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Lou Kahn:
It sure it is a surprise, well I thought I was going to a coffee klatch, but it turns out to be a clambake… it’s great. I hope everyone can hear me. I have 2 microphones and a lot of batteries up here I think maybe you can make out what I say. you know it’s very difficult to speak to many people. I’ve done it before, but I must say that almost invariably what happens is that it becomes a kind of performance rather than an event. Because I think when you speak to just one other it can be extremely eventful. Somehow the lectures of one person to another can manage to come to a single point and it becomes generative. That when you speak to just another person you don’t feel as if your lines are necessary. That you feel like saying something like you never said before. And though I will try just to amuse myself not to put the first act first and the second act second, I’ll try to scramble it a bit. Because that’s only thing I can do. The memory leaves you of course, to a great extent because there are many people. But I’m very certainly gratified everybody is here. It seems as though, if you left anybody out, I think all of this college seems to be here.
In saying this also, I’d like to give you a sense of my recent thoughts. As the old ones sort of get worn by such performances when you begin to hear yourself say the say the same thing over and over again. Which one is prone to do. You just make up your mind that it probably it isn’t true at all. Because it doesn’t grow. If it doesn’t grow, it needs fortification.
I think everyone is tempted to define architecture and I won’t dare to define it because it is really a too all comprising of a thing… too wonderful a thing to try to nail down. I do believe it kind of begins with a room. A room. Which has a relation to a person. It seems walls when they’re far away and the walls when they’re close, they make you say different things. I’m sure that at a large place, you say something differently than you do in a small place. If you’re near a fireplace just with one other person as I mentioned a little while ago. I think it is truly generative time. And especially if it’s with a person you don’t know too well that you feel that you feel a remoteness in your personal relationship. Then it becomes even more sharply generative. Because you feel the necessity of renewing yourself. And for that reason, that which has been dormant, that which has never been said, somehow occurs to you.
The room I feel is also defined by the way it’s made. It is invariably an incomplete place if the way it is made this room is not made is not evident in the room itself. There is a kind of completeness about it. It isn’t just a partitioned off place where you feel other parts of it are somewhere else. It’s so important to think that a room is a great thing to have happened and to become part of the everyday, you know. It is while on the one hand when people tell you of free-wheeling spaces that I go back to the feeling of the room per se defines not easily partitioned off, something which is like an extension of self. Something that which is kind of piece of self… was made that it has in the end a superior position in the record in your mind of your past through circumstance than one in which you have just freely moved and tried to feel freedom. As sometimes you don’t feel it all. You just feel a kind of liberty, but maybe there’s a distinction between freedom and liberty. I think very much the room as religion.
Now a poet, an American poet who studied architecture and had it deeply ingrained in him though he became a writer… just in honor of his previous considerations of where his past expressions would be wrote a poem about architecture in which he said many things, but out of it I drew something I thought tremendously significant. He said, “what slice of the sun does your building have?” And also, “What slice of the sun enters your room?” when I thought of the sun striking the jamb and the sill of a window and that you’re acquainted with this place that you enter either in the morning, or get up in it, or walk into it. That you feel the marvel of it. In a room with another you forget the wind the rain and the trees and the birds and the sky. There is something about the world the within the world that has an effect on the mind. In fact the room is a place in the mind. It is very seldom that your mind flowers on Times Square. You endanger your life so much walking on any city street anyways that one thinks first of his life than of thought. But it is something that I think tremendously significant. that kept growing and growing in significance.
The sense that you are making a room. That you are making a society of rooms when you’re making a building. And if you think of it as a freewheeling space. Which I think is also of great importance today. In fact, it recalls a beautiful time in architecture during the Greek thought and realizations which were new… an emergence… a time of beginning, and I don’t know of anytime more important than that time of beginning. All the extensions that still recalls the beginning are certainly less than the beginning to think that something can happen when there’s no precedent. And something that forms a kind of an agreement in the mind which says “this is something that it must be”. When it was thought about it must be considered as being always there. It’s a confirmation which comes out of the I commonality of man which is tremendously important. And so a building is a society of rooms. You have absolute freedom to say what this society of rooms are. The function of the building is only a kind of start of what these spaces should be. That society of rooms. You honor the function without question. But it is only the stimulus around which things gravitate to try to glorify the sense that something must be. This poet who said, “What slice of the sun enters your room?” is almost like saying. “Sun, well you never knew how great you were do you… until you saw a building.”
And it must be considered in another light. I don’t want to lose a thread of thought of the room and if I was to deviate from it, then you just remind me because I’m going to fly over to a different kind of consideration.
That of silence and light. Silence is this feeling one gets in the presence of the pyramids, and not only isolated to the pyramids I would say many a great work has the same feeling. You felt this silence today, at least a few of us did when we heard this music. And this sum total of it all is a kind of silence. When Rachmaninoff used to play on the piano, and I heard him, I had the great privilege of hearing him, when he was finished with his work. It seemed as though the entire thing was locked in a cloud above you. Complete… the completeness of it was never lost. It wasn’t just a passing thing. And there you thought it had the quality of silence. A kind of wordless voice that simply reflected the inner nature of man which has this will to be to express. I say this manifestation of ourselves on this earth or anywhere we really are is the will to be to express. As though that’s the only reason for man. To express. And light that tremendous phenomenon I consider that all material is spent light. As though light was not light but was a kind of prevalence of the luminous. That it is non-material before it becomes material and the luminous. The prevailing luminous grouped in a wild dance of flame and a flame congealing spending itself into material.
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