Happiness Quote by Minoru Yamasaki

Yamasaki’s language is doing double duty: it’s a plea for aesthetic plurality and a quiet refusal of the pieties that mid-century America loved to dress up as inevitability. “Myth” here isn’t folklore; it’s doctrine: the idea that a society (and by extension, its buildings) must submit to a single, purifying story about what counts as serious, modern, or respectable. Coming from an architect whose career was shaped by the reigning orthodoxies of modernism, the word lands as a gentle act of heresy.

The most revealing move is the pivot from “held by” to “do everything we can.” He frames taste as something imposed versus something practiced, almost civic labor. Delight and joy aren’t offered as decorative afterthoughts; they’re treated as social goods worth fighting for. In a profession that often praises restraint as virtue, Yamasaki insists that pleasure is not frivolous. It’s a metric of cultural health.

Then there’s the “palette,” an art metaphor smuggled into the language of planning and policy. It implies choice, mixture, color, and contradiction. “All the available parts” reads like an argument against both elitism and austerity: use what’s there, including ornament, historical reference, human-scaled warmth, and whatever modernism told you to outgrow. Subtextually, it’s also about permission - for designers and for the public - to reject the myth that progress must look severe.

Context matters: Yamasaki is often remembered through the catastrophic symbolism that later attached to his most famous work. This quote is a reminder that his ambitions were fundamentally humane: architecture as a generator of everyday pleasure, not just an emblem of power or a manifesto in steel.