Word: yamasaki
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This is the credo of Minoru Yamasaki, who at 46 is turning out some of the gayest and most graceful buildings in the U.S. In recognition of Yamasaki's growing stature among U.S. architects, the Detroit Institute of Arts will open next week a full-scale show of his past works and future projects, timed to coincide with the dedication of Yamasaki's newest building -the Detroit headquarters of Reynolds Metals Co. Though its grille of gold anodized aluminum owes an unabashed debt to Architect Ed Stone, the Reynolds building, on a 4½-acre plot...
Jaundiced Eye. It took Detroit and the U.S. a long time to recognize Yamasaki, as it took Yamasaki a long time to find himself. Born in Seattle, he shared the indignities common to Japanese Americans. But he had a burning desire, inspired by an architect uncle, to become an architect. After getting his degree in architecture from the University of Washington, he went East to New York, struggled through a long apprenticeship working as a draftsman, waited out the animosity of the war years, in 1945 landed a job with a firm in Detroit, where he stayed. Steady progress...
...Yamasaki took advantage of a long convalescence to go to Japan. He was captivated by what he saw in its architecture: the interplay of light and shadow, the union of building and garden. He came back to cast a jaundiced eye on the serried ranks of glass boxes rising along the main streets of Manhattan and other major cities. "Our life gives promise of being spent in look-alike houses, look-alike automobiles and look-alike buildings," he warned his fellow architects...
...began to turn out plans for buildings whose distinguishing features are precast concrete coaxed into graceful curves and lacelike delicacy, a box-shaped podium for a base, a surrounding pool, a gemlike skylight. "In our buildings,'' says Yamasaki, "we try to think of what happens to a human being as he goes from space to space, and to provide the delight of change and surprise...
Concrete & Paper Fans. Minoru Yamasaki's $1,172,000 conference building at Wayne University in Detroit is almost too pretty to be great. But it does promise well for the 60 acres of new campus construction that Wayne and Yamasaki hope to add. A Seattle-born Nisei, Yamasaki is in love both with Western technology and Oriental refinement. His crisp little temple of talk, set beside a reflecting pool, owes a lot to the Taj Mahal, something to Japanese paper fans, and most of all to modern engineering in glass and concrete. Yamasaki puts precision over ornamentation and lets...