Professional Documents
Culture Documents
LOUIS I. KAHN
Conversations with Students
Second Edition
Dung Ngo, Editor
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electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording,
or information storage and retrieval without the permission from the publisher.
Introduction p. 7
Peter Papademetriou
D e s i g n I s F o r m To w a r d s P r e s e n c e p. 36
Hands Up p. 69
Lars Ler up
Lou Kahn speaks across three decades again, and his sensi-
bilities are ever relevant to a new generation of white-shirt
students and architects; his values and ideals remain as
normative postulations.
When I did the first edition of this book in 1969, my idea for
the text was a response to the poetic nature of Kahns
lecture, to take his unedited recorded words and reconstruct
their physical presence in the form of blank verse, or at
least somewhat of its appearance, to visually represent the
rhythm of Kahns way of expressing his ideas. I thank Dung
Ngo for retaining this format; I thank Lars Lerup and Kevin
Lippert for republishing this text in its updated form, as
Princeton Architectural Press in many ways is to this
generation of architects what our special publisher of the
first edition, the late George Wittenborn, was to us in 1969.
Peter Papademetriou
w h i t e l i g h t b l a c k s h a d ow
a month ago,
A
I was working late in my office,
as is my custom,
and a man working with me said,
I would like to ask you a question
bout
But I had just been reading in the New York Times Magazine of
the things that had been going on in California.
I had visited California, and I went through Berkeley,
14
and that the revolution will bring forth a new sense of wonder.
Only from wonder can come our new institutions . . .
they certainly cannot come from analysis.
Gabor is so concerned.
In fact, he is so in love with the meaning
of word itself
that he would compare on equal terms
a piece of sculpture by Phidias
and a word.
16
where the boy who didnt quite get what the teacher said
could talk to another boy,
a boy who seems to have a different kind of ear,
and they both could understand.
Y ou cannot anticipate.
And they moved their chairs closer to the table and they said, How
do you know?
I said it was simple . . . if you know what a thing will look like fifty
years from now, you can do it now. But you dont know, because the
way that a thing will be fifty years from now is what it will be.
There are certain natures which will always be true. What a thing will
look like will not be the same, but that which it is answering will be
the same. It is a world within a world; that is what it will always be.
When you have an enclosure, it will be different from what it is out-
side. And it will be so because its nature is such.
I think that there are men today who are prepared to make things
look entirely different from the way they look now, if only they had the
opportunity to do so, But there is not the opportunity, because there
is not the existent will of this thing floating around.
You take the drawings of Ledoux, which are very interesting. Ledoux
has this feeling of what a town is like, of what a city is like, but he
39
projected this, and town didnt actually look that way at all, and that
was not so many years ago. He imagined this.
When a man sets out to project something for the future, It may turn
out to be a very amusing bit of history, because it will be only what
can be made now. But, actually, there are men today who can make
what is an image. It is what is possible today, not what will be the
forerunner of what things will be tomorrow. Tomorrow you cannot pre-
dict, because tomorrow is based on circumstance, and circumstance
is both unpredictable and continuous.
The very secret of Cartier-Bressons art is that he looks for the criti-
cal moment, as he puts it. This is like saying that in circumstance,
which is both continuous and unpredictable, he sets the stage for it.
He knows what will happen, but he waits and waits for it. I know when
he was taking photographs of me some year back that I used to enter
the drafting room, not knowing he was there. he was in a corner
somewhere; perhaps he had waited for hours in a corner, and I did-
nt know he was waiting for me. I used to go around the room while
he was waiting for me to stop at a certain board. And I did stop, too,
because the board was occupied by a beautiful Chinese girl, thats
why. I went over to the board and I started to draw, and I heard the
camera go clickclickclick. He was ready, you see; he was waiting for
the very moment, but he was setting the stage for it. He was a mar-
velous photographer. He dealt with that subject, you see. In fact, I
learned very much about the meaning of one art and another through
him, just by coming to the understanding that his art was different
only because he was giving the circumstance.
This is a very broad question, but since I went through about five or
six buildings, I had about five or six different stimuli. It is more or less
a recognition of a single element. The stimulation came from the
place of assembly. It is a place of transcendence for political people.
In a house of legislation, you are dealing with circumstantial condi-
tions. The assembly establishes or modifies the institution of man.
So I could see the thing right from the start as the citadel of assem-
bly and the citadel of the institutions of man, which were opposite,
and I symbolized the institutions of man. (Earlier, I symbolized the
institutions of man by making a school of architecture - a school of
art and a school of science. Disciplines that are different, complete-
ly different, although they were both made by man. One is truly objec-
tive, whereas the other is truly subjective.) And then there are build-
ings which are called the place of well-being, where one begins more
and more to consider the body as the most precious instrument, and
to know it, and to honor it.
In the program there was a note which said that there should be a
prayer room of 3,000 square feet, and a closet to hold rugs; that was
the program. I made them a mosque which was 30,000 square feet,
and the prayer rugs were always on the floor. And that became the
entrance, that is to say, the mosque became the entrance. When I
presented this to the authorities, they accepted it right away.
47
48
No - there are some who can think in this manner, and some who can-
not. And it cannot be done by committee, or you would be voted
50
opposite: Plan sketch for the Rice School of Architecture, 1969; unbuilt.
52
Does that mean that I own the waltz? I dont own the waltz any
54
more than the man who found oxygen owns oxygen. It was simply
that one finds a certain nature, and as a professional, we must
find that certain nature.
In any school which makes clear this difference, the method will
also be clear.
56
Suppose you had a great kind of alley, or gallery, and walked through
this gallery, and connected to this gallery are the schools which are
associated in the fine arts, be it history, sculpture, architecture, or
painting, and you saw people at work, in all these classes. It was
designed so that you felt always as though you were walking through
a place where people are at work.
Then I present another way of looking at it, say as a court, and you
enter this court. You see buildings in this court, and one is desig-
nated as painting, one as sculpture, one as architecture, another as
history. In one, you rub against the presence of the classes. In the
other, you can choose to go in if you want to. Now, without asking you
which is better, which is a very unfair question, let me tell you what
I think is better. I think the latter is the greater by far. In the halls that
you go through, you will absorb by some osmosis . . . you will see
things. If you can choose to go there, even if you never do, you can
get more out of that arrangement than you can of the other. There is
something that has to do with the feeling of association which is
remote, rather than direct, and the remote association has a longer
life and love.
So it is the court. The court is the meeting place of the mind, as well
57
as the physical meeting place. Even if you walk through it in the rain,
it is the fact that you are associated with it in spirit greater than your
actual association. So I have asked the question and answered it
too, havent I? Thats the best way of giving an examination that I
know. You get the best mark and everything.
You make the bridge and invent it. The bridge is not physical; It has
to be in spirit, though; its lasting quality depends on it. Now there are
other reasons as well. We must not assume that every teacher is
really a teacher, because he can be a teacher only in name. You can-
not depend on something that is frozen in this architectural arrange-
ment . . . where actually the connection can be made in far reaching
ways. One does not assume that even a good student can become a
successful practitioner, or that a teacher is necessarily a good
teacher. One who is just beginning to sense things may emerge to be
the best teacher.
where you are thumbing through the files and catalogues and dis-
covering books. Architects have hardly any patience with a cata-
logue. An architect invariably gets disgusted with the first block of
the library, which is the catalogue. You know this yourself. Now, if you
had a library where you just had broad tables . . . very broad . . . not
just how big is a table . . . Maybe the table is a court, not just a
table, but sort of a flat court upon which books lie, and these books
are open. They are planned very, very cleverly by the librarian to open
at pages that humiliate you with the marvelous drawings . . . things
that have been recorded, finished and spread before you, buildings
that are magnificent. If a teacher could make comment on these
books, so a seminar is spontaneous, this would be marvelous. And
so you have a library which has just the long tables, and plenty of
room to sit to one side with a pad and pencil, and the books are out
in the middle. You can look through them, but you cant take them
out. They are simply there to invite you to the lesson of the library.
The library is really just a classroom, and you can make it so, and
looking at this element, library is different from library. The man
who is studying and writing his Ph. D. has his catalogue. Its there,
and it is his religion.
In his catalogue, he might see sparks come out, which are books,
and the association of the catalogue and the books is very precious
to this man. He makes a log of recordings of the books he is going
to swallow up, and he finally writes what the other fellow wrote, only
in a different way. But our library is very different in the school of
architecture, for you are really treating your minds in a very different
way. Every book is really a very, very personal kind of contact, a rela-
tionship. You know what I mean. Youve gone through it, and you
60
know what I mean exactly. The location of the library comes from this
nature. If you put it on the first floor, second floor, third floor, I think
it tests against its nature. You shouldnt be forced to put people
through the library. It should be just something in its structure which
says, What a wonderful place to go, and of course, the location has
much to do with it, and its convenience has much to do with it, but
essentially, it is its nature which you are after to convey. Glare is bad
in the library; wall space is important. Little spaces where you can
adjourn with a book are tremendously important. So you might say
that the world is put before you through the books. You dont need
many . . . you need just the good ones. And there is no such thing as
looking for a book through the catalogue. You dont just ask for a cat-
alogue book . . . it would die in the library.
sion the whole room is, quiet passion, violent passion, whatever it
may be, but the room is full of it. and you have no patience to clean
up anything. In fact, when the classroom is orderly, you lose every-
thing . . . that is to say, you really dont find anything. So the class-
room is not a pretty room, but it is a room which is dedicated, with
light, and plenty of space to work in. You cant mete out the square
foot area for a mans work, because some people require a great
deal of room, and others require little room. Youve got a series of
desks, and youve got to hang your drawings on the back of your
shirts, if there is no room for anything. You just have to see a place
which is very broad, and full of light. And there must be high spaces,
because the whole lesson of measurement and association with
dimension must be part of the room. I think you just feel that you are
in a room that is 60 by 60, and from this you can tell what a room
80 by 80 would be, because you know what 60 by 60 is. You dont
have to have that big a room; your mind can take care of many things.
Man can work in seclusion, but, you know, when you have an idea, if
youre a really good person, you just cant help telling that idea to
somebody else. You want to share it immediately, and you dont want
to hide it. In a sense, thats our nature. If you had stolen that idea,
you would be hated for the rest of your life, but to convey it is just an
urge which everyone has. You cant help it. Any one of us, in a sense,
is a teacher, because we want to share that idea, and because shar-
ing the idea has another meaning. The other meaning is that you
know its validity through sharing the idea. The confirmation by one
man with a sensitive feeling of its validity is like getting the approval
of a million people. This would not be true if you were dealing with a
mathematical problem, but it is true when the problem has to do with
62
aesthetics, with art. If that man is honest, and will tell you what he
feels, then you have a tremendous approval, that of feelings which
strike the soul. The location of the classroom, of course, is impor-
tant. but it will not influence anybody. I think that the power lies in
working on your own. If it is an inspiring place to work, you see, the
greatest service is given to the campus by its just being there. There
is a point about a meeting, and there should really be classes, like
seminar classes, and they are mandatory things. You just dont go
out and have a seminar because the mood strikes. I do not think that
there should be rooms designated for seminars in a row on a certain
floor, because a seminar is really an inspired thing, and you hold a
seminar like this one, and you sit around and hold it. As soon as you
make it on the second floor, with all the seminars lined up, it is no
longer a seminar. There isnt the spontaneity in back of it, and in this
sense I think you might ask, Shouldnt the school of sociology and
the school of architecture have a meeting?
I think every building must have a sacred place. I found what I think
is a sacred place in a theater which I am designing for For t Wayne,
Indiana. It went through a great deal with that; I didnt know much
about theaters. I knew dressing rooms had to be, but as long as I had
to know all about dressing rooms, I knew I would never have been
able to do the problem, because, you see, I didnt know the spirit. It
has come to the point at which I didnt care how many dressing
rooms. I just knew their position, and their position could be here, or
could be there, they will tell you, and you might end up with some
space left over, then, well, we need a few more dressing rooms. But
it is all built around the most incomplete plans that have been offered
to theaters, because there isnt anyone who is the leader who can tell
you the spirit of one quality or the other. To look for the spirit and find
it is the key, I think, to serving the realm of spaces known as the the-
ater. Now Ill tell you the result, instead of tantalizing you with all
kinds of things. The sacred space here is the place of the actor, the
dressing rooms, the rehearsal room. The dressing room has its bal-
cony overlooking the stage. There is a relationship between this and
the stage, you see. As soon as I bunched everything together, it
became a sacred space, and it wasnt just left-over space.
64
The stage itself was just like a plaza. I designed it as a plaza. If you
look at it, there are buildings where people are, but you look out from
here to the plaza. The traps were made so that you could have seats
there, and the forestage would give you a theater in the round, the
background of which would then be this building. You wouldnt see it,
but at times you could see it. This was the sacred place. After that,
I didnt care how big a lobby it was, really, just so it was big enough.
It was so important to have found this not in this dead way, you know,
with a sort of debris of left-over spaces.
This was a real building. It really was so important to find the idea.
We found the theaters own sacred self, and that theater came
absolutely alive. It was an honest place, an invitation, you see. The
theater is not a place to say, Im sorry we dont have any seats. You
must always have seats there, and thats a common thing a man
should recognize. A man comes early to the forum and he finds a
seat that befits a king, but there is always a place for the king, even
when he comes late. We are here, and there is a gallery here, and it
all has a very distinct kind of architecture. I have used brick arches,
and I have used the same old stuff, because its absolutely magnifi-
cent. Why shouldnt I use it . . . the old stuff? What I am using here
is just an order which is completely clear. Its not phony, and it costs
less. I would make the same theater, if I wanted to, in the damnest
beautiful concrete structure, but I have no fascination for it. What Im
interested in is to build this . . . If I build this . . . I know that I have
revived a theater. The presence of this architecture is a fact . . . and
now, when this lights up, the theater is complete. The theater is sort
of held together, and that is the religious place. What is the sacred
place in a school of architecture? It could be the lobby, but it could
65
also be the place where you gather together for reaction. Reaction to
your work means approval of millions, even through only a few are
present. Its the kind of thing in which you learn that what you pre-
sent you can believe in, and that is a tremendous thing.
So you call it a jury room, if you like, but it is a room where you meet,
where classes all meet, for a kind of review of an experience in doing
a building . . . starting with a piece of white paper.
It could be the most valuable lesson to call on people and get some
reactions - maybe violent reactions from persons of certain beliefs.
You dont have to take their marks, you see. Marks are the teachers
concern. I thing to have this person who comes in give you a mark
would be asking him too much. He is reacting, and his reactions
shouldnt be marked.
Around this, I think, you can build a school. You have so many rooms.
The rooms can have rough walls; it doesnt matter. You can pin things
up any place you want to. you can throw paint on the floor. The class-
66
room can be like a Jackson Pollock, but when you come to the jury
room - no. There should be something wonderful about it. It should
be a place where you can have tea . . . and it should always be a
friendly room. Its always a sanctuary, you see. It is not a room where
you sit around as if you are on trial. It is just a great room. It is the
sacred space in the school of architecture.
69
HANDS UP
Lars Lerup
Typewriter: It types us, encoding its own linear bias across the free
space of the imagination.2
gets collapsed into the two index digits (at least in the
computer beyond the keys). Will the remaining eight gather
their peculiarities (pinkie/lazy, ring/faithful, middle/rude,
thumb/happy) and start a rebellion? No longer just a working
tool or symbol, the hand reemerges full-fledged. Without tricks
up their sleeves, our hands will navigate the complete digital
menu with dizzying biotechnological wizardry, and bit for bit
coincidence in a parallel universe. Until now, the hand
designing our various universes (modernist, postmodern,
deconstructive, minimalist) has been far from parallel but rather
constrained, colonized, and tied down by the universe itself.
With a lighter touch, more ease, more directness, more
parallelism, other universes will doubtless appear dexterous,
liquid and alive.
The era when cathedrals were white5 and held their citizens in
73
1
Charles Siebert, My Fathers Machines, The New York Times Magazine
(September 27, 1997), p. 91.
2
J. G. Ballard, A Users Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews, (New York:
Picador, 1996), p. 276.
3
Ibid., p. 276.
4
Ibid., p. 279.
5
Refers to Le Corbusiers book on America of the same title.
6
Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph, The Aleph and other Short Stories: 19331965,
(New York: Bantam Books, 1971).
7
Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews,
ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p.165. Foucault suggests
that we may eventually refer to the twentieth century as the Deleuzian century.
8
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. C. V. Boundas (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1990), p. 280.
9
Ibid., p. 285.
10
Ibid., p. 263.
79
Introduction
tion laid the groundwork for his later masterworks, and marked
a phase of Kahns work characterized by an attention to
geometry and structure as the embodiment of architectural
symbolism. His synthesis of tectonic goals and modernization
inserted architecture into the mechanisms of a democracy that
was increasingly derived within technology and its processes
economic, machinic, numeric, or sociopolitical. The period
around 1944 signaled a turning point for Kahn, and marked
the emergence of a more politicized architecteven in the
later stages of his careerthan our profession has historically
recognized.
The IMF hoped to secure the stability of global trade and allow
an acceleration of the cartographic dimensionsthe geometries
of capitals liquidity. Modernization, as part of this market
dynamism, would be permitted to transgress the cartographic
borders of national concerns and likewise achieve unprecedent-
ed dimensions. In this global economic climate, the social and
political advocacy of Kahns early careerhis attempts to create
a stable environment for housing within a system of govern-
ment fundinghad to be either abandoned or folded into a
renewed practice. Seeking a monumental architecture allowed
Kahn to reconcile a professed desire for structural rationalism
with the dynamism of the new, postwar economy; Kahn, in
effect, required a system that would account for both the fluidi-
ty of capital and the Cartesian, and essentially stable, dimen-
sions that had previously domesticated his works. An archi-
tecture derived within such a system would conflate geometries
of building with movements algebraic functions, fixing the
aspirations of the collective while unanchoring them from their
Cartesian grid. The local divisions that characterized a pre-war
site of architecture would become, quite literally, enmeshed
with a newly active international site of economic dimensions.
83
Motion
Twenty-seven Years
Survived
1
Vincent Scully, What Will Be Has Always Been: The Worlds of Louis Kahn, ed.
Richard Saul Wurman (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), p. 297.
2
Alfred E. Eckes, Jr., A Search for Solvency: Bretton Woods and the International
Monetary System, 19411971 (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1975), p.
35.
3
Kenneth Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in
Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture, ed.John Cava (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1995), pp. 209210.
4
David B. Brownlee and David G. DeLong, Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of
Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), p. 42.
5
Eckes, A Search for Solvency, p. 7.
6
Georg Schild, Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks (New York: St. Martins
Press, 1995), p. 106. See also R. G. Hawley, Bretton Woods: For Better or Worse
(New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1946), p. 9.
7
A series of photos of Kahn at the blackboard appeared in the introductory pages
of Scully, What Will Be.
8
Brownlee and DeLong, In the Realm of Architecture, p. 20.
9
Ibid., p. 21.
10
Scully, What Will Be, p. 284.
11
Brownlee and DeLong, In the Realm of Architecture, p. 42.
12
Michael Benedikt, Deconstructing the Kimball (New York: SITES/Lumen
Books, 1991), p. 65.
13
John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics and Art, in The Liberal Hour (New
York: Mentor Books, The New American Library of World Literature, Inc.,
1964), p. 53.