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