Nghĩ về ngôi nhà

1. Một công trình tốt cần tôn vinh và tạo ra tính nhân văn, trong đó giá trị lớn nhất là mối quan hệ giữa người với người. Mọi ngôi nhà cần được xem là một tổng thể hoàn chỉnh của tình yêu huyết thống. Kiến trúc sư không đồng lõa với việc tạo ra cơ hội làm cho các mối quan hệ trở nên tồi tệ hơn.

Đó là nhiệm vụ không bao giờ phải hối tiếc của KTS. Nếu không làm được điều đó, ngôi nhà chỉ đơn thuần là một khối gạch đá chồng chất.

2. Chức năng cao cả nhất của một ngôi nhà là nơi nuôi dưỡng, phát triển tình thương yêu. Nó vượt lên tất cả các chức năng cơ học, xã hội hay cá nhân.

"Mỗi công trình phải có một nơi thiêng liêng" (L. Kahn), với ngôi nhà, đó chính là không gian đặt bàn ăn tối của gia đình.

SBM Architects.

Sacred place

I think every building must have a sacred place.

Louis Kahn.

A great building

A great building, in my opinion, must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed, and in the end must be unmeasurable.

Louis I. Kahn

Philips Exeter Library

For the Exeter Library, Kahn again used a great central space. In classical and neoclassical buildings, the central space had symbolized a social hierarchy, with certain people of functions occupying the center and others relegated to the  periphery. Modern architecture had rejected this centrality as undemocratic.

Frank Lloyd Wright placed a massive fireplace at the center of his early houses, displacing people from the center to move about it in an architectural version of the Copernican revolution. The European architects, such as Le Corbusier, used a grid made up of columns that made all of the spaces equally important and none central.

But Kahn realized that hierarchy is not necessarily incompatible with democratic ideals. The differences among people implied by previous hierarchies can be internalized into each person. Kahn’s realizations was similar to those of Freud and Jung, who saw the great human dramas, which had previously been acted out by Oedipus, the Hero, or the Mother Goddess, internalized into the individual’s psyche. By reflecting a full range of human complexity, or hierarchy, in his buildings, Kahn restored a richness to architecture that had to a large extent been absent in the modern movement.

In the Exeter Library, Kahn was concerned with how the person and the book come together. He said:

“I see the library as a place where the librarian can lay out the books, open especially to selected pages to seduce the reader. There should be a place with great tables on which the librarian can put the books, and the reader should be able to take the book and go to the light.”

At Exeter, Kahn designed a great central space. Through the roof, through the stacks, and through the great circular shapes cut in the walls, light comes into the space. In this central space, the librarian can display books, and the reader can then carry them to study carrels, or alcoves, along the perimeter of the building.

The carrels are illuminated by great windows starting above the eye level of the reader, and each carrel has a smaller eye-level window with a sliding wooden shutter, which can be closed for privacy and concentration, or opened to permit a view of woodened campus.

Analysis of the Site

STUDENT: Do you approach your analysis of the site building the same way, and try to understand the nature of the surrounding area? Considering form and design - is one the maker of the other?

KAHN: Often the character of it, the nature of it, must be explored because it is there. You just don't plunk a building somewhere without the influence of what is around it. There is always a realationship.

Form has no shape or dimension. Form merely has a nature and a characteristic. It has inseparable parts. If you take one part away, Form is gone. That's form. Design is a translation of this into being. Form has existence, but it doesn't have presence, and design is towards presence. But existence does have mental existence, so you design to make things tangible. If you make what could be called a form drawing, a drawing which somehow shows the nature od something, you can show this.

When asked by the Minister how I would make the Unitarian Church, I merely went to the board and told him, without having known one before. But I dodn't make an architectural drawing. I made a form drawing, a drawing which indiates the nature of something and something else. I can show you what the drawing is like. I said here is an ambulatory, and here is a corridor, and here is a school. The ambulatory is for the man who is not so sure, "I want to think it over. I don't want to be in the church yet. He might be a Catholic, or a Jew, or a Protestant, you see, and he only goes to the Unitarian Church when he feels he wants to listen, and thus, the ambulatory. This is a form drawing. It shows the nature.

Louis Kahn

To what do you relate the fine aspects of your problems?

I really look for the nature of something. When I am doing the school, I would try to solve it by "school", rather than "a school". First, there is the aspect of why "school" is different from something else. I never read a program literally. This is a circumstantial thing. How much money you have, and where it is tobe, and it is tobe, and the number of things you need have nothing to do with the nature, and then you are confronted the program. Look at the nature of it, and you see in the program that you want... a library, for instance. The thing that is done is the rewriting of the program. Now this must be accompanied by something which interprects it. Your program alone would not mean anything, because you are dealing with spaces. So you would send back your sketches which encompass your thought about what the nature it is. Invariably, more spaces are required because every program written by an non-architect is board to be a copy of some other school or some other building. 

It's like writing to Picasso and sayin, "I want my portrait painted...I want two eyes in it... and one nose...and only one mouth, please." You can't do that, because you are talking about the artist. He is not this way. The nature of painting is such that you can make the skies black in the daytime. You can make a red dress blue, You can make doorways smaller than people. As the painter, you have the preprogative. If you want a photograph, ou get a photographer. If you want an architect, you deal with spaces...spaces which are inspired...and so you need to reconsider the requirements for the nature of the environment which inspires the activity of that insitution of man. You see in a shool or an office building, or church, or a factory, or a hospital an institution of man.

Louis Kahn

Materials

Realization is Realization in Form, which means a nature. You realize that something has certain nature. A school has a certain nature, and in making a school the consultation and approval of nature are absolutely necessary. In such a consultation ou can discover the Order of water, the Order of the wind, the Order of light, the Order of certain materials. If you think of brick. You say to brick, "What do you want, brick?". Bricks say to you, "I like an arch". If you say to brick, "Arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete lintel over an opening. What do you think of that, brick?". Brick says, "I like an arch".

Louis Kahn