Chapter 2 of 16
Phillips Exeter Library & Dining Hall, Exeter Academy, New Hampshire By Louis Kahn, 1972. The Library From The North West
LK: Now, there was a young architect who chose this thesis to do this story on me, because nobody has written about it. I have been also very reluctant about anything personal, because I felt what I really wanted to help that person do is to write something like a Leo and a Duke, you see, not a personal history, and all that time, and look, and all that stuff, you see, which is a human interest story, all of which is really relatively different, different from the work story. They're really quite different, though it has much to do with it. It's so terribly circumstantial, you see, compared to the work story, which is not so circumstantial. What presents you in the way of how you express things, you see what I mean, has to do circumstantially, of course, with what jobs you get, you see, the people you meet, where you are at the moment and all this, but your security, the sense that you know what to do, comes from cutting through this entirely, you see, and coming to a kind of realisation which is really you. Because if you allow the circumstances to play on what is really you, and spoils you, you haven't got you. See, the circumstances are going to be secondary, almost, and they are just a kind of medium, you see, within which you can find yourself.