Louis Kahn Quotes

I am very interested in architecture. I've been asked if I'd ever direct, but me, I'd rather build. It's very similar to directing, because you get to walk among this piece of art, to live in it, be surrounded by it, which is just thrilling.

The practice of architecture is the most delightful of all pursuits. Also, next to agriculture, it is the most necessary to man. One must eat, one must have shelter. Next to religious worship itself, it is the spiritual handmaiden of our deepest convictions.

Architecture is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.

Architecture is about public space held by buildings.

The essence of architecture is form and space, and light is the essential element to the key to architectural design, probably more important than anything. Technology and materials are secondary.

Architecture is the masterly, correct, and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light: light and shade reveal these forms.

The concept of architecture as analogous to landscape is something that has interested me for a long time.

Architecture theory is very interesting.

Some authors regard morality in the same light as we regard modern architecture. Convenience is the first thing to be looked for.

My father, Robert Ernst, was teaching as an architect at the technical high school of our city.

A turning point in the public's perception of the building art came with the publication of Frank Lloyd Wright's 'An Autobiography' of 1932, a picaresque narrative that captivated many who hadn't the slightest inkling of what architects actually did.

I love architecture.

You can never draw enough or read enough - reading about architecture, in other words.

Light is something that can really change your perception of space.

Purpose is not necessary to make a building beautiful.

I'm working on a school of architecture in China. It's rare that an architect gets to design a school of architecture, and here I get to do it. I'm so pleased that they asked me.

To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.

It was the drawing that led me to architecture, the search for light and astonishing forms.

People outside the profession of architecture perhaps often lack the understanding of how their physical environment comes into being. What are the processes, the concerns and considerations? What are the parameters that shape the world around them?

When he was eighteen, my dad went off to college to become an architect.

Early in my career, I tried to bring an artistic feeling to architecture. That's really the intent and impression of what I think about: context, space, shapes, and landscape.

In architecture, Palladio is the game. It means hard thought all through - if it is labored, it fails.

From my first days studying architecture at the architectural association, I have always been interested in the concept of fragmentation and with ideas of abstraction and explosion, where we were de-constructing ideas of repetitiveness and mass production.

The history of architecture is the history of the struggle for light.

One of the great beauties of architecture is that each time, it is like life starting all over again.