April 2009

Minoru Yamasaki will forever be remembered alongside America’s most profound architectural disaster. Whatever he was before 2001—which was maligned, dead and mainly sliding away into obscurity—he is forever after the designer of the most ambitious modern structure ever to end up as a gaping hole. The World Trade Center, at this point, has been sufficiently eulogized, and the rebuilding process has brought a healthy dose of controversy to a city that seemed on pause while the wreckage was being cleared. But before closing the book on Yamasaki and his work, one last review of his career bestows upon him another spurious honor: possibly the most disastrous (and short-lived) legacy of 20th century American architecture. Yamasaki’s tale is a true American success story that not only ended in an immense tragedy, but was punctuated by numerous other disasters throughout his career. His buildings might be uninteresting, but his spectacular failures bring out the uncanny coalescence between Yamasaki’s work and the major controversies and programs of the last half-century.

Long before 2001, Yamasaki had already been implicated in the greatest disaster in the history of modern architecture. His Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis was razed to the ground in 1972, just seventeen years after its completion. The award-winning project had been heralded as a revolution in low-cost, high-density housing; in 1951, the firm of Hellmuth, Yamasaki, & Leinweber applied for a patent for the building-type that would be emulated in so many cities. But the 33 eleven-story slabs, a housing battalion in tight formation, rapidly became a nucleus of crime and vandalism—a living, or maybe staggering, symbol of the failures of the urban renewal then called slum clearance. The architect who spoke against the architectural monument and for satisfying, through design, society’s paramount “need for pleasant and useful space in which to live and work” regretted already in 1955 the mistake of placing slab buildings opposite one another, creating a space that seemed endless glass and brick, and not grass and sky. By the following year, Pruitt-Igoe was, in his own word, a “tragedy.” He had “designed a housing project, not a community.” In 1965, when the city of St. Louis decided to pump five million dollars into the projects, in a desperate attempt to save them, Yamasaki blamed the disaster on the frugality and demands of the Public Housing Administration, as well as the nature of its inhabitants: “I never thought people were that destructive.”

The people, or Pruitt-Igoeans, as the literature christened them, had been forced out of St. Louis’s historical slums, acres of deteriorated 19th century housing stock, and shuttled into Yamasaki’s one prefabricated slum. Though Pruitt-Igoe opened by Supreme Court decision as an integrated project, it quickly became exclusively black. The vast majority of its households were headed by women, depended on public assistance, and included an average of four minors. Cut off from the rest of the city and its resources, families that ended up in this ghetto would have preferred to live elsewhere but were simply too big or too poor; they had no choice. So while St. Louis suffered from an extreme shortage of low-cost housing, Pruitt-Igoe’s almost 2,800 units averaged a 20 to 25 percent vacancy rate throughout its existence (the national average for public housing was 5 percent). Its “modern amenities” hailed in a 1951 Architectural Forum article were soon experienced through the looking glass by project residents. Exposed steam pipes scalded children. Novel skip-stop elevators (they stopped on the 4th, 7th, and 10th floors), outdoor corridors (“breezeways”), and laundry rooms throughout the building were havens for muggers, rapists, public urinators, and later also drug dealers. The fields between buildings were planted with garbage and broken glass.

While 11,000 people had no choice but to remain in Pruitt-Igoe, the project spawned a grand jury investigation, special committees, sociological studies, and expensive attempts at renovation. Pruitt-Igoe became a laboratory for the study of America’s urban crisis. Though the project’s failure was more extreme, more visible than most, there was no fundamental difference between Pruitt-Igoe and every other site for the punishment-by-architecture that by and large characterized postwar public housing efforts. To be sure, most of these projects were not designed by celebrated architects.

By 1965, Yamasaki lamented publicly that Pruitt-Igoe was “a job I wish I hadn’t done.” It was spectacularly undone not long afterwards. The first building was imploded on July 15, 1972. The following year the site was fenced off and then torn down, the remaining inhabitants relocated to other (comparable, if less infamous) projects. The Pruitt-Igoe site today at 34 vacant acres remains one of the largest development sites in St. Louis.

In Yamasaki’s 1979 autobiography, A Life in Architecture, he admits more than anyone would care to know about his private life, but makes a glaring omission in his inventory of major projects: it was as if Pruitt-Igoe had never happened. Not a peep about it, aside from an allusion to some buildings that were “just plain bad,” but in the end acted as “forceful reminders that we must do more carefully thought-out work in succeeding commissions.” Lest we come to suspect that Yamasaki is whitewashing his career, he admits to other early failures. A building commissioned in 1951 by the Department of Defense was built without a sprinkler system, and then burned in a spectacular fire. That building, the U.S. Military Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri, housed 38 million individual service records and 4,000 employees. When it was completed in 1956, the six-story concrete and aluminum behemoth was one of the twenty largest buildings in the world.

Less than twenty years later, in July 1973, a fire tore through the building, burning out of control for more than two days. It was the weekend of the official end of the draft, and the news was all bombs and impeachment. Over the previous two years, the Records Center had reported a dozen small fires, all started intentionally. This one, set shortly after midnight on July 12, appeared to be another case of arson. No one died in the blaze, set when only 50 employees were on duty, but sixteen to eighteen million military personnel files, many of them irreplaceable, were lost. Today, the Personnel Records Center informs those seeking information that, as a result of the fire, it cannot provide access to 80 percent of army files on personnel discharged between 1912 and 1960, as well as 75 percent of air force personnel discharged between 1947 and 1964. Information about hundreds of thousands of veterans vanished from the face of the earth. The building survived.

Future of Mortgages according to the FSA

Mobile Mini House

£100m House

It is on one of London’s most prestigious squares, with more than 21,000 sq ft of living space, 20ft ceilings and luxury fittings throughout. But will anyone actually pay £100m for No 10 Belgrave Square?

That is the question being asked by the handful of estate agents who make their living selling the capital’s most expensive homes. As the builders put the finishing touches to the inside of the six-floor, white-stucco-fronted building, Savills, the estate agent, is looking for someone with both the resources and inclination to spend so much on a home.

The property, which has a huge basement and a mews house behind, has been gutted and revamped by Musa Salem, its Lebanese owner, a private developer. Having bought the building’s freehold, he has aimed, according to one agent familiar with the property, to recreate the ambience of his own, slightly more modest, home in “billionnaires’ row” – The Bishops Avenue in north London.

The sale is shrouded in secrecy that is extreme even for this level of the market. Buying agents, normally involved in such deals, are not being allowed in to look “on spec”, and any potential clients they produce will first be vetted.

If Salem were to get his price, it would break the record for this type of property: £80m paid for a house in Upper Phillimore Gardens, in Kensington. It was bought by Elena Franchuk, a Ukrainian philanthropist, when the very top end of the London market was near its peak in February last year.

Belgrave Square is also home to Oleg Deripaska, the Russian metals magnate, Sheikh Mohammed, the ruler of Dubai, as well as a handful of embassies. Can’t quite manage £100m? On the opposite side of the square, No 31 has also come onto the market at a marginally more affordable £80m.

The eight-bedroom, 20,000 sq ft house is being sold by the Saudi Juffali family, following the death of its owner, who bought it for £33m in 2006. Savills’ rival, Knight Frank, is handling the sale. So why the near-threefold price increase?

“It’s in really wonderful condition,” says one agent who has been inside. “The design shows Middle Eastern influences and has plenty of marble and decorative features, but all done with taste and to a standard you seldom see.” It has a gym, a pool, a mews house and a garage room large enough to house any prospective buyer’s collection of Bentleys.

Laid out by Thomas Cubitt for the 2nd Earl Grosvenor, later the 1st Marquess of Westminster, in the 1820s, the square, which forms the heart of Belgravia, is one of the grandest in London. The original scheme consisted of four terraces – three of 11 grand houses and one of 12 – with detached mansions in three of the corners and a private garden in the middle.

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