A-INDEX: We continue to talk with the firm’s founders and architectural photographers about their most intimate moments and collect stories about great architecture and true feelings.

QPRO: Alexandra Ushakova, creative director, QPRO partner, architect, lighting designer

Louis Kahn is widely known for his profound philosophical approach to architecture, his ideas about the “integrity” of a project as an art form, and his emphasis on material, light, and geometry as central concepts. His work with forms and their interaction with the environment, nature, natural and artificial light often leaves a lasting impression on the fledgling minds of architecture students worldwide, and his rigorous yet daring approach remains relevant and unique even today. Louis Kahn’s least-known project, but still my favorite, is the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, California. The thoughtfulness of this structure, from its location relative to the sun and seasonal changes, the ocean’s behavior, the climate zone, the local vegetation, and the surrounding environment to the room layouts, the material connections, and the arrangement of desks and beds, is astounding.

All elements, at varying scales, work to create a unified whole, and this whole is precisely what shapes our experience, the atmosphere of a place, and the sensory and emotional memory. (That architecture is the memory of a certain number of experienced feelings, read Peter Zumthor.) It seems that by currently dividing design responsibilities and areas into the overall master plan, architecture, interiors, and engineering solutions and handing them over to different firms that do not communicate with each other, we may forever deprive ourselves of the opportunity to create projects where logic is evident at first glance and meaning is discerned in every detail—projects that truly create memories.