Anti-Japanese sentiment was strong during the years of his youth. His family lived “down near the police station” in Japantown, where his father worked as a stock man in a local shoe store. Yamasaki was born in 1912 and raised in Seattle. Minoru Yamasaki and the Fragility of Architecture by Paul Kidder is an excellent, thoughtful survey of the difficulties of placing Yamasaki in the pantheon of modern and postmodern architects. It’s a reassessment of an architect worthy of serious consideration and a man whose ideas and projects have been beloved by the public, reviled by critics and sometimes demolished. Architecture, he once said, “must … fulfill society’s aspirations, its reaching for nobility, its craving for beauty.” And over his long career, those ideals and aspirations helped to profoundly shape his hometown, Seattle.Ī new book by a Seattle University philosophy professor looks at Yamasaki’s career - his accomplishments and failures, and the meaning of it all. The twin tower terrorist attacks were an odd exclamation point to the career of architect Yamasaki, whose works were largely informed by his idealism about the purpose of his craft.
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