Daily Inspiration Quote by Helmut Jahn

Jahn’s line reads like an urbanist joke with a blade in it: the distance isn’t what exhausts you, it’s the city. Michigan Avenue stands in as a kind of civic promise, a place where walking a mile feels natural because the street is doing its job - offering safety, spectacle, friction, and reasons to move at human speed. In that “never think of taking a cab” is a quiet metric for quality: a good city makes your body the default mode of transport.

The second sentence flips from praise to indictment. “In a bad city you take a cab just to go around the corner” isn’t about laziness; it’s about avoidance. The subtext is fear (traffic, harassment, emptiness), discomfort (heat islands, broken sidewalks, dead frontage), and insult (a streetscape that treats pedestrians as obstacles). When the corner is too far, the design has failed at the most basic unit of urban life: the block.

As an architect who helped shape Chicago’s late-20th-century skyline, Jahn is also taking a swipe at his own industry’s temptations. Buildings can be iconic while the ground plane is hostile; megaprojects can photograph beautifully while the street feels like an afterthought. The cab becomes a proxy for the ways we privatize public space: pay to escape what should have been shared. His intent is pointedly practical: judge cities by what they make easy, not by what they make impressive.