Louis Kahn

A stunning celebration of the architect's residential masterpieces Louis Kahn (1901-1974), one of the most important architects of the postwar period, is widely admired for his great monumental works, including the Kimbell Art Museum, the Salk Institute, and the National Assembly Complex in Bangladesh. However, the importance of his houses has been largely overlooked. This beautiful book is the first to look at Kahn's nine major private houses. Beginning with his earliest encounters with Modernism in the late 1920s and continuing through his iconic work of the 1960s and 1970s, the authors trace the evolution of the architect's thinking, which began and matured through his design of houses and their interiors, a process inspired by his interactions with clients and his admiration for vernacular building traditions. Richly illustrated with new and period photographs and original drawings, as well as previously unpublished materials from personal interviews, archives, and Kahn's own writings, The Houses of Louis Kahn shows how his ideas about domestic spaces challenged conventions, much like his major public commissions, and were developed into one of the most remarkable expressions of the American house.

A thoroughly updated and redesigned edition of McCarter's esteemed monograph on the globally-revered modern master.0Louis I Kahn was one of the greatest influences on post-WWII world architecture, and in the twenty-first century his significance has skyrocketed. In this revised, expanded, and redesigned edition of Phaidon's bestselling and critically-acclaimed monograph, Robert McCarter explores how Kahn redefined Modern architecture - and why his work remains a fundamental source today. Extensively illustrated, this comprehensive overview includes both built and unbuilt projects, as well as a project realized forty years after Kahn's death - New York City's Four Freedoms Park.

Louis Kahn's parliament building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, a rarely seen architectural masterpiece that influenced generations of architects and designers, can now be appreciated in this beautifully crafted volume of recent photographs by Grischa Rueschendorf.

Born in Estonia 1901 and brought to America in 1906, the architect Louis Kahn grew up in poverty in Philadelphia. By the time of his mysterious death in 1974, he was widely recognized as one of the greatest architects of his era. Yet this enormous reputation was based on only a handful of masterpieces, all built during the last fifteen years of his life. Wendy Lesser’s You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn is a major exploration of the architect’s life and work. Kahn, perhaps more than any other twentieth-century American architect, was a “public” architect. Rather than focusing on corporate commissions, he devoted himself to designing research facilities, government centers, museums, libraries, and other structures that would serve the public good. But this warm, captivating person, beloved by students and admired by colleagues, was also a secretive man hiding under a series of masks. Kahn himself, however, is not the only complex subject that comes vividly to life in these pages. His signature achievements—like the Salk Institute in La Jolla, the National Assembly Building of Bangladesh, and the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad—can at first seem as enigmatic and beguiling as the man who designed them. In attempts to describe these structures, we are often forced to speak in contradictions and paradoxes: structures that seem at once unmistakably modern and ancient; enormous built spaces that offer a sense of intimate containment; designs in which light itself seems tangible, a raw material as tactile as travertine or Kahn’s beloved concrete. This is where Lesser’s talents as one of our most original and gifted cultural critics come into play. Interspersed throughout her account of Kahn’s life and career are exhilarating “in situ” descriptions of what it feels like to move through his built structures. Drawing on extensive original research, lengthy interviews with his children, his colleagues, and his students, and travel to the far-flung sites of his career-defining buildings, Lesser has written a landmark biography of this elusive genius, revealing the mind behind some of the twentieth century’s most celebrated architecture.

This photographic tour of every one of the buildings designed solely by Louis Kahn represents the architect's greatest accomplishments. This book focuses on over twenty buildings that were designed solely by Louis Kahn. From his native city of Philadelphia to the heart of Bangladesh, Kahn's architecture reflected his fascination with science, mathematics, history, and nature. Striking new interior and exterior photographs by esteemed architectural photographer Cemal Emden reveal the characteristic features of Kahn's aesthetic: juxtaposed materials, repetition of line and shape and geometric precision. Also evident is the way Kahn's designs flourish in a variety of settings--religious, governmental, educational, and residential. The book gives close attention to Kahn's most iconic buildings, including Erdman Hall at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania; the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad; the Sher-e-Bangla Nagar in Dhaka, Bangladesh; and the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, as well as a cluster of residences he designed in the Philadelphia area. Chapter openers written by architecture professor Caroline Maniaque, an introduction by academic Jale Erzen and an extensive chronology by academic Zekiye Abali, as well as a selection of Kahn's most insightful statements complete this book, which allows for a rich understanding of Kahn's architectural ingenuity.

An astounding treasury of drawings and plans from one of the 20th century's greatest architects, offering unprecedented insight into his design process "The importance of a drawing is immense, because it's the architect's language," famed architect Louis Kahn, one of the most significant architects of the 20th century, told his masterclass in 1967. While much of his built work has been heavily studied, this publication chooses instead to focus on Kahn's prolific arsenal of drawings and plans, some of which were never realized. The Importance of a Drawingprovides an in-depth look into the subtleties of Kahn's designs, featuring incisive analysis from architectural experts and over 600 high-quality reproductions of work by Kahn and his associates. A testament to the architect's meticulous craft, this volume is an essential addition to the library of established designers as well as students of architecture. Louis Kahn(1901-74) was an Estonian-born American architect who worked in Philadelphia for the majority of his life. Inspired early in his career by European medievalism and later the ruins of much older civilizations, Kahn was notable for his ability to meld the modernist tendencies of his time with the classical poise of ancient monuments. Some of his major designs include the National Parliament House in Dhaka, Bangladesh and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. Some of Kahn's unrealized projects, such as the Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island, have since been constructed posthumously. Kahn taught at Yale School of Architecture from 1947 to 1957 and then at the University of Pennsylvania until his death.

The first in-depth biographical study of the brilliant but elusive architect who fundamentally redefined twentieth-century architecture. Now ranked with Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe, Louis I. Kahn brought a reverence for history back into modern architecture while translating it into a uniquely contemporary idiom. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews with colleagues, coworkers, clients, and family members and illustrated with many previously unpublished photographs, this book documents the uniquely American rise of a poor immigrant to the pinnacle of the international architectural world. It illuminates the richly diverse personal relationships Kahn had with such clients as Jonas Salk and Paul Mellon, and the romantic entanglements that mystified even those closest to him. While celebrating the genius of Kahnís art, the book provides an invaluable portrait of the man who created it.