“The purpose of architecture is to create an atmosphere in which man can live, work and enjoy.”

The words of the late architect Minoru Yamasaki still echo today. Yamasaki is well known for his innovative design of the World Trade Center, and its similar predecessors on campus: the Conservatory of Music, Warner Concert Hall and King Memorial Building. 

The Conservatory, built in 1964; Warner Concert Hall, designed in 1963; and King, erected in 1966, all share distinct characteristics with the WTC, constructed in 1972, most noticeably the verticality of the grill on the exterior façades.

The three buildings are loosely inspired by Gothic architecture.  As evidenced by the WTC towers, Yamasaki’s personal fear of heights led to high-rise buildings that used extremely narrow windows and limited vistas.

“The interesting thing about Oberlin College as it differs from other more urban schools or universities is that it is a walking campus...We had to think in terms of a walking population rather than an automobile-transported population. So there are some little qualities in the building that might be interesting. As you approach the concert hall, you look at the garden first,” Yamasaki once said.

Oberlin’s very nature as a walking campus strongly influenced his aesthetic philosophy.  Serene buildings and calm surroundings were important to him in what he called the “whole machine era.” 

Yamasaki believed “that the environment is one very strong way to counterbalance the chaotic nature of our life.”

The Conservatory’s Japanese-style garden has a meditative, peaceful quality where students can often be found taking a break, gathering their thoughts or rehearsing on warm days. Yamasaki’s work on campus illustrated how structural strength could still be gussied up with light embellishments. 

Some architects view the Conservatory and King as experimental studies that later expressed their full form in the WTC.

Selected from a number of other prominent American architects, Yamasaki was commissioned to design the WTC with New York firm Emery, Roth and Sons. With a budget of only $500 million, the task at hand was considered by many to be nearly impossible.  The project required the construction of twelve million square feet of floor area on a site of merely sixteen acres, which also had to accommodate for Hudson River tubes and subway tunnels.

Yamasaki studied over 100 plans, building miniature models to help conceptualize his vision.  The final decision rested on a two -tower development that would contain nine million square feet of office space.  One tower seemed structurally unsound with mammoth proportions and several towers risked looking like a housing complex. Two was highly advantageous, overlooking a great view while maintaining feasible structural plans.

 Manhattan’s twin towers featured 110 floors stacked to an immense 1,353 feet.  Observation decks allowed viewers to see 45 miles in every direction. A surreal effect was created as the dramatic pair punctured the skyline as two large-scale sculptures.

Yamasaki called the WTC “a living symbol of man’s dedication to world peace…a representation of man’s belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his beliefs in the cooperation of men, and, through cooperation, his ability to find greatness.”

His optimistic view was unfortunately changed during the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

Born in Seattle, Washington on Dec. 1, 1912, second generation Japanese-American, Yamasaki, part of the Nisei, was raised in poverty.  His immigrant father, the fourth son of a Japanese farmer, had come to the States in 1908.  As a child, early years were spent in the slums inside a building tilted due to a faulty foundation.

Uncle Koken Ito, an architect educated at the University of California, Berkeley, influenced the young Yamasaki; the more Ito spoke about his career, the more interested the boy became. 

Yamasaki managed to put himself through school at the University of Washington by working five summers in Alaskan salmon canneries for 17 cents an hour.  A 66-hour work week amounted to a small income of about $50 per month; overtime pay was 25 cents an hour.

“And there was plenty of over time…During busy periods, we would work from 4 in the morning until midnight,” Yamasaki said in 1963 during an interview with Time.

 “When I looked at the older men (working in the cannery) destined to live out their lives in such uncompromising and personally degrading circumstances, I became all the more determined not to let that be the pattern into which my life would fall,” he recalled in a 1982 interview with the Detroit News.

After earning his bachelor’s degree, Yamasaki moved to New York City with $40 in his pocket.  He enrolled at New York University, graduating a few years later with a master’s degree in architecture.

Unfortunately, beginner’s luck did not follow Yamasaki after graduation. He spent about a year in Manhattan wrapping china for an import firm before he finally found employment in 1937 at Githens & Keally to help plan the Brooklyn Public Library. 

From there, Yamasaki moved to the then-young architecture firm Shreve, Lamb and Harmon, a company best known for the 1931 Empire State Building.  He was lucky enough to have kept his job after Pearl Harbor during waves of anti-Japanese sentiment, even though Shreve, Lamb and Harmon had been working on a number of military bases. Continuing to hone his skills there, he was able to jump to Harrison, Fouilhoux and Abramovitz, designers of Rockefeller Center. 

In 1945, 33-year-old Yamasaki, armed with an impressive resume, became the chief of design at Smith, Hinchman and Grylls in Detroit, Michigan. He dove into a number of projects, but stress eventually took its toll; in 1954, he suffered a near-fatal ulcer attack.

At the request of the U.S. State Department, Yamasaki traveled to Japan to gather inspiration for a new U.S. Consulate building in either Kobe or Osaka. 

While there, he studied the idea of tokonoma, a room usually decorated with tatami mats and decorative scrolls, that is considered by the Japanese to be the spiritual and artistic center of a home. 

Although his trip only lasted a month, the Japanese influence became evident throughout his career. His first significant building, the 1955 Pruitt-Igoe Housing project in St. Louis, Missouri, was a stark, modernist-minded concrete piece.  Unfortunately, it was not well received and was dynamited about two decades later.  However, experts now consider it to have been the birth of post-modern architecture.

Despite this setback, Yamasaki forged ahead.  In 1959, he received the first award from the American Institute of Architects for his unique design of the McGregor Center on the Wayne State University campus in Detroit.  The building displays Japanese-style reflecting pools, triangular motifs and skylights. These characteristics became part of his signature style, employing elements of pools, naturally lighted interiors and the idea of open, concave space.

Yamasaki’s youthful energy prompted many travels around the globe, with tours of Europe and Asia where he absorbed European Gothic designs and Indian architecture.  He found the Taj Mahal’s marble inlays and inexhaustible detail to be awe-inspiring. His design philosophy transformed from the in-vogue, new minimalism to one that reflected a softer, older romanticism. 

And thus began Yamasaki’s one-man campaign to reintroduce into the modern school of architecture the embellishments that modern artists had tossed off as weighty, bothersome and generally too distracting, cloaking their building’s ultimate expressions.  

Yamasaki’s high-rise project, the Michigan Consolidated Gas Company building, is now known as the American Natural Resources building in downtown Detroit.  Awash with glass walls, the ground floor is heightened with glossy, reflective surfaces that create an illusion of a floating box.

International influences continued to dot his work. The Dhahran Air Terminal in Saudi Arabia uses low, Arabic-style arches in a crowd of concrete canopies. In 1968, he drew ideas from ancient Jewish tradition for the Congregation Beth El in Bloomsfield, Michigan.

Other notable buildings include the 1962 U.S. Science Pavilion for the Seattle World Exposition, Harvard University’s William James Hall, Princeton University’s Robertson and Peyton Hall, Century Plaza Towers in Los Angeles and the Picasso Tower in Madrid, Spain.

However, Yamasaki’s greatest triumph is indisputably the World Trade Center, which landed him on the cover of Time magazine.

In 1951, Yamasaki founded his own firm, Yamasaki Associates, based in Rochester Hills, Michigan. Today, it is a flourishing company with international offices, with Tae Sun Hon, OC ’87, as its senior vice president.

Although a man of slim build, weighing approximately 130 pounds, Time magazine wrote in 1963, “the core of the man is all steel.” Despite this inner strength, cancer knocked Yamasaki off his feet; he died of cancer on Feb. 6, 1986 at age 73.

“And a building must be like a human being. It must have a wholeness about it, something that is very important,” Yamasaki said.