His first internationally recognized design—the Pacific Science Center, with its iconic arches—was constructed by the City of Seattle for the 1962 Seattle World's Fair. His first significant project was the Pruitt–Igoe housing project in St. Louis in 1955. Despite his love of traditional Japanese design and ornamentation, this was a stark, modernist concrete structure. The housing project experienced so many problems that it was demolished in 1972, less than twenty years after its completion. Its destruction is considered by architecture historian Charles Jencks to be the end of modernist architecture.