Louis Kahn Quotes

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.

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.

We are born of light. The seasons are felt through light. We only know the world as it is evoked by light.

The sun never knew how great it was until it hit the side of a building.

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.

Even a room which must be dark needs at least a crack of light to know how dark it is.

Design is not making beauty, beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love.

A city is the place of availabilities. It is the place where a small boy, as he walks through it, may see something that will tell him what he wants to do his whole life.

Even a brick wants to be something

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.

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.

Architecture is the thoughtful making of space

Architecture is what nature cannot make. Architecture is something unnatural but not something made up.

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.

A room is not a room without natural light.

Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.

The nature of space reflects what it wants to be.

You can never learn anything that is not a part of yourself.

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

Consider the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted and the column became.

Every time a student walks past a really urgent, expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his college, it can help reassure him that he does have that mind, does have that soul.

Just think, that man can claim a slice of the sun.

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.

The room is the beginning of architecture.

In a small room one does not say what one would in a large room.

Every building must have... its own soul.

How accidental our existences are, really, and how full of influence by circumstance.

Thoughts exchanged by one and another are not the same in one room as in another.

Architecture struck me between the eye and the eyeball.

The crocodile must want to be a crocodile for reasons of the crocodile

I try to create homes, not houses.

If people want to see Beaux-Arts, it's fine with me. I'm interested in good architecture as anybody else.

Even a brick wants to be something.A brick wants to be something.It aspires. Even a common, ordinary brick... wants to be something more than it is.It wants to be something better than it is.