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Design Agendas: Modern Architecture in St. Louis, 1930s–1970s

2024-08-16T16:13:00-04:00

The story of modern architecture in St. Louis is complex and often contradictory.

Beginning in the 1930s, internationally known architects such as Eric Mendelsohn, Eero Saarinen and Minoru Yamasaki — alongside important regional and national figures like Harris Armstrong, Charles Fleming, Joseph Murphy and Gyo Obata — created iconic structures that embodied new ideas about form and, in many cases, democratic social organization. Yet the period also was marked by racial segregation and by large-scale demolitions throughout the urban core.

This fall, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis will present “Design Agendas: Modern Architecture in St. Louis, 1930s–1970s.” With nearly 300 architectural drawings, models, photographs, films, digital maps and artworks, “Design Agendas” is the first major exhibition to examine how interlocking civic, cultural and racial histories, as well as conflicting ideological aims, reshaped the city.

“I lived in Pruitt-Ig...

Recalling Philippe Petit’s World Trade Center high-wire act after 50 years

2024-08-09T19:03:00-04:00

The walk can never be repeated, but it also can never be undone. You cannot fly a jetliner into a memory. In hindsight, the so-called art crime of the century has become a tribute to the lives of the 2,753 who were killed in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, and whose stories, too, will always live on. When I see a photo of Mr. Petit in the air, it suggests to me that the lost were able to bridge that distance, too.

Philippe Petit’s early morning stunt on August 7, 1974, helped sway public opinion in favor of the recently opened NYC World Trade Center towers, which struggled financially until the Port Authority changed course and allowed financial services companies to begin leasing space by the end of the decade. The 75-year-old is currently on a media tour promoting his two-day performance at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, where his daughter’s ashes are interned.

At the time of their 1973 opening, architect Minoru Yamasaki had said his towers were "a representation of man's belief in humanity." Fans have said this notion also courses through Petit’s life and art in the most serene and apparent, life-affirming ways.

Win a copy of Sandfuture, Justin Beal's revealing biography of World Trade Center architect Minoru Yamasaki

2022-06-23T17:43:00-04:00

Admirers of World Trade Center architect Minoru Yamasaki in search of a hot beach read this summer look no further! We’re giving away a copy of Justin Beal’s engrossing title Sandfuture, recently published by The MIT Press, wherein the prolific career and perplexing obscurity of the late Japanese designer is threaded across 256 pages to an eventual conclusion that asks several essential questions about architectural history, the art market, and changing face of the city in a technically precise novelistic tone.

By avoiding a simple shot-for-shot retelling of the different formative events and pivotal moments comprising the arc of Yamasaki’s still-debated five-decade-long career, Sandfuture builds from the scrapheap of a bygone era into an accurate reflection on contemporary life in post-9/11 New York City, beginning with the author’s own retelling of the infrastructure damage that occurred during Hurricane Sandy.

Image: The Century City Plaza in Los Angeles (courtesy of Walter P. ...

Minoru Yamasaki’s Michigan State Medical Society building hits the market for $4.3 million

2021-11-18T15:37:00-05:00

An excellent example of the New Formalist style is now available for the relatively low price of $4.3 million.

Local news outlets are reporting the recent addition of Minoru Yamasaki’s Michigan State Medical Society to the real estate market in East Lansing.

Image courtesy Michigan State Historic Preservation Office via Flickr

The architect of the World Trade Center received the commission for the building in 1959, marking his first major project outside of Metro Detroit. It was given a two-story extension in 1979 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2011.

Yamasaki’s design features a column-lined exterior connected by 31 cast-concrete arches which form a profile later repeated in the Trade Center’s podium and characterized by an internal collaborative office plan and vaulted ceilings.

Image courtesy Michigan State Historic Preservation Office via Flickr

“The intent was to build a serene and inviting building to express the idealism and humanity of the medical pro...

Mark Cuban just donated a trove of World Trade Center drawings to the Cooper Hewitt

2021-09-10T11:56:00-04:00

In 1962, Diniz was hired by architect Minoru Yamasaki as part of the team designing the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. His drawings in the WTC portfolio show viewers the experience of monolithic structures in the context of Lower Manhattan and inside the buildings themselves. The drawings were intended to illustrate Manhattan as a center of international business.

Carlos Diniz' drawings occupy a revered place in architectural history, and his World Trade Center drawings have been by and large kept out of public collections until now. The illustrator was first hired by Minoru Yamasaki in 1962 to give the public a sense of place and scale caused by the architecture that would later become the domineering experience for users of the buildings after they were completed in 1973.

"It strikes an emotional chord with every American," Cuban told Axios. "I wanted the actual drawings to be where any American can see them, and the Smithsonian was the right home."

The Dallas Morning News has more on the billionaire's gift here.

World Trade Center blueprints pulled from trash up for sale

2020-03-09T20:59:00-04:00

Blueprints for the original World Trade Center have gone on sale at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair on Friday after a Colorado man pulled them out of the trash. The set of plans for sale represents the largest floor plan of the Twin Towers complex ever offered for sale, according to the New York-based Janes Cummins Bookseller. Cummins told the Associated Press that he expected the sale to be in the six figures.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the plan set includes over 500 original plans from the 1960s and once belonged to Joseph Solomon, one of the World Trade Center architects.

The Twin Towers at the NYC World Trade Center in 2001, shortly before the September 11 attack. Photo: Carol M. Highsmith.

Shinola unveils limited edition watch celebrating the legacy of architect Minoru Yamasaki

2019-12-05T17:55:00-05:00

Detroit-based lifestyle brand Shinola celebrates the legacy of Minoru Yamasaki with a new addition to their Great American Series of watches, the Yamasaki Limited Edition Watch 38mm. "Through his world-class architecture, Yamasaki’s legacy continues to delight and surprise those who are lucky enough to experience his buildings in [Detroit], across the country and around the world," the company writes.

The watch is inspired by the McGregor Memorial Conference Center and One Woodward, both located in Detroit. Sporting a burshed stainless steel case, a black dial with matte alabaster embellishments along with an exclusive Yamasaki caseback, this timepiece is sure to realize its potential in celebrating Minoru Yamasaki's life and legacy.

Michigan's central role in the Modernist movement leaves lasting impacts

2018-09-07T13:51:00-04:00

If Michigan isn’t the first place that comes to mind when considering [the Modern era] — unlike, say, Germany or France in the 1920s — it should be. The presence of Ford in the city and Booth in the country was enough to make Michigan ground zero for the Modernist experiment [...] making the state home to perhaps the most diverse and best-preserved collection of early Modernist experiments in the world.

A look at Michigan's history in the Modernist movement and the story it tells for our future. M.H. Miller traces three main convergences in the state: Henry Ford's first Model T factory, the Cranbrook school's presence, and numerous influential architects most notably Albert Kahn and Minoru Yamasaki. While this all leaves Michigan with several noteworthy sites, Detroit and surrounding areas are also cautionary markers of modernism's relentless pursuit of "progress" for future generations.

Yamasaki, architecture firm of the original World Trade Center, returns to Detroit

2017-09-14T15:02:00-04:00

The firm of famed Detroit architect Minoru Yamasaki is returning to the city, seven years after it was forced to close. The Seattle-born architect lived in Detroit from 1945 until his death in 1986. He launched his own firm in 1950, which survived him until 2009 when it closed due to financial problems. Yamasaki’s most famed work is the World Trade Center twin towers, although he contributed many buildings to the Detroit skyline, including the One Woodward office tower.

"I think we’re really interested in that kind of momentum that Detroit has now," Robert Szantner, a long-time employee of Minoru Yamasaki's original firm until it closed, told the Detroit Free Press. Szantner had bought the intellectual property, including the name, out of receivership in 2009 and operated the successor firm, Yamasaki Inc., in Birmingham, MI. The company has announced to open a new headquarter office in the Fisher Building in the New Center area this month.

Yamasaki's posthumous critique of the new World Trade Center

2015-06-25T14:07:00-04:00

I must ask myself if we want to design buildings for people to fit some preconceived idea of a glass world. Is this really the future of cities?" – Minoru Yamasaki

While the critical response to the new 1WTC has been, at best, one of resigned acceptance, the original Twin Towers didn't receive much fanfare either when they first opened in 1973. Ada Louise Huxtable, then architecture critic for The New York Times, wasn't much of a fan of Minoru Yamasaki's design: "I, for one, am not in thrall to size; build very big and you can build very bad—and the very bad will be inescapable."

Yamasaki responded, defending his monoliths of slitted windows with an attack on the very concept that characterizes the new 1WTC and Manhattan's skyline today – glass: "As for mirror glass, I detest it, because buildings with it look to me as if they have cataracts, showing no live within. On the interior, it produces strange reflections of lights, objects and people which gives me a feeling I can only describe as eerie."

Yamaski's complete letter was published in CLOG's 2014 "World Trade Center" issue. For more news on the World Trade Center:

Foster's Out, Ingels' In: ...