Daily Inspiration Quote by Minoru Yamasaki

Yamasaki is smuggling an ethical demand into a line that sounds, at first blush, almost quaintly metaphorical. “A building must be like a human being” isn’t just an architect reaching for poetry; it’s a declaration of allegiance in a century when architecture often treated people as data points and cities as problems to be solved with sweeping gestures. By insisting on “wholeness,” he’s arguing against the fragmentation that modern life (and modern planning) can impose: the building as a collection of systems, the user as a flow, the street as a throughput machine.

The word “must” matters. This isn’t taste, it’s obligation. Yamasaki frames wholeness as “very important” because, in practice, it’s the difference between architecture that merely stands and architecture that consoles, or at least doesn’t alienate. Subtext: a building that feels “human” isn’t only scaled to bodies; it acknowledges vulnerability. It offers legibility, rhythm, and a sense that parts belong to an intelligible whole.

Context sharpens the stakes. Yamasaki built in an era of corporate modernism and megaprojects, and his own career sits uneasily inside that machine: elegant, patterned, often serene forms commissioned at enormous scale, most famously the original World Trade Center. Read this way, the quote doubles as a quiet defense and a quiet anxiety. If a building is like a human being, it can also be injured, misunderstood, even turned into a symbol that overwhelms the lived experience it was supposed to serve. Wholeness becomes not a style choice, but a moral alibi - and a warning.