From Design to Destruction: Archiving the World Trade Center

In the weeks following September 11, 2001, the offices of Minoru Yamasaki Associates, Inc. were inundated with correspondence. Mail, faxes, and emails poured in for the firm’s President Robert Szantner, AIA, Senior Vice President Henry J. Guthard, PE, and Chairman William Ku, AIA—all members of the original design team that worked on the World Trade Center alongside firm founder Minoru Yamasaki, FAIA, who had died in 1986.

As a plume of smoke and debris choked New York City’s skyline in the days following September 11, the United States, like Minoru Yamasaki Associates, labored to make sense of the destruction enacted on the World Trade Center, as well as the catastrophic damage to the Pentagon, the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense in Arlington County, Virginia, and the thwarted destruction of the White House. Local and national media hounded Yamasaki Associates about the World Trade Center’s technical specifications and in search of comments on the tragedy. The firm, which had worked on the World Trade Center complex design for twelve years, had scaled down in the preceding decades. It was no longer working out of a purpose-built modernist office in Troy, Michigan, designed in 1967 at the midpoint of the World Trade Center commission, but out of a leased commercial office suite within the further flung Detroit suburb of Rochester Hills. Yet, it was not just communication from the media that the firm was receiving; other letters were coming in too, from architects expressing their condolences to the firm regarding the destruction of their work, to handwritten notes from children, ranging from pledges to become engineers as a way to fight for world peace, to questions regarding how the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers managed to fall so quickly.

On October 17, the principals and staff of Minoru Yamasaki Associates issued their first official statement:

“MYA (Minoru Yamasaki Associates) is shocked and outraged at this terrible tragedy. Mere words cannot adequately express the depth of our grief, and our thoughts and prayers go out to the victims and their families. MYA has been in contact with law enforcement authorities, and we will provide any assistance we can to aid the rescue efforts. In this time of national emergency, we believe that any speculation regarding the specifics of these tragic events would be irresponsible. For obvious reasons, MYA has no further comment at this time.”

These correspondences, representing a narrow slice of the many ways in which the whole country reacted and responded in the time period after the September 11 attacks, can be found at the Archives of Yamasaki Associates in Lansing, Michigan. The Yamasaki Archive came to reside at the Archives of Michigan in 2010 through the quick actions of Pauline Saliga, former Executive Director of the Society of Architectural Historians, and Michigan State archivist Mark Harvey. While archives related to the work of Minoru Yamasaki and his namesake firm exist in the collections of other institutions, such as Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, the collection in the Archives of Michigan is from the firm itself, a representation of how the firm designed and developed projects, and what it valued enough to keep over time—either for archival or litigious purposes.

The Port Authority of New York City began developing a concept for the World Trade Center in 1960. In 1962, Yamasaki & Associates—the firm would drop the ampersand later and use various other naming iterations—was chosen as the architect and began to design a complex of buildings that would bring the activities of private firms and public agencies engaged in world commerce together in one location. In 1966, the World Trade Center’s architectural plan was unveiled to the public, including two 110-story office towers, two 9-story office buildings, an 8-story US Custom House, and a 22-story hotel, all constructed around a central, five-acre, landscaped plaza.

The World Trade Center was a convergence of Minoru Yamasaki’s work as a designer whose buildings were infused with subtle classical details, but also represented new ways of thinking around skyscrapers, particularly in terms of the design of the 110-story office towers. Yamasaki delicately extended pointed arches and placed them at the foot of the towers, a design that, once the building was entered, repeated within the building’s lobby. The steel grid of the façade was broken up at the 44th floor and at the 75th floor with a vertical geometric pattern and repeated at the building’s crown. Arches of all types—horseshoe, parabolic, and pointed—as well as the use of geometric patterns as a type of architectural screen were schemes that Yamasaki utilized again and again, from projects as diverse as One North Woodward in Detroit, Michigan, originally designed as the headquarters for the Michigan Consolidated Gas Company in 1962, to North Shore Congregation Israel, a Reform Jewish synagogue completed in 1964 in Glencoe, Illinois.

Minoru Yamasaki, a Seattle-born, first-generation child of Japanese immigrants, was developing his career in architecture during a time when anti-Japanese attitudes in the United States had initiated the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans. That Yamasaki was able to go from hiding himself and his family during World War II to building a firm that would create architecture across the world is miraculous, particularly as the field lacked racial diversity.

In designing the tallest buildings in the World Trade Center complex— the tallest in the world when completed—Yamasaki was thinking about the prevalent use of glass in skyscrapers, bucking the trend established by architects designing in the style popularized by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Shortly after the World Trade Center was dedicated in 1973, Yamasaki wrote, “For me, the day of the all-glass building is finished.”¹ From Yamasaki’s point of view, glassy buildings were a strain on both energy consumption and the human users that had to adjust their environments across the course of a day, opening or closing curtains across large spans of glass. “I must ask myself,” Yamasaki continued, “if we want to design buildings for people to fit some preconceived idea of a glass world. Is this really the future of cities?”²

The World Trade Center’s primary purpose was to bring the function of economics and commerce together, yet Yamasaki was thinking about how the design of the complex would be experienced on a human scale, from the way in which people entered the buildings, either through the concourse and shopping mall—Manhattan’s largest—beneath the complex, or through the plaza with its sculptures and fountains, to the experience that workers would have upon meeting the seventy-foot Skylobbies at the 44th or 74th floors of the towers. “In the limited number of projects on which we are privileged to work, our primary objective is to heighten the quality of experience for those who work or visit or live in the buildings,” wrote Yamasaki.³

All of that would be obliterated within the span of less than two hours on September 11, 2001. At 8:45 a.m., a plane crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Within minutes radio and television broadcasts across the United States began reporting on what remained a terrifying abnormality until 9:29 a.m., when a second plane crashed into the south tower. At 10:01 a.m., the south tower collapsed. The north tower would follow at 10:33 a.m. Two thousand, seven hundred and fifty-three people, from insurance brokers to security guards to staff at the World Trade Center’s restaurants and hotel, lost their lives in that two-hour period, a loss that is both unthinkable and horrifying.

The World Trade Center, called at its completion “the first building of the 21st century,” would last less than two years within that century.⁴ The buildings, particularly the twin towers, became a central icon in a developing symbology that called for people to “never forget.” As the context for the events of September 11 unfolded across radio, television, and the newly burgeoning widespread use of the internet, “never forget” would be used to not only justify increased security measures at airports, public and private buildings, but also acts of racism and xenophobia, prolonged international conflicts in the Middle East, and an abandonment of the notion of the United States’ ideals of justice, freedom, and equality for all.

Yamasaki Associates closed in 2009 amid a sea of mounting legal disputes and debt, as the firm and its final owner, Ted Ayoub, struggled to pay both employees and subcontractors. Oakland County took control of the firm in 2010, including the Troy office, which contained blueprints, architectural models, photographs, slides, and Minoru Yamasaki’s own library. A portion of the collection was to be auctioned, but out of concern for sensitive material, such as the designs for airports and banks, like St. Louis’s Lambert International Airport (1956) and the Monetary Agency Building in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (1978), some material was ordered destroyed. Saliga alerted Harvey that the Yamasaki records were in danger. Harvey then worked quickly to secure access to the Troy office from the Oakland County Treasurer, and to acquire a signed release from Ted Ayoub that the Yamasaki materials could be possessed by the State Archives. Over four hours, the day before the county would initiate the auction, a crew of volunteers pulled up to the former Yamasaki offices. Moving through the building, the volunteers extracted everything they could within the limited timeframe.

In a 2012 interview with Michigan Public Radio, Harvey shared, “I’ve never been in a situation of having to collect records with someone standing behind me with a dumpster.” Later that day, Ayoub called Harvey, asking to meet him at a storage facility in Troy to receive additional portions of the collection. According to Harvey, lingering litigation gave Ayoub reason to hide the World Trade Center drawings offsite from the offices. Over the next few months, Harvey would field additional calls from Ted Ayoub, telling him to pick up additional materials related to Yamasaki for the archive.

Pauline Saliga, who died in 2022, was also interviewed by Michigan Public Radio in 2012. In this interview she shared reflections on the World Trade Center drawings. “Obviously, with the World Trade Center, the significance is the buildings no longer exist, so outside of photographs and videotape and film, whatever we have documenting the buildings, these drawings show the architect’s actual intent.”⁵

Twelve years later, the Archives of Michigan is still working on processing the massive amount of material related to Yamasaki, a representation of the scope of both Minoru Yamasaki and his namesake firm across fifty years, and over two hundred and fifty projects across the globe. Included in the Yamasaki, Inc., Architectural Firm Records are all the paperwork and materials that an architecture firm generates in order to design buildings, interact with clients, and manage staff. The collection includes promotional materials and copies of Requests for Proposals, advertisements and paper press clippings in English, Japanese, Italian, Turkish, Portuguese, and Arabic languages—representing the international breadth of Yamasaki’s work and clients. These materials are also an expression of how technology advanced from the beginnings of Yamasaki’s firm in 1955, when architectural elements were drawn by hand and delivered to clients as physical paper copies, to its end in 2009, when both the design process and delivery were executed via technological and digital means.

The World Trade Center is manifested in this collection via many forms, and many items still retain the original Yamasaki & Associates project number given to the World Trade Center: 6211. Thousands of photographic slides and negatives capture the model making process as the firm worked on iteration after iteration of designs for the complex. While the models themselves no longer exist, these images show how the models were used to work through Yamasaki’s desire for the complex to appeal to a human scale, and to help anticipate how the World Trade Center would sit amongst the existing built fabric of Lower Manhattan. Other photographs, taken by Detroit-based architectural photographer Balthazar Korab, show the World Trade Center’s plaza when it was new, with Fritz Koenig’s bronze sculpture The Sphere sitting at the center of a plaza that had not yet been landscaped.

Then there are the architectural drawings for the World Trade Center, including concept sketches, plans and elevations, as well as renderings for electrical, mechanical, and plumbing systems. These drawings are stored in massive envelopes and wheeled out of the stacks of the archives on tall wooden carts.

Taking the drawings carefully out of the envelopes, the World Trade Center reveals itself via its technical details. Minoru Yamasaki, and Yamasaki & Associates, are printed in large block letters on the title page of each drawing set, but so are Emery Roth & Sons, the local architect, as well as Worthington, Skilling, Helle & Jackson, the structural engineers, Joseph R. Loring & Associates, the electrical engineers, and Jaros, Baum & Bolles, mechanical engineers. Architecture as it is built is the result of complex systems of experts working collectively. Covered in mathematical calculations, geometric sketches, and notes taken by many different hands in pencil, pen, and marking crayons, these drawings convey an intimacy with the people that designed and built the World Trade Center. The core collections of these drawings have dates ranging from 1967 to 1972, reflective of a narrative where elements of construction are designed, changed, and refined before being executed. Each structure built, and each structure destroyed, is here in these envelopes: 6 World Trade Center, the building that served as the US Customs House and damaged extensively on September 11; the seven-story L-shaped 5 World Trade Center; 4 World Trade Center; and 3 World Trade Center, a hotel. What was left of these last three buildings was demolished during the recovery efforts.

Revealed next from the envelopes: 1 World Trade Center and 2 World Trade Center, the North Tower and the South Tower, noted in the drawings as Tower A (South) and Tower B (North). The hand-drawn elevations of the Twin Towers of the World Trade are like witnessing the technology of the past pushed up to the precipice of the future. It is in these drawings where the tripartite nature of the Twin Towers is revealed: they have three distinct sections, each with details and subtle ornamentation. They are also not exact twins; text at the bottom of the drawings notes: “Towers ‘A’ and ‘B’ are identical except for 43rd and 67th floor heights.” The trident-like column cover contours on the first floor of the towers are noted in the drawings of Towers A and B as “elevation of typical ‘tree.’” When the dust settled over the World Trade Center site after September 11, a portion of these column cover contours appeared as an otherworldly outcropping amongst the rubble, a section of the façade that had lost everything behind it and now appeared as a multi-story fragment of mangled and twisted filigree.

It is in the human-scale details of the drawings that the lives of the people directly affected by the destruction of the World Trade Center begin to actualize. The revolving doors at the plaza, where people would have fled from the buildings. Typical stair details, including treads, risers, and balustrades: a method of escape—or a place of capture. Custom oval doorknobs and elevator displays—what role did they play in the way survivors could, or did escape? Window frames within spandrel panels, out of which survivors of the initial crashes would cling desperately for fresh air. The drawings become an unexpected iteration of the terror, sadness, and anger that that the World Trade Center would come to symbolize. The drawings are a simultaneous representation of a monument, a sacred space, and a tomb.

Elsewhere in the Yamasaki Inc. Architectural Firm Records is a collection of items once a part of Minoru Yamasaki’s library. In this collection is a November 1972 copy of Inland Architect, addressed to Yamasaki himself, with a photo on the cover of St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe Homes, once the largest public housing development in the United States. In the photo, Pruitt-Igoe is being imploded and is surrounded by a cloud of dust and debris. Designed by Yamasaki & Associates in 1954, the Pruitt-Igoe Homes were demolished in 1972, the result of a complex combination of the financial circumstances of the St. Louis Housing Authority, a lack of resources for maintenance and security, and value engineering. Minoru Yamasaki would be understandably self-critical of his work on Pruitt-Igoe over time, but there is no way of knowing how he might have personally felt about the destruction of the World Trade Center. Minoru Yamasaki succumbed to stomach cancer in 1986.

The Pruitt-Igoe homes were destroyed after an extraordinary discourse on their failure. Like the World Trade Center, their destruction was filmed and broadcast on television, and like the World Trade Center, they became such a symbol that their aesthetics were no longer a part of the discourse.

Similarly prophetic is an April 1973 issue of Architectural Forum in the collection. An article in the issue is titled “W.T.C. 2023.” The article, a work of speculative fiction set fifty years into the future, imagines the disbanding of the Port Authority and the conversion of the World Trade Center into low-income public housing, as preservationists seek a landmark designation.

What remains of the World Trade Center is contained in collections like the one at the Archives of Michigan, used by scholars and experts in architecture and engineering to understand its design, and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, created as a place of both remembrance and education. But the World Trade Center also exists in myriad items produced prior to their destruction in 2001 that are much more ephemeral in nature. The image of the World Trade Center and their iconic twin towers were screen printed on tee shirts, emblazoned on souvenir banners and playing cards, and projected on movie screens and in television shows, demonstrating a critical part of a global understanding of what the World Trade Center meant, represented, and symbolized about the United States and New York City as an urban destination. Many more people experienced the World Trade Center through these mass-market means than those that witnessed the buildings before September 11. All these items are a key part of the object as witness, particularly as an entire generation exists between September 11, 2001, and today.

In the correspondences kept within the folders of the Yamasaki Inc. Architectural Firm Records is a loose, handwritten letter on lined notebook paper, brittling with age, without a closing or a name. It is addressed, “Dear People Who Made the World Trade Center.” It proceeds: “I feel sorry for you guys. I feel sorry that they bombed your building. People died in the building. Some people survived. You had a nice building. I never seen [sic] the building in person.”

There is a rarity to these correspondences both in terms of their existence in the archive of an architectural office, and their survival at all. Architects do join advocacy efforts seeking to prevent their buildings from being destroyed, but in the case of the work of Minoru Yamasaki, nothing could have prepared the firm—or the world—for the destruction of the World Trade Center. This makes the communications that the firm kept, documenting the letters and messages in a spreadsheet, but also retaining some of these documents as primary source materials, from handwritten messages to paper copies of email replies, as a way to understand how the firm reacted to a significant cultural moment related to one of its architectural projects. In terms of archives and records, these correspondences were created and filed during a moment where technology was changing, which always puts materials at risk for destruction. In 2001, information and communication was being delivered through the internet, but the technology had yet to proliferate.

The World Trade Center holds significance as a symbol and a national fixation. As a result, the aesthetics and design become less of the discourse, yet they are inextricably linked to what the buildings were and how they are remembered. Yet here in the Archives of Michigan, an aspect of the human nature of architecture—from design to destruction—is revealed.