There are other ironies. Yamasaki (1912-86) was a first-generation American, son of a Japanese rice farmer who emigrated to Seattle. He encountered a great deal of racial hatred when growing up in the 1920s and 1930s. He was not allowed into public swimming pools, and remembered driving 30 miles with teenage friends to an almost-empty cinema, only to be told by the manager that they must go to the upstairs gallery rather than mix with the handful of whites downstairs. Astonished, Yamasaki and his friends demanded their money back and left.
Things reached a head after Pearl Harbour. By then Yamasaki was working for the American war effort, helping to design a naval base. In the hysteria following the disaster, Yamasaki was routinely stopped, and was once accused of being a spy.
Nor was this the first Yamasaki building to be destroyed. In 1972 his extensive Pruitt-Igoe housing development in St. Louis, built 1950-58, was dynamited by the authorities. This was an early example of a high-rise social housing project, and an equally early example of such a project going wrong socially. It had come to be hated by its residents, even to the extent of being the subject of arson attacks. Its demolition was seen by some critics, notably the post-modern champion Charles Jencks, as spelling the end of modernism. This proved not to be the case, though it certainly turned out to spell the end of that kind of social housing, for a good 30 years.
Though Yamasaki’s best buildings are good, they are not great. He was far from being the finest architect of his generation. His appointment to the World Trade Center was a snub to the famous names of American architecture. Indeed, when first informed of the value of the contract, he assumed an extra zero had been typed in by mistake. On learning it was not a mistake, he protested that his firm was too small to be able to handle it. But his careful, analytical approach - he made 100 design studies before settling on the Twin Towers - won the confidence of his client, the New York Harbour Authority.
