Silence and light静谧与光明：路易-康演讲.doc

SILENCE AND LIGHT – LOUIS I. KAHN AT ETH 1969 ZURICH,SWITZERLAND Louis I. Kahn talking to the students at the School of Architecture, ETH, Zurich, February 12, 1969. This talk officially opened the exhibition of his work (refer to Preface). I’m going to put on the blackboard here what may seem at first to be very esoteric. But I believe that I must do it in order to prime myself. Don’t forget that I’m also listening and I have really no prepared talk except that I put a few notes down just to get the sacredness out of me because, you know, this is like a blank piece of paper on which I’ve got to make a drawing. And so, the drawing is a talk this time, you see. It is wonderful to consider, you know, that you must see so well that you hear too. And sometimes it is well to hear so well that you see too. The sense really can be considered one thing. It all comes together. It is the reason why I constantly refer to music in referring to architecture, because to me there is no great difference – when you dig deep enough in the realm of not doing things but simply thinking what you want to do- that all the various ways of expression come to fore. To me, when I see a plan I must see the plan as though it were a symphony, of the realm of spaces in the construction and light. I sort of care less, you see, for the moment whether it works or not. Just so I know that the principles are respected which somehow are eternal about the plan. As soon as I see a plan which tries to sell me space without light I simply reject it with such ease, as though it were not even thoughtfully rejected, because I know that it is wrong. And so, false prophets, like schools that have no natural light, are definitely un-architectural. Those are what I like to call- belong to the marketplace of architecture but not to architecture itself. So I must puton the board something which I thought on only recently which could be a key to my point of view in regard to all works of art including architectur