A World within a World

“You present a quality, architectural, no purpose. Just a recognition of something which you can’t define, but must be built… But that’s a definite architectural quality. It has the same quality as all religious places…It’s the beginning of architecture. It isn’t made out of a handbook. It doesn’t start from practical issues. It starts from a kind of feeling that there must be a world within a world.”
Louis Kahn, Silence and Light, lecture first delivered at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, December 3, 1968, quoted in James F. Williamson, A World within a World: The Design of a Campus Interfaith Chapel

Jean Nouvel - Monolith - 2001-2002 - Unknown Photographer?

Konstantin Rozhdestvensky - Suprematist Landscape - 1935

Tony Smith - Die - 1962
via RUDY/GODINEZ

Human Inertia

"Because one must produce,

one must by all possible means of activity replace nature

wherever it can be replaced,

one must find a major field of action for human inertia,

the worker must have something to keep him busy,

new fields of activity must be created,

in which we shall see at last the reign of all the fake manufactured products,

of all the vile synthetic substitutes

in which beatiful real nature has no part,

and must give way finally and shamefully before all the victorious substitute products

in which the sperm of all artificial insemination factories

will make a miracle

in order to produce armies and battleships."

Antonin Artaud, To Have Done With The Judgement of God, 1947

Louis Kahn - Library, Competition for Washington University - 1956

via Infinite Interior

J. L. M. Lauweriks - Interior for Exhibition of Christian Art - 1910

John Russell Pope - Proposal for Lincoln Memorial - 1912
via An Architectural Humanism

Otto Kohtz - Reichshaus am Königsplatz - Berlin
via Ross Wolfe