Minoru Yamasaki will forever be remembered alongside America’s most profound architectural disaster. Whatever he was before 2001—which was dead, maligned, 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.

n 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.