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.
Questions that pertain to the foundations of mathematics, although treated by many in recent times, still lack a satisfactory solution. Ambiguity of language is philosophy's main source of problems. That is why it is of the utmost importance to examine attentively the very words we use.
All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.
Man is man so long as he is struggling to rise above nature, and this nature is both internal and external.
If we remain grotesquely unequal, we shall lose all sense of fraternity: and fraternity, for all its fatuity as a political objective, turns out to be the necessary condition of politics itself.
All I know is I'm not a Marxist.
Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree.
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