each tower, Yamasaki created the Twin Towers' "Skylobby" system. The Skylobby design created three separate, connected elevator systems which would serve different zones of the building, depending on which floor was chosen, saving approximately 70% of the space which would have been required for traditional shafts. The space saved was then used for additional office space. Internally, each office floor was a vast open space unimpeded by support columns, ready to be subdivided as the tenants might choose. Other design challenges included anchoring the massively tall towers to the bedrock located about 80 feet below lower Manhattan's soft soil. Digging a large trench to the bedrock risked flooding from nearby New York Harbor. The solution employed by Yamasaki and his team of engineers was to use a slurry wall; digging very narrow trenches about 3 feet wide and then filling these with a slurry (a mixture of clay and water) that was dense enough to keep the surrounding water out. Pipes were then lowered into the slurry trench and concrete was pumped in. The concrete, being more dense than the slurry, sank to the bottom of the trenches all the way down to the bedrock displacing the slurry to the surface, where it was drained away. This process was repeated around the entire perimeter of the site and reinforced with steel cables to create a watertight concrete bathtub surrounding the excavation site. This slurry wall system had only been employed a few times prior in the United States and never on such a large project.

Another design challenge presented by the World Trade Center project was developing a wind-bracing system to keep the ultra tall but relatively lightweight steel and glass structures from swaying at their upper levels. Other contemporary modern skyscrapers had used centrally located cross-bracing systems located in the core of the interiors at the upper levels, but Yamasaki and structural engineer Fazlur Rahman Khan employed an exterior truss system; a network of vertical and horizontal structural elements on the exterior of the towers giving them structural support. This external structural support system also decreased the need for large internal pillars. The external truss support system and the unique elevator configuration created more rentable space in the World Trade Centers to satisfy the owner's (The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey) massive demand for ten million square feet of office space.

The first of the towers was finished in 1970. Many of his buildings feature superficial details inspired by the pointed arches of Gothic architecture, and make use of extremely narrow vertical windows. This narrow-windowed style arose from his own personal fear of heights. After partnering with Emery Roth and Sons on the design of the World Trade Center, the collaboration continued with other projects including new buildings at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, DC

In 1978, Yamasaki designed the Federal Reserve Bank tower in Richmond, Virginia. The work was designed with a similar external appearance as the World Trade Center complex, with its narrow fenestration, and now stands at 394 ft (120 m).

Yamasaki was a member of the Pennsylvania Avenue Commission, created in 1961 to restore the grand avenue in Washington, DC, but he resigned after disagreements and disillusionment with the design by committee approach.

The campus for the University of Regina was designed in tandem with Yamasaki's plan for Wascana Centre, a park built around Wascana Lake in Regina, Saskatchewan. The original campus design was approved in 1962. Yamasaki was awarded contracts to design the first three buildings: the Classroom Building, the Laboratory Building, and the Dr. John Archer Library, which were built between 1963 and 1967.

Yamasaki designed two notable synagogues, North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoe, Illinois (1964), and Temple Beth El, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (1973). He designed a number of buildings on college campuses, including designs for Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota between 1958 and 1968 as well as being commissioned to design buildings on the campus of Wayne State University in the 1950s and 1960s, including the McGregor Memorial Conference Center, the College of Education building and the Prentis Building and DeRoy Auditorium Complex. The buildings at Wayne State University incorporated many architectural motifs that would become characteristic elements in Yamasaki's designs. With regards to the McGregor Memorial Conference Center, this included placing the building on an elevated base or pedestal to emphasize its presence, repeated geometric patterns on the exterior facade of the building (many times these exterior design features were functional as well, providing structural support to the building). He also used exotic materials such as white marble tiles and columns, incorporated a skylight traversing the length of the building and made extensive use of the secondary space outside the building including constructing a plaza with reflecting pools, seating areas, greenery and sculptures. The College of Education building featured repeating gothic arches throughout the exterior of the building which were both ornamental but also provided structural support for the building.

After criticism of his dramatically cantilevered Rainier Tower (1977) in Seattle, Yamasaki became less adventurous in his designs during the last decade of his career.

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