Kahn - last note on the Salk Institute

"You are driving on the roadway in La Jolla and you turn into the gravel driveway and that's when the sound changes... You stop the car and hear the last little skid of the tire on the gravel.


You open the door and step out and you hear your shoes are hitting the ground.

Seconds later, you walk onto different surface and the sound changes again. This time your steps are crushing the leaves on the ground and light filters in through the tree branches.

You are at an oblique point near the entrance gate and the stairs; you still do not see the courtyard.

You turn frontally to enter and you go up a few steps then you see the channel of the water right down the middle, in symmetry with the buildings on both sides. Your eyes follow it and immediately your mind superimposes that on the ocean itself, so it goes 'boom' and you are out to the horizon and any thought you had up to it, evaporates."


"Your thoughts are just too tiny at that moment and you have drawn into the shot. If you sit there for couple of hours as I did, you see light and shade, people traveling the courtyard and you can pick out who are familiar with the building from the way they cross over the water.

The building becomes so static, it allows you to see the world around it, changing and moving.

Therefore, the life itself is the variable, and the architecture is constant."


--Michael Rotondi