Hasta La Ideas

Some sad news coming out of Troy, Michigan this morning. The firm started by Minoru Yamasaki, who designed the World Trade Center’s twin towers in New York, has folded due to an overwhelming amount of debt the company had been carrying for the past few years. Yamasaki passed away more than twenty years ago now, but the firm had been kept alive by his partners. While things had gone on just fine for decades, the past few years saw both the financial collapse and the architecture industry taking huge hits, and to a lesser extent, the state of Michigan had continued on its long path of financial woes. Here’s a bit from the Detroit Free Press on how bad the situation was upon the firm’s demise:

Jack Finn, director of the wage and hour division of the state Department of Energy, Labor & Economic Growth, said several Yamasaki employees have filed complaints with the division over unpaid wages. Additionally, a spokesman for the state’s Unemployment Insurance Agency said the agency filed suit last fall against the firm for not paying its unemployment insurance taxes.

Meanwhile, other firms that had done business with Yamasaki complained of not getting paid, with the debt often running into tens of thousands of dollars.

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