Parenting & Family Quote by Maya Lin

Maya Lin is describing a discipline that’s usually sold as the opposite of “childlike”: architecture as calculation, liability, and hard-won authority. Her provocation is to treat the beginning of making as a return to unarmored perception, before taste hardens into formula and before a project becomes a spreadsheet of constraints. “Process” is the key word here. Lin isn’t romanticizing ignorance; she’s staking a claim that the earliest phase of design should preserve curiosity, play, and the willingness to be surprised by materials, sites, and ideas.

“Almost childlike” is carefully qualified. She’s not arguing for naïveté, but for a controlled innocence - a mindset that lets an artist approach the world without pre-deciding what it must be. That’s the subtext: the real enemy of good design isn’t complexity, it’s premature certainty. The line also signals how Lin’s work often operates: deceptively simple forms that carry immense emotional and political weight. Think of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where minimal gesture becomes maximum resonance, and where the visitor’s experience completes the piece. Childlike, here, points to directness and embodied understanding rather than didactic storytelling.

Calling it “magical” is not woo; it’s an admission that the best work still contains an element that resists full explanation. In a field obsessed with mastery, Lin leaves room for the irreducible: the moment when a concept clicks, a model suddenly feels alive, or a space creates meaning beyond its blueprint. She’s defending wonder as a professional tool.