Science & Tech Quote by Minoru Yamasaki

Serenity, in Yamasaki's framing, is not an aesthetic preference but a civic intervention. He treats architecture as a counterweight to the machine age: an era of speed, noise, crowding, and systems too complex to feel human. The line "our civilization is chaotic" is doing more than diagnosing modernity; it quietly assigns blame to the very forces that also enabled modern building - industry, automation, mass production. Yamasaki is arguing that if the city has become a kind of engine, then buildings must supply what engines cannot: composure, rhythm, relief.

The rhetoric is tellingly modest - "I feel", "somehow", "I think" - a soft-spoken way to advance a radical claim: that form can regulate mood, and that mood has political stakes. "Serene buildings" implies a public good, not a private luxury. It's also a defense of ornament, lightness, and contemplative space against the hard-edged bravado often associated with mid-century corporate modernism.

Context sharpens the urgency. Yamasaki came of age amid war, internment-era racism, and postwar redevelopment. His work was commissioned at the exact moment American cities were being remade by highways, megaprojects, and bureaucratic planning. Read that way, serenity becomes both aspiration and alibi: an architect promising calm while participating in the scale and machinery of transformation. The subtext is a tension he never fully resolves - whether architecture can truly "counterbalance" chaos, or whether it merely frames it more beautifully.