A Study on the Exteriority of Interior in the Louis I. Kahn's Architecture - Focused on the Study of Character of Connecting Elements -

This paper is a study of the possibility of experience and expression in the architecture of Louis I. Kahn by focusing on the characters of entrance, court and window/wall of his public buildings. In the course of composition, Kahn defined the entrance, court and window/wall as an connecting elements and elements of boundary. The characters revealed by these elements or rooms give the clue to insight Kahn's thought of relation of interior and exterior space or inner and outer space. Following are the characters of these elements. First, a entrance reveals the fact that inner space separates from outer space by connecting these two space and giving the value to inner space as the entity and totality like outer space. The entrance gives its ontological being to human subjects not by vision but experience and expression which is the essence of commonness, that is, Silence. Kahn made the possibility of activity amplify in this common and silent space. Second, this entrance is connected with wide and huge central space not individual spaces of interior space. This extreme procedure of entering makes human subject feel sublime of intoner space. And the central spaces becomes another exterior or another world in the inner world of architecture by the lights from above and by having the boundary wall which shows same pattern of exterior wall. Third, Kahn regarded a window as the giver of lights not as the medium of vision connecting inner space with outer. He tried to connect interior with exterior through the being and character of the light expressed in the interior. And in his buildings, interior space is connected with exterior by expressing the purpose of building, composition of inner space, structural truth and construction facts through the Form, a pattern of wall, details and ornamental joints. By practicing this thoughts in the real buildings, Kahn tried to gave aura to both the interior space and entity of architecture which is regarded as micro universe like flowers, rocks and human beings.