Minoru Yamasaki (1912–1986) was an American architect, born in Seattle to Japanese immigrant parents, best known for the original World Trade Center in New York, designed from 1962 with Emery Roth & Sons. Many of his buildings carry details drawn from pointed Gothic arches and very narrow vertical windows, a style that grew partly from his own fear of heights. Two of his major projects, the Pruitt–Igoe housing in St. Louis and the World Trade Center, were destroyed on live television; the historian Charles Jencks saw Pruitt–Igoe's demolition as the symbolic end of modernist architecture.
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The McGregor Memorial Conference Center in Detroit (1958) stands on a raised base, with repeated geometric patterns on its façade, white marble and a skylight running its whole length. His terminal at Dhahran Air Terminal in Saudi Arabia (1961) was so well received that it appeared on the one-riyal banknote. The Pacific Science Center in Seattle (1962), built for the World's Fair, was his first widely acclaimed design. After criticism of the dramatic cantilever of Rainier Tower in Seattle (1977), he became less adventurous. Minoru Yamasaki's buildings are studied for ornament and pattern within modernism.
McGregor Memorial Conference Center1958 · Detroit
One Woodward Avenue1962 · Detroit
Century Plaza Towers1975 · Los Angeles
Dhahran Air Terminal1961 · Dhahran
Pacific Science Center1962 · Seattle
North Shore Congregation Israel1964 · Glencoe
Rainier Tower1977 · Seattle