The WTC Towers, Pruitt-Igoe and the legacy of Minoru Yamasaki

Sometimes you discover things in surprisingly serendipitous ways.

I spent part of the day today doing research on a condominium development in Singapore that my girlfriend and I are interested in. In the process I inadvertently learned a few things about architecture, architectural history, social/urban planning and the architect who designed the World Trade Center Towers; which seemed appropriate on this the ten-year anniversary of their destruction.

The condominium I was researching proves to be a very unique development in that each unit has a high degree of outdoor space that is relatively public (almost like a suburban front-yard) and which neighbors must pass on their way to the elevator. This semi-private space is included in each unit even as far as the top levels of the development and is staggered to provide two floors of volume above each space. Some inhabitants have quite lush gardens growing in these spaces, some use it as an open-air shed. Some of the units are small, some are huge. The architect reportedly modeled the development on the native Malay Kampung (village), renown for it's communal and family-oriented style of life. I do not know the specific design choices that make the development work, but . . . it works. Even during our brief visit to look at one of the units, we struck up a lengthy conversation with one of the neighbors 'over the fence'. A recent survey conducted with the inhabitants indicated their (self-reported) communal interactions, feeling of security, etc were all in the 90th percentiles.

I was, and am, impressed.

In an academic article on the building, the author referred to it as an anti-Pruitt-Igoe. Pruitt-Igoe, it turns out, was a highly praised, large-scale public housing development in Saint Louis built in the early 1950s. Pruitt-Igoe rapidly and notoriously decayed, becoming an icon for failed public-housing and urban-planning; failures often attributed (though perhaps unfairly) to the architecture. The Pruitt-Igoe development, it turns out, was the first large-scale project of the American architect Minoru Yamasaki. At about the same time the destruction of Pruitt-Igoe was being nationally televised, Yamasaki's next major project was about to debut. The World Trade Center North Tower 1 opened for business in the same year, 1972.

The live, nationally televised demolition of Pruitt-Igoe makes the WTC the second major project of Yamasaki's to be captured being destroyed on live national television. Of course, the controlled demolition of a building is a completely different sort of spectacle to the horrors of witnessing a populated high-rise structure destroyed. Nevertheless, it is an extraordinary fact.

These televised events place Yamasaki's work inadvertently in the midst of major upheavals in the American psyche. Pruitt-Igoe was originally a segregated development (the "Pruitt" and "Igoe" of the name refer to prominent black and white Saint Louis natives) and the decay and demolition of the development parallels the demise of segregation as well as of the modernist architectural project (at least according to Charlie Jencks). Putting the demolition of the building on live national television heightened the symbolic significance of the event. The symbolism of the World Tade Center attack is doubtless more sensitive and contended, especially with multiple wars still linked - however tenuously - to the event.

So, to make a long story short, I found myself engaged in a bit of very pertinent architectural history this afternoon. I thought I'd share some of what I discovered.

It's worth mentioning that Yamasaki's work is still visible in many of the cities I've lived in and called home. 100 Washington Avenue in Minneapolis is a Yamasaki building, as is the IBM building in Seattle and half the buildings on the Carleton College campus in Northfield, MN. Somewhere out there, I'm sure, there's a grad student writing a paper on architecture and the spectacle of its destruction. He, or she, will have to talk about Yamasaki.