A method is presented for designing an observer for the state of a linear time-invariant system with unknown inputs. The structure algorithm developed by Silverman is applied to obtain the observer which estimates the maximum estimable subspace of the state. It is shown that the observer equation can be derived from the maximum uncontrollable subspace of the original system with the aid of a left inverse for a transposed linear system. This leads us to the necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a state observer. An application to the insensitivity observer synthesis is also included.