Minoru Yamasaki*

Minoru Yamasaki was born in 1912 in Seattle, Washington. He worked five summers in an Alaskan salmon cannery to earn his tuition to the University of Washington. In 1934, Yamasaki earned a master's degree in architecture at New York University, and then he worked for the architectural firm that designed the Empire State Building.

In 1951, he and two colleagues formed a partnership and designed the Lambert-St. Louis Municipal Air Terminal, which set the standard for a number of airport buildings designed by top architects around the country.

The U.S. State Department later commissioned him to build a new U.S. consulate in Kobe, Japan. In the following years, his services were much in demand. Yamasaki is best known for building New York's $270 million World Trade Center. It took seven years to complete and was destroyed by terrorists on September 11, 2001.