Light Extracts

“Light is the Theme”

Page 5

“For it was not simply making, it was creating.”

“It is meant as an offering of thanks for his leading us, through his character and his art, to a fuller appreciation of why life is worth living.”

Page 7

“Silence to Light

Light to Silence

The threshold of their crossing

Is the Singularity

Is Inspiration

(Where the desire to express meets the possible)

is the Sanctuary of Art

is the Treasury of the Shadows

(Material casts shadows, shadows belong to light)”

Pages 11 – Image 1

“What slice of the sun does your building have? What light enters to your room? – as if to say the sun never knew how great it is until it struck the side of a building.”

Pages 12 – Image 2

“No space, architecturally, is a space unless it has natural light.”

“Here I felt that the light in the rooms structured in concrete will have the luminosity of silver.”

“This light will give a glow of silver to the room without touching the objects directly, yet give the comforting feeling of knowing the time of day.”

Pages 15 – Image 3

“The blues would be one thing one day; the blues would be another thing another day, depending on the character of the light. Nothing static, nothing static as an electric bulb, which can only give you one iota of the character of light.”

Page 16

“So this is a kind of invention that comes out of the desire to have natural light. Because it is the light the painter used to paint his painting. And artificial light is a static light… where natural light is a light of mood. And sometimes the room gets dark – why not? – and sometimes you must get close to look at it, and come another day, you see, to see it in another mood – a different time… to see the mood natural light gives, or the seasons of the year, which have other moods.”

Page 17

“it, knowing And the cloud that passes over gives the room a feeling of association with the person that is in that there is life outside of the room, and it reflects the life-giving that a painting does because I think a work of art is a giver of life. So light, this great maker of presences, can never be… brought forth by the single moment in light which the electric bulb has. And natural light has all the moods of the time of the day, the seasons of the year, [which] year for year and day for day are different from the day preceding.”

Page 18– Image 4

“Structure is the giver of light.”

Page 21 – Image 5

“Added to the skylight from the slit over the exhibit rooms, I cut across the vaults, as a right angle, a counterpoint of courts, open to the sky, of calculated dimensions and character, marking them Green Court, Yellow Court, Blue Court, named for the kind of light that I anticipate their proportions, their foliation, or their sky reflections on surfaces, or on water will give.”

Page 22– Image 6

“Of course there are some spaces which should be flexible, but there are also some which should be completely inflexible. They should be just sheer inspiration… just the place to be, the place which does not change, except for the people who go in and out.”

Page 27– Image 7

“You know what’s so wonderful about those porches? They’re so unnecessary.”

Page 28– Image 8

“And I realize that the light must come from a high point where the light is best in its zenith. The vault, rising not high, not in an august manner, but somehow appropriate to the size of the individual. And its feeling of being home and safe came to mind.”

Page 33 – Image 9

“You might say that the nature of a room is that it always has the character of completeness.”

Page 34 – Image 10

“This “natural lighting fixture”... is rather a new way of calling something; it is rather a new word entirely. It is actually a modifier of the light, sufficiently so that the injurious effects of the light are controlled to whatever degree of control is now possible. And when I look at it, I really feel it is a tremendous thing.”

Page 37– Image 11

“When a man says that he believes that natural light is something we are born out of, he cannot accept a school which has no natural light. He cannot even accept a movie house, you might say, which must be in darkness, without sensing that there must be a crack somewhere in the construction which allows enough natural light to come in to tell how dark it is. Now he may not demand it actually, but he demands it in his mind to be that important.”

Page 38– Image 12

“I put the glass between the structure members and the members which are not of structure because the joint is the beginning of ornament. And that must be distinguished from decoration which is simply applied. Ornament is the adoration of the joint.”

Page 43– Image 13

“Client: Well, now that we have the general form, we have to put in all the guts and see if we can fit them in.

Kahn: If they don’t all fit in easily and properly, then we have the wrong form.”

“Engineering is not one thing and design another. They must be one and the same thing.

Page 50 – Image 14

“Listen to the man who works with his hands. He may be able to show you a better way to do it.”

Page 54– Image 15

Page 56 – Image 16

“The world cannot be expected to come from the exercise of present technology alone to find the realms of new expression. I believe that technology should be inspired. A good plan demands it.”

Page 60 – Image 17

“This building feels – and it’s a good feeling – that I had nothing to do with it, that some other hand did it.”

Page 73 – Image 18