Seattle architect created trade center as peace symbol
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http://seattlep-i.nwsource.com/local/38737_architect13.shtml
Seattle architect created trade center as peace symbol
Thursday, September 13, 2001
By JANE HADLEY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
New York City's World Trade Center seized the spotlight in 1973 at 110
stories, at that time the tallest skyscraper in the world. But its
celebrated architect, the late Minoru Yamasaki, began life in humble
circumstances in Seattle in 1912.
Yamasaki was born to first-generation Japanese parents in a tenement
in the Yesler Hill neighborhood. He graduated from Garfield High
School and put himself through the University of Washington by working
summers in Alaskan fish canneries, graduating in 1934.
Yamasaki created architecture in the modernist style. To him, it
represented serenity and world peace -- a tragic irony in light of
Tuesday's destruction by terrorists of his most famous creation.
He wanted the World Trade Center to be "a monument to world peace" and
said it should represent "man's belief in humanity, his need for
individual dignity, his beliefs in the cooperation of men and through
cooperation, his ability to find greatness."
The New York landmark was modeled after the IBM Building in downtown
Seattle -- another Yamasaki project. On both projects he worked with
the Seattle firm of Skilling, Ward, Magnusson and Barkshire, which
drew up the structural engineering plans for the World Trade Center.
"We look at our buildings as family members," Brian McIntyre, chief
operating officer of the firm, said. "To lose one like this is
devastating."
Yamasaki's buildings often featured groundbreaking technology.
In Seattle, he designed the Rainier Tower at Fourth Avenue and
University Street, built in 1977, as well as the Pacific Science
Center at the Seattle Center, built for the 1962 World's Fair.
The Rainier Tower, controversial at the time it was built, sits on a
sculpted pedestal that is considerably narrower than the building it
supports.
The science pavilion was the first large-scale use of precast,
prestressed concrete panels.
The World Trade Center was many years in the making. Yamasaki got the
commission to design it in 1963. Groundbreaking was in 1966. The
ribbon cutting for the opening was in 1973, with other aspects of the
project not complete until 1977.
Hours after two jetliners crashed into the two towers on Tuesday,
architects began discussing how and why the buildings collapsed and
whether it is possible to design against such collapses. A Duke
University professor speculated that fire from the plane crashes
softened the steel supporting the structures.
Yamasaki is not around to defend his building. He died in 1987 in
Detroit, where his architectural practice, Minoru Yamasaki Associates,
lives on.
After graduating from the UW in the middle of the Depression, he went
to New York, where he earned a master's degree at New York University.
He moved to Detroit in 1945 to become head designer of a firm there.
In 1960 Yamasaki became the first Japanese American to be honored as
alumnus of the year -- the Alumnus Summa Laude Dignatus Award -- by
the UW University of Washington and its alumni association.
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1999-2001 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
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Trade towers' exterior steel fabricated in Seattle
Thursday, September 13, 2001
By BILL VIRGIN
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
Nick Soldano described as disheartening the experience of watching the
New York skyscrapers he had helped build erupt in smoke and fire and
then crumble to the ground.
There was also a bizarre, ironic twist to Tuesday's horrifying scene,
he noted. One Seattle company fabricated the steel used to erect the
twin 110-story towers of the World Trade Center. Another Seattle
company, he said, made the planes used by terrorists to bring them
down.
Soldano was manager of Pacific Car & Foundry Co.'s Seattle-based
structural steel division in 1967 when it won a $21.7 million contract
from the New York Port Authority to build exterior wall components for
the World Trade Center. Soldano set up the production line through
which Japanese-produced steel plates were welded together to form box
columns, along with spandrels (which form an arch) for the window
openings at each floor.
Each assembly was 12-by-36 feet, and Soldano said more than 4,000 of
the three-story units were shipped by rail to the East Coast. About
50,000 tons of steel were used for the three-year project. The columns
were fabricated at the company's facility on South Hudson Street in
the South Seattle industrial area.
Pacific Car & Foundry's contract was the largest single structural
steel contract awarded for the project, according to Seattle
Post-Intelligencer accounts at the time. Other companies assembled the
steel for interior columns and floor trusses.
Soldano was transferred from the Seattle operation before the contract
was completed. "I'm sorry I wasn't around to finish it," he said. And
while he drove past the World Trade Center he never actually went
inside it, figuring that "an office building is an office building."
But watching the buildings' demise "made me feel kind of low," he
said.
Pacific Car & Foundry, the predecessor to the company today known as
Paccar, bought Structural Steel Fabricators in 1936, according to a
company history written by Alex Groner and published in 1981.
Paccar shut down the structural steel division in 1973, , according to
Groner's book. Portland's Schnitzer Investment bought the division's
assets. Paccar is today best known for its truck-manufacturing
operations.
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