Serenity & Delight

"Today our technology has brought a chaos. We have speed, traffic, fear, congestion and restlessness. We need a place to put our lives in balance. Architecture is a good place for this. When people go into good buildings, there should be serenity and delight."

This is the credo of Minoru Yamasaki, who at 46 is turning out some of the gayest and most graceful buildings in the U.S. In recognition of Yamasaki's growing stature among U.S. architects, the Detroit Institute of Arts will open next week a full-scale show of his past works and future projects, timed to coincide with the dedication of Yamasaki's newest building --the Detroit headquarters of Reynolds Metals Co. Though its grille of gold anodized aluminum owes an unabashed debt to Architect Ed Stone, the Reynolds building, on a 4 1/2-acre plot in a suburb just north of Detroit, epitomizes Yamasaki's ideals of serenity and delight. Aluminum-clad columns lift it above a pond filled with water lilies. Employees will cross the pond on slender concrete ramps on their way to work; in moments of leisure they can sit or stroll beside it beneath the shadowed arcade provided by the overhanging second floor. A glass skylight lined with aluminum ribbing protrudes from the concrete roof, projects a variety of light patterns on the inner court below.

Jaundiced Eye. It took Detroit and the U.S. a long time to recognize Yamasaki, as it took Yamasaki a long time to find himself. Born in Seattle, he shared the indignities common to Japanese Americans. But he had a burning desire, inspired by an architect uncle, to become an architect. After getting his degree in architecture from the University of Washington, he went East to New York, struggled through a long apprenticeship working as a draftsman, waited out the animosity of the war years, in 1945 landed a job with a firm in Detroit, where he stayed. Steady progress led to his first partnership, to his St. Louis airport building, with its lofty barrel vaults of shell concrete (TIME, April 16, 1956), and later, in 1954, to a near fatal case of ulcers.

Yamasaki took advantage of a long convalescence to go to Japan. He was captivated by what he saw in its architecture: the interplay of light and shadow, the union of building and garden. He came back to cast a jaundiced eye on the serried ranks of glass boxes rising along the main streets of Manhattan and other major cities. "Our life gives promise of being spent in look-alike houses, look-alike automobiles and look-alike buildings," he warned his fellow architects.

He began to turn out plans for buildings whose distinguishing features are precast concrete coaxed into graceful curves and lacelike delicacy, a box-shaped podium for a base, a surrounding pool, a gemlike skylight. "In our buildings,'' says Yamasaki, "we try to think of what happens to a human being as he goes from space to space, and to provide the delight of change and surprise for him.''

No Awe. Yamasaki's McGregor Memorial Conference Center for Wayne University hovers like an elegant pavilion above a pool studded with concrete islands for student loungers. The folded roof of the American Concrete Institute in Detroit and its grilled end walls of concrete pipes show how subtly concrete can be shaped. For an airport at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, Yamasaki devised concrete Moorish arches and la.cy wall panels as graceful as an illustration for the Arabian Nights. In his pavilion for the U.S. exhibit at the World Agriculture Fair in India late this year, visitors will wander through a forest of 40-ft. domes perched on single columns shaped like so many fairy toadstools grown to monstrous size. The U.S. consulate in Kobe, Japan, with its encircling rim of glass-fiber shades set in bronze gridwork, is fitted artfully into a Japanese garden setting. Other buildings under construction or on the drawing board: a radio-television station for CBS in St. Louis, a conservatory of music for Oberlin College, a library for Butler University, a skyscraper for Michigan Consolidated Gas Co. in Detroit.

Today his firm of Yamasaki. Leinweber & Associates is swamped with business. As a person, he is still fighting an uphill battle; because of his race, he was forbidden to build a home for himself in a fashionable Detroit suburb. He is not bitter. "Only in America can people like myself get anywhere or try to do the things they want to do," he says. He feels himself a thoroughly indigenous American architect coping with particular American architectural problems. "Most of the great architecture of the past." he once said, "was built for monumental purposes --to impress or awe the masses. Our democratic ideals need buildings that give us, instead of a sense of awe, a sense of happiness, peace, security."

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