Minoru Yamasaki
Minoru Yamasaki ( born December 1, 1912 in Seattle, Washington, USA, † February 6, 1986 in Detroit, Michigan ) was an American architect. Among his most famous projects, the World Trade Center was in New York.
Life
He studied architecture in 1930 at the University of Washington (BA 1934) and then at the University of New York. He first worked for the firm of Shreve, Lamb and Harmon. In 1945 he moved to Detroit, where he was employed by Smith, Hinchman, and Grylls; In 1949 he left the company and founded his own office.
Through his travels, he developed a style that was influenced by Indian and Japanese influences. In 1961, he was responsible for the design of the Dhahran Air Terminal. Five years later, his most famous design, the World Trade Center in New York has been realized. Minoru Yamasaki was suffering from acrophobia.
Importance
The architect Yamasaki was next to another large building projects (see below ), both the designer of New York's World Trade Center and the social settlement Pruitt - Igoe in St. Louis (1956 completed ). The latter was destroyed relatively shortly after the inauguration in 1972: it was deliberately blown up because the social structure was so decayed that another solution to save the district did not seem in sight. The demolition of the settlement has been taken as a signal of the so-called functionalist Modernism in the film Koyaanisqatsi as a reason contemporary critical thinking, and was also one of the reference objects in Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus To Our House, in which the author formulated a devastating critique of modern architecture. The culture-critical concept of " Einstürzende Neubauten " refers primarily to the images of the well-documented blast measure the settlement Pruitt Igoe. The architecture critic and historian Charles Jencks dated in its programmatic writing The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, the end of modernity at the moment, as in 1972, the first three buildings on the residential Pruitt - Igoe were blown up in St. Louis.