Arts and Letters

Today we mourn the death of our fellow member Minoru Yamasaki. He was a sensitive, gentle man, who loved his craft and achieved success and fame as a designer of many important buildings throughout the world.

In his moving autobiography, A Life in Architecture, published in 1979, he tells us of his early struggles against poverty and racial prejudice in the years of depression and war.

Yama, as he was called by his friends, discovered early in life that architecture is an art, whose main purpose is "to create an atmosphere in which man can live, work, and enjoy." All his work from the beginning of his career to his death showed this fundamental concern for human beings, and he confessed that he liked to use materials that would "be pleasing to the touch as well as to the eye" and that he sought "to impart serenity, beauty, love, and hope to his work."

Such soft romantic feelings, in times when architecture was mostly a clever system of packaging our complexities in sleek boxes, were not the kind to endear him to the more dogmatic members of the profession. But the people for whom he built loved him for what he gave them and they stood by him—particularly the people of Saudi Arabia, who were convinced that he was the only architect in the world able or willing to reinterpret in modern terms what they believed to be the rich tradition of the Muslim world. Yet the fact that the full approval of his peers in the profession had been partly withheld, on the basis that his work was too decorative, ornamental, or self-indulgent, hurt him deeply. In my frequent talks with him, he confessed to being at a loss to understand the reasons for this lack of appreciation by some of his fellow architects.

Being an honest and reflective man, he admitted an early tendency to over-design and over-decorate some of his buildings; but he told us that he had later learned from Emerson that "beauty rests on necessities, the line of beauty being the result of perfect economy, which relies on the poetry of the columns for its strength." He never said so, but while there was a lesson to be learned from such intellectual preaching, it never became his guiding philosophy—probably because he could see it as the very cause of our modern dilemma.

In his later years, Yama was enormously excited by the discovery of the architecture of his ancestors in Japan and came to believe that "its traditional forms seemed quite as appropriate when built today as they were in the past."

In all periods of his very active and productive life, he never deviated from his fundamental belief that while we cannot quite duplicate the forms of the past, it is important for us to reinterpret in our own way the delicacy and the warmth of feeling they represent.

It is ironic to observe that Yama died just when strong new trends are emerging as a reaction against the sterility of our recent past. Perhaps the profession may now see Yama's romantic attitudes in a different and more sympathetic light. It can begin to admire his lifelong, persistent search for beauty and permanence, even perfection, in an imperfect world, where technology and the obsession for material progress make the architect's task so difficult.

In very recent years, having learned how indispensable were discipline and integrity in any work which is to last, he wrote that "architects spend too much time thinking of ways to improvise, with the result that buildings become too trendy, giving them no lasting meaning." He accepted the fact that the same humanistic impulses which he tried so carefully to nourish all his life—the desire to express beauty in its infinite variations—were the same as those which now motivate a younger generation of designers intent on minimizing the pervasive ugliness of our world. But he could also see and fear the danger that the limpid well of creative inspiration could become polluted by the pseudo-intellectual pretensions of a self-styled avant-garde, echoing the inanities and clichés of our entertainment media in a mindless celebration of the banal.

There is much a friend could say about Yama—the man, the architect, and the artist—but I wish to be brief in my recollections, so as to emphasize his role as a successful and lovable dreamer in these particularly important times of transition. Many of his buildings are now architectural milestones, beginning with his seminal St. Louis Airport, the exquisitely detailed McGregor Memorial at Wayne State University, the original Reynolds Building, as well as the Michigan Consolidated Gas Company building, the Dhahran Air Terminal, the North Shore Congregation Israel in Glencoe, Illinois, the Century Plaza Hotel, and finally the World Trade Center—a true monument of design and engineering skill, much criticized as to its size but unforgettable as a work of architecture.

We who were his friends and loved Yama shall miss him very much.