“Form comes from wonder. Wonder stems from our ‘in touchness’ with how we were made. One senses that nature records the process of what it makes, so that in what it makes there is also the records of how it was made. In touch with this record we are in wonder. This wonder gives rise to knowledge. But knowledge is related to other knowledge and this relation gives a sense of order, a sense of how they inter-relate in a harmony that makes all things exist. From knowledge to sense of order we then wink at wonder and say ‘How am I doing, wonder?”

“Dear Rick and Gene:

In the ten years since the printing of this book I have been given the opportunity to study design and build new building and reshape land. I was privileged also to enjoy the experience of designing a number of building at the same time. This is good, for one building tells the other of its nature, leading to new realizations of spaces.

The principal of comparing of distinguishing the servant areas from the spaces served which I thought about when designing the Trenton Bath House has been a constant guide in the structure and character of spaces.

In the text file Notebook I touched on Thoughts about the affect of the intimate room and the big room on student and teacher. I feel that the Room is the beginning of Architecture and the Plan is the Society of the Rooms. In German, French, and Italian I realized that “Room” is not understood as it is in English. Beauty, a total harmony, is in the realizations of this word “Room.” If I were to speak in the Baptistery of Florence I would be led by the walls around me to say what I never said before. A room can be generative. This could happen in a small room with just another person. A third person could disturb the vectors, changing what could be an event to a mere performance. So sensitive is a room.

The Pyramids seem to want to tell us of its motivations and its meeting with Nature in order to be

I sense Silence as the aura of the “desire to be to express”
Light as the aura “to be to be”
Material as “Special Light.”
(The mountains the streams the atmosphere and we are of spent light.)

Silence to Light
Light to Silence
The Threshold of their crossing
Is the Singularity
Is inspiration
(where the desire to express meets the possible)
is the Sanctuary of Art
is the Treasury of the Shadows
(Material casts shadows belongs to light)

The longest trace from Silence, sustaining the unmeasureable before the measurable of Light is permitted to cross in the Threshold ‘Poetry.’

Parting form Silence restraining the desire to express to grasp the Laws of Nature, the measures of Light, and to extend its offerings in the longest path toward Silence.
Crossing its reluctant trace is the Threshold ‘Science.’

Yet a Newton, like the poet, needs but a hint from Nature to reuse the Universe. He allows the desire to express, the yet not expressed to lead him, disapproving of his knowing of law seeking only the total harmony of Order.

I wanted to illustrate Silence and Light
Silence I felt – this way about.

Light? – how could I do better than accept the whiteness of the paper itself? Looking at an illustration of the Waverly Tales by Cruikshank I noticed his lines followed the direction of the source of light. I realized that the stroke of the pen was where the light was not.

This was the clue to the illusion. My remark that structure is the giver of light is here by recalled. The column in the Greek Temple is where the light is not.

LIK June 15 ‘73”

“Joy will prevail.”

“Very good is less than good.”

“I try to create homes, not houses.”

“One should criticize, but not judge.”

“Even when I get a haircut I’m an architect.”

“A good answer defies the greatest answer.”

“Architecture is the thoughtful making of spaces.”

“I cannot in any way practice what I just preached.”

“In a small room one does not say what one would in a large room.”

“The Pyramids try to say to you, Let me tell you how I was made.”

“The crocodile must want to be a crocodile for reasons of the crocodile.”

“Even a common, ordinary brick ... wants to be something more than it is.”

“The sun never knew how great it was until it hit the side of a building.”

“Even a room which must be dark needs at least a crack of light to know how dark it is.”

“Consider the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted and the column became.”

“Questions permeate every aspect of our world and our life. Life is all about questions. If you stop asking, you stop living.”

“It is not worth it to use marble for what you don’t believe in, but it is worth it to use cinder blocks for that which you believe in.”

“All Bach cared about was the truth. Indefinable, unmeasurable truth. And so it is with architecture. It’s a search for the truth.”

“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.”

“I honor beginnings. Of all things, I honor beginnings. I believe that what was has always been, and what is has always been, and what will be has always been.”

“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.”

“You say to brick, ‘What do you want, brick?’ Brick says to you, ‘I like an arch.’ If you say to brick, ‘Arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete lintel over an opening. What do you think of that, brick?’ Brick says, ‘I like an arch.’”

“We are all born with a sense of what to do. Within our own singular limits we know instinctively that, given a sufficient opportunity to put this instinct into practice, we know what to do almost instantaneously, if what we do is true to our singularity.”

“I like English history . . . I have one of eight volumes, and I only read the first volume and only the first chapter, because every time I read it I also read something else into it. And the reason is that I’m really interested in readying Volume Zero. And maybe, when I get through with that, Volume Minus-One.”

“I do not believe that beauty can be deliberately created. Beauty evolved out of a will that may have its first expression in the archaic. Compare Paestum with the Parthenon. Archaic Paestum is the beginning. It is the time when walls parted and the columns became and Music entered architecture. Paestum inspired the Parthenon. The Parthenon is considered more beautiful, but Paestum is still more beautiful to me. It presents a beginning within which is contained all the wonder that my follow in its wake.”