What do these have in common?
This.
And now this one may be destroyed, too, Christopher Hawthorne writes in today’s LA Times.
What else do they have in common? This Seattle native.
His name is Minoru Yamasaki and he designed this first (as I’ve liked to point out).
In a blog post called “One architect’s tortured body of work,” Hawthorne asks the essential question, and I wish he’d take a crack at answering it (he’s far more qualified than I am):
The question of whether the architecture of Yamasaki’s buildings … played any role in their fate is complex enough to require its own dissertation.
Is it poor Minoru’s fault?? Did his buildings contain the DNA of their own destructions?
HE also did the “rainier building” with the sloping and sides down to the narrow base in downtown Seattle. The one with the louis vuitton store in it.
That won’t be torn down thankfully
Geezus- I was born in St Louis and frequently drove by those projects as a youth. I’ve stood atop the WTC and been in it numerous times, and I once stayed in the Century Plaza. Am I six degrees of fucked?
Something is the matter with your blogging software – this one is identified as a Jen Graves post, instead of Charles Mudede.
@3
I was going to say the same thing.
Both the housing project and the WTC display a scale that makes elegance impossible.
I haven’t seen too much more of Minoru’s work, but the Rainier Tower and the Seattle Center are much better on so many levels than this other work.
Perhaps his problem was being apart from Seattle?
There is also the IBM building SE of Rainer Tower. Its the only place where you can still walk between two of Yamasaki’s buildings-now that WTC is gone
maybe he just put shit in the wrong locations.
Oh shit, Jen’s been getting into Charles’s stash of mushrooms and architecture porn.
Dang. #3,4 and 8 all beat me to it. I scrolled up twice to make sure this wasn’t a Mudede post.
Also, Jen: No, and fuck you for asking.
@3/4: You read my mind. I was about to write something disparaging, but now I’m just scratching my head.
This post is bad and you should feel bad.
The Oberlin Conservatory is his too.
I think he also designed a building around 6th and Stewart, that is basically a mini WTC. He was a modernist, is all. Most have long lost that simple optimism.
I mean 6th and Virginia.
From rotten.com‘s page on WTC
http://www.rotten.com/library/history/wt…
What isn’t entirely clear is why the Twin Towers pissed off terrorists enough to not only try to destroy them, but come back for a second try.
It certainly wasn’t because of the Architect himself: Yamasaki also designed Dhahran Air Terminal, a building that so enamored the Saudi Royal Family that it graces their currency.
While there is no actual evidence to this effect, Osama bin Laden may have been personally offended by the Towers’ architecture. Consciously or subconsciously, Yamasaki modeled the WTC square layout after Mecca, and incorporated pseudo-Islamic arches at the base of the buildings. The sides of the buildings are an intricate pattern reminiscent of the Moors. Yet the buildings still appear distinctively American and Godless. Not only may have bin Laden and his ilk hated what the buildings stood for, he may have hated them for their perversion of Islamic culture.
That picture of the Pacific Science Center arches is awesome. One almost forgets how beautiful they are with all that ZooBooMaFoo crap piled up under them.
My visceral reaction to the inclusion of WTC’s collapse was, ‘Wow, stay classy, Stranger.’ We all know that no earthquake made those towers collapse.
Good question, though — even bin Laden hadn’t expected the planes’ impact to completely level the towers, and he’s an engineer. The History Channel’s analysis a few years ago settled on the fact that the planes weakened the core support columns, if I remember correctly. I’d like to think the PSC arches are structurally different enough that they should be fairly safe.