Architecture Note on reading "Kahn"

To design is

to plan and

to organise,

to order,

to relate, and

to control

in short it embraces

all means opposing disorder and accident.

Therefore it signifies

a human need

and qualifies man’s

thinking and doing.

 ...............................................................................Joseph Albers........................................................................

Kahn’s works presents us with two complementary yet utterly opposed principles. The first is categorically anti-progressive and asserts the presence of collective abstract architectural memory in which all valid compositional types are eternally present in their disjunctive purity. The second principle is vehemently progressive and pursues the renovation of architecture form on the basis of advanced technique. It seems that Kahn believed that this second principle, as it responded to new tasks and uses, would be able to lead, when combined with the first, to an appropriate architectural expression, resynthesizing fresh poetic and institutional values in terms of concrete form.

................................................................................................................................Kenneth Frampton on later buildings of Kahn

Knows the aesthetic implication of geometry inherent in biological structures bringing us in touch with the edge between the measurable and unmeasurable.

.......................................................................................................Kahn on Ronchamp chapel

A good building is one which the client cannot destroy by wrong uses of space.

“Thoughtful making of space”

I believe that we are speaking about order when we are speaking about design. I think design is circumstantial. I think order is what we discover the aspects of.

A library should offer a system of spaces and their consequent form as a building should originate from broad interpretation of use rather than the satisfaction of a program for a specific system of operation.

It is a duty of architect to find what is the thoughtful realm of space….

Wright gives insight to learn/that nature has no style/that nature is the greatest teacher of all/the ideas of Wright are facets of the sight thoughts.

Kahn on Wright

“Architecture is what nature cannot make”

No geometrical form more apt to fulfil this demand the circle or forms deriving from it. In such geometrical plans the geometrical pattern will appear absolute, immutable, static, and entirely lucid. Without the organic geometric equilibrium where all parts are harmonically related like the members of the body divinity cannot reveals itself.

When personal feelings transcend into religion (not a religion but the essence of religion) and Thoughts leads to philosophy, the minds opens to realizations. Realizations of what may be the existence will of, let us say, particular architectural spaces, Realizations is a merging of Thoughts and Feelings at the closest rapport of the mind with the psyche, the source of what a thing wants to be.

Form has no shape or dimension…. Form is ‘what’. Design is ‘how’. Form is impersonal. Design belongs to the designer; Design is a circumstantial act…. From has nothing to do with circumstantial conditions.

Schools began with a man under a tree….. Soon spaces were erected and the first schools became, the establishment of schools was inevitable because it was part of our desires of man. Our vast system of education, now vested in institutions, stem from these little schools but the spirit of their beginning is now forgotten. The rooms required by our institutions of learning are stereotype and uninspiring.

“Space has a power and gives mode”

A religion atmosphere

A realization that you are responsible beyond your own selfish self.

                                                                                                            

This cosmo-geographical macrocosm, whose microcosms are those of the city, the mosque, the house and the garden distils a concept of divine essence which leads us by specific ways and paths in earth-paradise ascension…. This is architecture which restores something to those who have no heritage, who find in it an image their dignity, and who-for lack of anything better-see in it vision of a different life.

....................................................................................................................Kahn on parliament, Dhaka

I don’t believe that society makes the man.

I believe that man makes the society.

Science finds what is already there

 but the artists makes that which is not there.

I didn’t want anything pretty:

 I wanted to have a clear statement of a way of life

A religious place –

a place which has no other meaning but is just good place to go.

A building that has become a ruin is again

free of the bondage of use.

The court is the meeting place of the mind, as well as the physical meeting place.

I think architects should be composers and not designers. They should be composer of elements. The elements are things that are entities in themselves.

The architects jobs in my opinion is to find the spaces where the availabilities, not yet here and those that are already here, can have better environments for their maturing into.

I believe that man’s greatest worth is in the area where he can claim no ownership. This may have his great accomplishment; not the specific shapes, which has inspired an entire generation of architects, but the idea that knew no shape and would endure.

“What will be has always been”

The threshold where silence and light meets, silence with its desire to be, and light, the giver of all presence.

Silence was the realm of ideal truth. Which has existed before the pyramids had been built- “Before the first stone was laid.” Light on the other hand, was the energy of the real; “I sense light as the giver of all presence, and material as spend light. What is made by light casts a shadow, and the shadow belongs to light. I sense a threshold; Light to silence, silence to light – an ambience of inspiration, in which the desire to be, to express crosses with the possibilities.     

A great building must, in my opinion, begin with the unmeasurable and go through the measurable in the process design, but (it) must in the end be unmeausrable.  

Structures are the maker of light, because structure releases the spaces between and that is light giving.

Architecture has little to do with solving problems. Problems are run-of-the-mill. To be able to solve a problem is almost a drudgery of architecture. Thought it is tremendously delightful, there is nothing equal to the delight of coming to realizations about architecture itself. There’s something that pulls on you as though you were reaching out of something primordial, something that existed before yourself. You realize when you are in realm of architecture that you are touching the basic feeling of man and that architecture would never have been part of humanity if it weren’t the truth to begin with.