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Minoru Yamasaki
Minoru Yamasaki (1912) was a Japanese-American architect, best known for his design of the twin towers of the World Trade Center, buildings 1 and 2. The left image is of the modernist Pruitt-Igoe housing project designed by the Japanese – American architect Minoru Yamasak in 1951.
The federally funded Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis was thought to be the epitome of modernist architechture-high-rise, "designed for interaction," and a solution to the problems of urban development and renewal in the middle of the 20th Century. Pruitt-Igoe opened in 1954 and was completed in 1956. Pruitt-Igoe included thirty-three, eleven story buildings on a 35 acre site just north of downtown St. Louis.
By the late 1960s, the complex had become internationally infamous for its poverty, crime, and segregation.The Pruitt-Igoe was demolished on March 16, 1972 (right image), an event widely considered the death of modernism in architecture. (The architect behind Pruitt-Igoe, Minoru Yamasaki, designed another famously short-lived structure: the World Trade Center.) Chicago's Cabrini-Green housing complex (pictured below) is often considered in the same vein as Pruitt-Igoe.