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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."