Minoru Yamasaki Reassessed 25 Years After the World Trade Center's Destruction

Minoru Yamasaki's reputation is undergoing a reassessment as the 25th anniversary of the World Trade Center attack approaches this fall. The Japanese American architect, best known for the twin towers complex destroyed in 2001, designed several dozen other buildings worldwide, including office towers, college campus structures, synagogues, hotels and airport terminals. His 1965 building in downtown Minneapolis, distinguished by a green serpentine stone facade and a series of gothic arches, stands on a corner otherwise occupied by routine towers and reads at first glance as an urban temple rather than the former headquarters of a Midwestern insurance company. Yamasaki's mantra was "Surprise, serenity, delight," an attempt to fuse the steel-and-glass boxes of modernists such as Mies van der Rohe with decorative flourishes drawn from European and Asian cathedrals and palaces he encountered on a 1950s trip around the world. That pairing of opposites generated decades of angst for the architect, though he sometimes achieved it. The World Trade Center itself generally drew disdain from architecture critics and New Yorkers, who found it sterile and overpowering. Eric Lipton, who covered the attacks and co-wrote a book on the towers' history, traveled to roughly 20 Yamasaki buildings across the Midwest, Seattle and Japan to reconsider the architect's successes and failures.