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"In architecture," Kahn says, "nature approves of what you do—by working."
Kahn's prolonged meditation on substance, even through the lean years of the Depression and World War II when he built almost nothing independently, had immense consequences for his later work. For even the most complex of his buildings, the intricate massing of volume and void at Dacca or the planning of the Salk Institute, are also a demonstration of the bare rudiments of architecture. "I learned about order, order itself. That the brick wanted to be brick and nothing else, the stone stone, the concrete concrete. I just learned it so thoroughly, the orders and the elements. And from there I learned that a stair isn't just something you get out of a catalogue but a very important event in a building. I never forgot such principles. From this I sensed the eternity qualities of architecture. In the beginning lies eternity. It can never come about without the feeling that it's absolutely right, that there is no precedent before."
Consequently Kahn's relationship to past building is very strong; and because of his liking for traditional materials, axial planning and muscular interplays of light and shadow, space and solid, grand and intimate, he is linked to the historical icebox raiding of the Beaux-Arts tradition. "Except," he adds, "that I don't know it as a tradition. I know it as an introduction to the spirit of architecture, which has very little to do with the realistic solving of problems." The problems are posed and solved by what Kahn calls "reprogramming," and a radical questioning of the use a building is to be put to. Such questioning can make Kahn's relations with a client prickly, but it also produces remarkable collaborations, like the one with Dr. Richard Brown, the director of the Kimbell Art Museum, who supervised and fought out every detail of Kahn's proposals during the six years they worked together on the building. "But he was always on my side," chortles Kahn. "He wanted me to win." In the Exeter Library, Kahn refused to countenance the idea of a reading hall and produced instead a series of zones of privacy tucked away "in the folds of construction. I like early Gothic libraries I've seen," he says. "There was a high aedicular quality to them; they were small places, intimate."