Daily Inspiration Quote by Minoru Yamasaki

Yamasaki’s sentence is a careful act of defensive persuasion, the kind an architect learns when the drawing set meets the public hearing. He doesn’t deny the criticism; he domesticates it. “Sometimes” softens the blow, making dissent sound intermittent and manageable. Then comes the pivot: the promise that reason, properly revealed, will melt resistance. It’s a classic modernist bargain: trust the logic behind the form and you’ll accept the form itself.

The key word is “shape.” He doesn’t say “building,” “experience,” or “neighborhood.” He narrows the debate to geometry, as if objections were primarily misunderstandings of design intent rather than arguments about power, money, skyline politics, or how a project lands on the street. That narrowing is the subtextual move: relocate controversy from taste and consequence to explanation and expertise. If critics “will look,” he implies, they haven’t looked closely enough. Criticism becomes a failure of attention.

Context makes the line sharper. Yamasaki spent a career producing elegant, often formally serene modernism that still attracted suspicion: the charge that it was too corporate, too monumental, too detached from daily life. In the era of the World Trade Center and other mega-projects, “the reason why” wasn’t just structure or aesthetics; it was also the ideology of progress and the institutional muscle that commissioned it. His appeal is almost paternal: if only you understood, you’d relax. The sting is that publics often did understand - and objected anyway, because the argument was never only about the shape.