A Quote by Louis Kahn

The room is the beginning of architecture. — © Louis Kahn
The room is the beginning of architecture.
We've been fighting from the beginning for organic architecture. That is, architecture where the whole is to the part as the part is to the whole, and where the nature of materials, the nature of the purpose, the nature of the entire performance becomes a necessity-architecture of democracy.
There's a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the answer to the question: Where was I before I was born. In the beginning was what? Perhaps, in the beginning, there was a curious room, a room like this one, crammed with wonders; and now the room and all it contains are forbidden you, although it was made just for you, had been prepared for you since time began, and you will spend all your life trying to remember it.
Architecture is the beginning of something because it's - if you're not involved in first principles, if you're not involved in the absolute, the beginning of that generative process, it's cake decoration.
When we come to understand architecture as the essential nature of all harmonious structure we will see that it is the architecture of music that inspired Bach and Beethoven, the architecture of painting that is inspiring Picasso as it inspired Velasquez, that it is the architecture of life itself that is the inspiration of the great poets and philosophers.
When we talk of architecture, people usually think of something static; this is wrong. What we are thinking of is an architecture similar to the dynamic and musical architecture achieved by the Futurist musician Pratella. Architecture is found in the movement of colours, of smoke from a chimney and in metallic structures, when they are expressed in states of mind which are violent and chaotic.
There is no ecological architecture, no intelligent architecture and no sustainable architecture - there is only good architecture. There are always problems we must not neglect. For example, energy, resources, costs, social aspects - one must always pay attention to all these.
Architecture is for the young. If our teenagers don't get architecture - if they are not inspired, (then) we won't have the architecture that we must have if this country is going to be beautiful.
When I'm with him, there is someone with me in my house of grief, someone who knows its architecture as I do, who can walk with me, from room to sorrowful room, making the whole rambling structure of wind and emptiness not quite as scary, as lonely as it was before.
The way of architecture is the quiet voice that underlies it and has guided it from the beginning.
What connects architecture and music is that neither one is really an object. It's more like an ambience, a surrounding and a context. You can do other things while you're listening to music and of course, you can do other things while you're in the middle of architecture. The notion of multi-attention seems to me like it's the keynote to the beginning of the 21st century.
I got into architecture via fine arts, and I was a sculptor myself, and I have always involved artists in my projects. When I say 'involved,' I mean I always bring artists in at the beginning projects before they're built and say, 'Will you do a room? Will you do a sculpture floating in mid-air? Will you make a chimney? Will you do something?'
Architecture is art. I don't think you should say that too much, but it is art. I mean, architecture is many, many things. Architecture is science, is technology, is geography, is typography, is anthropology, is sociology, is art, is history. You know all this comes together. Architecture is a kind of bouillabaisse, an incredible bouillabaisse. And, by the way, architecture is also a very polluted art in the sense that it's polluted by life, and by the complexity of things.
Escape from the architecture ghetto is one of the major drivers and has been from the very beginning.
Architecture is a technology. And it's involved in all of the different networks of systems that produce architecture - including politics, economics, social and cultural conditions. So architecture is already in technology.
I've never had a problem with the old truism about dancing to architecture. I think you can dance to architecture. There's some pretty funky architecture to dance to.
All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
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