Minoru Yamasaki, the architect who principally designed the World Trade Center, is most famous for designing buildings that were later demolished He’s also responsible for the Pruitt Igoe project in St Louis, which was dynamited in the 1970s The thing is, of all the mid century modernists, Yamasaki was one of least deserving of such a fate. His architecture was rather graceful, even delicate. For all its monumentality, the WTC - with its off-center courtyard, its travertine, its elegant Gothic arches - was both serene and very human He transformed the International Style, which could be quite severe, into the supreme instance of Gothic Modernism. Gothic architecture, especially in is Perpendicular extreme, makes masses of stone appear weightless. Yamasaki did the same thing with the WTC. The external facade was load bearing, but the narrow spacing between the columns - just 3 ft 4 inches above the 7th floor - and the panes of glass just 20 inches (roughly the width of a person shoulder to shoulder) turned into spectacular work of lace almost 1,400 feet high. At the base, the columns gathered into bundles of three, creating an almost organic effect, as if the WTC was woven from a glade of trees It’s a real triumph of 20th century architecture, and tragic that it’s gone