This big, handsomely produced book chronicles the career of one of the most successful and controversial architects of the twentieth century. Although he designed seventy-nine buildings—schools, churches and synagogues, office towers, university buildings, airports, consulates, and houses—and won numerous design awards and was honored in 1959 with the first one-man exhibition at the Architectural League of New York since 1930, when Frank Lloyd Wright was so honored, Minoru Yamasaki (1912–86) never achieved the status of Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen, Louis Kahn, Paul Rudolph, or the other prominent architects of his era. And his reputation would always be sullied by the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe and the disappointment of the World Trade Center.
Although many well-regarded architects designed housing projects that were considered no more successful than Pruitt-Igoe, it was Yamasaki's project that was singled out for demolition and thus became a symbol of all that was wrong...
University of California Press