One architect’s tortured body of work

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In today’s paper I write about a preservation debate brewing in Century City. At the center of the controversy is the 1966 Century Plaza hotel, a building whose architect, Minoru Yamasaki, created a body of work that has been pilloried, demolished, attacked and threatened over the years in a way that is unique in recent architectural history.

Yamasaki’s first brush with the wrecking ball came on March 16, 1972, when his troubled, crime-riddled Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project in St. Louis, completed in 1955 and made up of nearly three dozen 11-story apartment blocks, was demolished. The act was quickly seized upon by critics for its symbolic value. Critic and landscape architect Charles Jencks, happy to see the complex come down, famously called it ‘the day Modern architecture died.’

Nearly three decades later, Yamasaki’s World Trade Center towers, finished in 1973, were brought down by terrorists.

Now, the Century Plaza is staring down a more traditional demolition threat. Developer Michael Rosenfeld wants to raze the hotel and replace it with a $2-billion, mixed-use development designed by Harry Cobb of the firm Pei Cobb Freed.

The question of whether the architecture of Yamasaki’s buildings -- and not just the American hegemony or social-engineering ambition their critics and attackers have always maintained they stood for -- played any role in their fate is complex enough to require its own dissertation.

In the case of the World Trade Center, most would argue that the towers became a terrorist target simply because they were the tallest and widest buildings in the Manhattan skyline. But that would ignore the WTC’s obvious symbolism as a sign of American wealth, might and ambition. Yamasaki wasn’t around to weigh in on that issue: He died in 1986 at age 73.

At the very least, we can say that if the Century Plaza winds up being torn down, the event will hardly be a run-of-the-mill razing, even in a city as familiar with the notion of wiping out the past as Los Angeles.

--Christopher Hawthorne

Caption: World Trade Center. Credit: flickr user RcktManIL