The sun never knew how great it was until it hit the side of a building.
Louis KahnRead
A city is the place of availabilities. It is the place where a small boy, as he walks through it, may see something that will tell him what he wants to do his whole life.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that a city is full of opportunities that can inspire one's life path.
In this quote, Louis Kahn reflects on the transformative power of a city as a landscape filled with potential and possibilities. It highlights how the diverse experiences and sights that a city offers can profoundly impact a young boy's aspirations and dreams, guiding him towards his lifelong passions and ambitions. The city becomes a metaphor for exploration and discovery, suggesting that the environment can shape an individual's future in significant ways.
In practice
This quote could inspire students exploring career options in an urban setting.
The sun never knew how great it was until it hit the side of a building.
I sense a Threshold: Light to Silence, Silence to Light - an ambiance of inspiration, in which the desire to be, to express, crosses with the possible Light to Silence, Silence to Light crosses in the sanctuary of art.
Greek architecture taught me that the column is where the light is not, and the space between is where the light is. It is a matter of no-light, light, no-light, light. A column and a column brings light between them. To make a column which grows out of the wall and which makes its own rhythm of no-light, light, no-light, light: that is the marvel of the artist.
The room is the beginning of architecture.
Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.
The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.
Were the happiness of the next world is as closely apprehended as the felicities of this, it were a martyrdom to live.
They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that dislike it, heresy; and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.
The word religion comes from an origin which means "coming together." But priesthood has been doing just the opposite, it has created splits in man, not oneness. Religion means creating in man an organic unity; it has nothing to do with God, it has something to do with you. It has nothing to do with worship, it has something to do with a transformation of your own consciousness.
Two forms of government are favorable to the prevalence of falsehood and deceit. Under a Despotism, men are false, treacherous, and deceitful through fear, like slaves dreading the lash. Under a Democracy they are so as a means of attaining popularity and office, and because of the greed for wealth.
Fools admire everything in an author of reputation.
Most Americans are exceptionalists; we think we live outside of history.
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