Louis Kahn Quotes
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Also marvelous in a room is the light that comes through the windows of a room and that belongs to the room. The sun does not realize how beautiful it is until after a room is made. A man’s creation, the making of a room, is nothing short of a miracle. Just think, that a man can claim a slice of the sun.
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A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable.
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If people want to see Beaux-Arts, it's fine with me. I'm interested in good architecture as anybody else.
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I Use The Square To Begin My Solutions Because The Square Is A Non-choice, Really. In The Course Of Development, I Search For The Forces That Would Disprove The Square.
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A work of art... is not a living thing... that walks or runs. But the making of a life. That which gives you a reaction. To some it is the wonder of man's fingers. To some it is the wonder of the mind. To some it is the wonder of technique. And to some it is how real it is. To some, how transcendent it is. Like the 5th Symphony, it presents itself with a feeling that you know it, if you have heard it once.
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The person of old had the same brilliance of mind that we assume we have now. But that which made a thing become manifest for the first time is our great moment of creative happening.
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Every building must have... its own soul.
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The sun never knew how great it was until it hit the side of a building.
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Consider the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted and the column became.
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I try to create homes, not houses.
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How precious a book is in light of the offering, in the light of the one who has the privilege of this offering. The library tells you of this offering
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Even a room which must be dark needs at least a crack of light to know how dark it is.
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You say to a brick, 'What do you want, brick?' And brick says to you, 'I like an arch.' And you say to brick, 'Look, I want one, too, but arches are expensive and I can use a concrete lintel.' And then you say: 'What do you think of that, brick?' Brick says: 'I like an arch.'
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The first thing that an architect must do is to sense that every building you build is a world of its own, and that this world of its own serves an institution.
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Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.
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The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.
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Design is not making beauty, beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love.
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In a small room one does not say what one would in a large room.
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We are born of light. The seasons are felt through light. We only know the world as it is evoked by light.
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Architects in planning rooms today have forgotten their faith in natural light. Depending on the touch of a finger to a switch, they are satisfied with static light and forget the endlessly changing qualities of natural light, in which a room is a different room every second of the day.
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Architecture struck me between the eye and the eyeball.
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How accidental our existences are, really, and how full of influence by circumstance.
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A room is not a room without natural light.
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You can never learn anything that is not a part of yourself.
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All material in nature, the mountains and the streams and the air and we, are made of Light which has been spent, and this crumpled mass called material casts a shadow, and the shadow belongs to Light.
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Architecture appears for the first time when the sunlight hits a wall. The sunlight did not know what it was before it hit a wall.
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I sense Light as the giver of all presences, and material as spent Light. What is made by Light casts a shadow, and the shadow belongs to Light.
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Architecture is the thoughtful making of space
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The nature of space reflects what it wants to be.
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Architecture is what nature cannot make. Architecture is something unnatural but not something made up.
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