ABSTRACT
Louis I. Kahn loved architectural ruins and he looked at building plans as if they were an archeologist's drawings recording the foundations of a great building or city. He would say to Architect that a good building made a good ruin and would point to ancient sites that revealed how the building had been constructed. He would look at a building such as Chateau de Chambord and wonder where it had come from, pondering what had preceded it that helped fashion such a wondrous creation. Such buildings emerged organically rather than deliberately and rationally, as if they sprang spontaneously from the earth out of a synthesis of necessity and human desire. The word architecture springs from the Greek for "to build a roof," but building a roof came from necessity, the need to provide shelter from the elements. Lou felt that they emerged from the earth expressing a new building type never before seen or conceived.
