Welcome back to the show.
Did you know that the architect who
designed the World Trade Center
in New York is from Seattle Minoru
Yamasaki's designs and influence
can be seen throughout the Emerald
City and across the country.
Seattle University professor Paul
Kidder explores these connections
in his book Minuro Yamasaki and
the fragility of architecture.
Yamasaki built many buildings in the
United States and throughout the world,
and I visited over 50 of them in this
project, and what I found was that people
who use the buildings tend to like them
and even call them iconic buildings.
But critics and architects tend
can be very critical of Yamasaki,
so I'm trying to stress that he's
important as an architect and also in
American history, and I'm trying to.
Dig into what his architectural vision
was to try to communicate that.
Well, I mean he has a very important
part of history and architecture.
Talk about his work on
the World Trade Center,
the World Trade Center has some important
connections to Seattle buildings actually.
So Yamasaki did the Pacific
Science Center and that Science
Center has a wonderful feel to it.
The Plaza you go out there and
it's got this wonderful. Com to it.
But it's also a very lively visual space
and one of the people working on the
World Trade Center project visited the.
62 worlds fair here.
Just enchanted with that building
and he thought, well,
we're going to build this enormous
building back in New York.
Maybe this architect could soften it, right?
And make it more human and bring all of
this elegance to this overwhelming project.
And that's what Yamasaki tried to do.
Ironically enough,
he saw the World Trade Center as
a symbol of peace he wanted.
To bring some of the qualities of his
other buildings which are focused
on feelings of serenity and calm,
spirituality and openness.
Of course there's a lot of controversy
about how successful he was.
He wanted to the building to
be as he called it,
quiet and not be too busy and
so forth because it was so big.
But a lot of people saw that as well.
They're dull,
and they they don't communicate much.
There were successes.
And failures in that
regard, well, criticism or not?
I mean you just blew my mind
when you tell me that he designed
the Pacific Science Center.
I stood there with hundreds of
others watching the solar eclipse
in silence and it was the perfect
location to something like that.
Yeah, it's just beautiful.
Tell me about more of his
buildings in Seattle.
Well, there are three buildings and that's
the Science Center and the Rainier tower,
the one that sits up on the pedestal and.
The IBM building,
which is Kitty Corner to that,
and they all have qualities that are
connected to the World Trade Center,
for example that quietness that he went
for is there in the Rainier tower.
You know it's dramatic at the bottom,
but above that it's a very formal,
quiet kind of building.
Then the IBM building has the some
of the same structural engineering
that the World Trade Center has.
It has those pinstripe columns on
the outside and those columns.
It's kind of innovative that they
actually helped hold the building up.
That was true of the World Trade Center.
It was the exterior of the
building that provided a lot of
the structural support to it.
So those three buildings are all
very characteristic of Yamasaki,
but his roots in Seattle go much deeper.
He was born here.
He learned architecture at the
University of Washington and
his training there really shaped
his vision and he influenced.
Architecture at the University of
Washington because he was on the
architectural Commission and everybody
had to build in ways that made him happy.
And so yeah,
so he had an influence on
the, you know, you know it, Paul,
it's not often that we're driving
around town and we look up at
these high rises and think that
there's much architecture involved.
I mean you, you just see
these these massive towers.
But hearing this, knowing this,
is such a great education,
what do you hope people who are non
architects take away from your book?
I think that we all feel that architecture
good architecture is not just useful and
it's not just good looking necessarily.
It's meaningful. And when we all get
on airplanes to go look at the great
buildings in Europe and so forth.
You know when when we travel, that's when
we really look at architecture, right?
And? The reason we go to see buildings is
because they're culturally meaningful,
and I think some of Yamasaki
buildings have that quality.
They're meaningful buildings,
and that's what I tried to emphasize
when I describe them and explore them.
Isn't that fascinating?