Brick

This is a ref­er­ence to, not a com­ment on, Acme Brick. Still, my house abutted a quarry of Acme Brick, in Fort Smith, Ark. I hiked through it a googol­plex of times.

Also:

To express is to drive. And when you want to give some­thing pres­ence, you have to con­sult nature. And there is where Design comes in.

“If you think of Brick, for instance, you say to Brick, ‘What do you want, Brick?’

“And Brick says to you, ‘I like an Arch.’

“And if you say to Brick, ‘Look, arches are expen­sive, and I can use a con­crete lin­tel over you. What do you think of that, Brick?’

“Brick says, ‘I like an Arch.’

“And it’s impor­tant, you see, that you honor the mate­r­ial that you use. You don’t [bamby(?)] it around as though you said, well, we have a lot of mate­r­ial around, we can do it one way and we can do it another. It’s not true. You can only do it if you honor the brick and glo­rify the brick instead of short­chang­ing it.”

– Louis Kahn. Tran­scribed from the 2003 doc­u­men­tary My Archi­tect: A Son’s Jour­ney by Nathaniel Kahn. Mas­ter class at Penn, 1971.