Revisiting the link between detention and design history, 75 years after FDR?s executive order On January 18, 1963, architect Minoru Yamasaki appeared on the cover of TIME magazine, his disembodied head floating amidst the neo-Gothic tracery, delicate tenting, and flower-shaped fountains of his own design.
The occasion was Yamasaki?s commission to plan the then-$270-million World Trade Center. The commission was made controversial, in the words of the TIME feature, by the contrast between the ?dreadful flaws? critics found in the work of the ?wiry, 132-lb. Nisei,? and the pleasure his work gave to the public with its ?declaration of independence from the machine-made monotony of so much modern architecture.?
Yamasaki?s aim was to please the eye, avoiding both the ubiquitous glass box and the Corbusian concrete tower, TIME said, while assuring its readers that the ?humble,? ?courteous? architect had a core that was ?all steel.?
The roots of Yamasaki?s toughness lay both in his stylistic battle for pleasure and delight?traced through details of his trips to India?s Taj Mahal, Europe?s Gothic cathedrals, and Kyoto?s Katsura Palace?and in a lifetime of discrimination.
Yamasaki grew up in a wooden tenement less than two miles from the Century 21 Exposition grounds in Seattle; moved to New York after receiving his architecture degree, having seen top Japanese-American graduates passed over for jobs; and sent for his parents after the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor to sav...