Architectural historian Dale Allen Gyure will discuss the career and life of Minoru Yamasaki (1912–1986), best know as the architect of the World Trade Center. Born to Japanese immigrant parents in Seattle, Yamasaki became one of the towering figures of midcentury architecture, even appearing on the cover of Time magazine in 1963. His self-proclaimed humanist designs merged the modern materials and functional considerations of postwar American architecture with traditional elements such as arches and colonnades. Yamasaki’s reputation began to decline in the 1970s with the mixed critical reception of the World Trade Center and the spectacular failure of St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe Apartments, which came to symbolize the flaws of midcentury urban renewal policy.

Gyure is the author of the first book to examine Yamasaki’s life and career, Minoru Yamasaki: Humanist Architecture for a Modernist World, published in November 2017 by Yale University Press. Copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing from Yale University Press.

Co-sponsored by the AIANY Historic Buildings Committee and DOCOMOMO New York/Tri-State.

Speaker:
Dale Allen Gyure, PhD, Professor and Associate Chair of Architecture, Lawrence Technological University; author, Minoru Yamasaki: Humanist Architecture for a Modernist World