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Chapter 3: Metaphysics
3a. Metaphysics in Kahn’s Text

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The First Line on Paper

“Form and Design” begins with Kahn’s story of a young architect visiting
him with a metaphysical question.
A young architect came to ask a question. “I dream of spaces full of
wonder. Spaces that rise and envelop flowingly without beginning,
without end, of a jointless material white and gold”. “When Iplace the
first line on paper to capture the dream, the dream becomes less”.
This is a good question. I once learned that a good question is greater than
the most brilliant answer.
This is a question of the unmeasurable and the measurable. Nature,
physical nature, is measurable.
Feeling and dream has no measure, has no language, and everyone's dream
is singular.
Everything that is made,however, obeys the laws of nature. The man is
always greater than his works because he can never fully express his
aspirations. For to express oneself in music or architecture is by the
measurable means of composition or design. The first line on paper is
already a measure of what cannot be expressed fully. The first line on
paper is less.1

Close inspection of this passage reveals that theyoung architect does not in
fact ask a question and that there are two possible questions arising from his or her
conundrum: how does one translate a dream onto paper and, w hy should such a
translation be difficult or impossible in the first place? Since the question of how
would not even be asked were it not for the question of why, it is this latter question
that is the most pressing inphilosophical terms and will become the focus of the
present chapter. Why can’t dreams be drawn, much less built? Were the young
architect’s dream merely a recollection of a particular building that he or she had
once visited and now wished to copy some aspect of, then translating that memory
onto paper would surely not be as onerous a task as Kahn’s passage suggests. But
the young architect’sdream is not a recollection of a material building. Kahn’s
inference is that the dream is of a building which does not, and could not exist. It

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might be argued that the young architect is simply asking Kahn a technical question,
to which Kahn might answer by referring to such materials as sprayed concrete,
were it not for Kahn’s insistence that the dream “cannot be expressed fully”. 2The question of dreams and why they cannot be drawn can, in light of
diffuse scholarship linking Kahn to Plato, be treated as a metaphysical one. If, as
Kahn insists, “[t]he first line on paper is already a measure of what cannot be
expressed fully”,3 then, according to a Platonic reading, it is by virtue of a
metaphysical gulf which Kahn sees separating dreams from drawn lines. Accordingto traditional Western metaphysics, it is the kind of gulf which separates, for
example, pure and applied mathematics, or which separates God from humankind.
The opening passage to Kahn’s article raises what philosophers would call a
question of ontology. Where exactly are these spaces full of wonder to which Kahn
refers, if not in the physical realm of lines and paper? Kahn tells us that theyare in
an “unmeasurable” realm, transcending natural phenomena; though where this
“unmeasurable” realm actually i s , be it in a dreaming architect’s mind, or in a
transcendent realm of the kind Plato describes, remains unclear. The following
discussion tracks one of a number of possible lines of interpretation, by exploring
the hypothesis that Kahn’s unmeasurable realm is comparable toPlato’s realm of
ideal Forms, which is transcendent.
Much that needs to be said about the metaphysical status of Plato’s Forms as
they are described in The Republic has been presented in the previous chapter.
Notwithstanding claims by some that the Forms are products of human discourse, or
that they lose their transcendence in later dialogues, the majority of Plato scholars
describe the Forms...