Quotes from Louis Kahn

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

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.'

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

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.

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

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.

I try to create homes, not houses.

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.

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.

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 thoughtful making of space.

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.

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.

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.

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

What does a house want to be?

Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.

The nature of space reflects what it wants to be.

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

Every building must have... its own soul.

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

The street is a room by agreement.

Architecture struck me between the eye and the eyeball.