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