Louis I Kahn - Softcover

McCarter, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0714849715 ISBN 13: 9780714849713

Publisher: Phaidon Press, 2009

Synopsis

Louis I. Kahn (1901-74) was one of the single greatest influences on world architecture in the second half of the twentieth century. This book provides a comprehensive critical overview of Kahn's architecture, examining his works chronologically and exploring key themes and their evolution throughout his career. Including both built and unbuilt projects, each of the architect's major buildings is analysed, beginning with the design process and ordering ideas, followed by the methods and materials of construction, and finally a 'walk-through' of the spaces themselves - recognizing that Kahn's primary concern was interior space and its experience. Each project is extensively illustrated with photographs that convey the spirit of Kahn's work and a concept development portfolio documents the inspirations and ideas that led to the finished design.
Robert McCarter's authoritative text explores how Louis I. Kahn redefined modern architecture. Featuring a selection of original drawings and photographs from the Louis I. Kahn Archives and newly redrawn plans, this book also includes selected writings by Kahn and the first publication of the complete chronology of Kahn's buildings and projects, compiled by William Whitaker, Chief Curator of the Louis I. Kahn Archives. This monograph is an indispensable reference work on this renowned architect.

About this title

Review:

The considerable beauty of Robert McCarter's book about Louis Kahn, one of the titans of modern archtitecture, is akin to a Kahn building: squarish, monumental, monkish yet passionate and cunningly designed. The layout is exemplary, the straightforward chronological account of Kahn's career interspersed with conceptual histories of each of his important buildings, from the Yale Art Gallery to the Salk Institute to the National Capital of Bangladesh. The light splashes off the bright, thick pages in a way that would delight the master, and he would approve the clarity of the text and illustrations. Though the ample passages of Kahn's own prose are more poetical than McCarter's, in his soberly scholarly way, he's intellectually lively too, alert to Kahn's influences, from Frank Lloyd Wright to Buckminster Fuller, Barnett Newman to Noguchi. Fascinatingly, he traces the conceptual development of each major project--Kahn's masterpiece, La Jolla's Salk Institute, derives from the Acropolis plinth, Diocletian's palace, Hadrian's villa, the Alhambra, medieval monasteries, Renaissance churches, and Piranesi's plan to rebuild the ancient Roman Campus Martius (which also inspired the Bangladesh masterpiece). With exhilarated admiration, McCarter explains how Kahn coated the Salk project's concrete forms with polyurethane for perfect smoothness, added travertine stone and pozzuolana in the old Roman fashion to fashion textures and warm the tones, and fulfilled the master's ambition to fufill the material's potential: "Concrete really wants to be granite, but it can't manage." Wonderfully, McCarter provides computer renditions of masterpieces Kahn never created, including the stunning Hurva Synagogue in Jerusalem, which was to echo Wright's Johnson Wax Building. He gives a sense of Kahn the man, in his lifelong lover's quarrel with Wright and his hatred of the automobile. For a still deeper portrait, see Kahn's son's brilliant documentary My Architect. No serious student of modern architecture can afford to be without this landmark book, a great teaching tool about one of the great teachers of the 20th century. --Tim Appelo

About the Author:

Robert McCarter is a prominent architectural historian and practising architect, and Professor of Architecture at Washington University, St Louis. He is the author of Unity Temple and Fallingwater in Phaidon's Architecture in Detail series, and is author of the monograph Frank Lloyd Wright and the primer On and By Frank Lloyd Wright, also by Phaidon Press.

About this edition

• Publisher: Phaidon Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0714849715
• ISBN 13: 9780714849713
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 512
• Editor: Clarke Victoria