Sandfuture

I picked up this book (at New York's McNally Jackson bookstore) because it didn't look like anything else on the shelf, and inside it doesn't read like anything else either. Mostly, it's a biography of the Seattle-born architect Minoru Yamasaki, known to us as the designer of what is now the Pacific Science Center but best-known to the world for two since-destroyed structures: the Pruitt-Igoe public housing in St. Louis and the World Trade Center. Around and through Yamasaki's courageous, tireless, sometimes tragic life, Beal—an artist and, by the evidence of this first book, a writer—threads erudite but approachable meditations on architectural failure and success, on the flooding of Hurricane Sandy, on his wife's migraines, on the health of cities and buildings, and more. My brain was working, happily, on every page.