The Notebooks And Drawings Of Louis I Kahn

This is a collection of drawings and statements by a master architect. They mirror the vigor and perception manifest in his buildings and personal teachings. The book is divided into two sections. The first is a group of sketches produced during his European travels, which are reproduced here actual size. The second section consists of early sketches as well as finished renderings of some of Kahn's buildings and visions. They are arranged as close to chronological order as overlapping projects allow. The text is based largely on transcriptions of unpublished speeches delivered by Kahn. He completely reworked these speeches for the book, transforming them from the spoken to the written word. There are also selections from his Voice of America broadcast, a Universal Atlas Cement folder, the Museum of Modern Art booklet on the A. N. Richards Medical Research Building at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as an introduction written for the book. There Kahn states that "The editors chose sketches of mood and development of a few projects rather than isolated drawings of a greater number of projects. Such a decision appeals to the architect who starts, like the writer and the painter, with a blank piece of paper, upon which he imprints the gradual steps in the development of something he wants to make exist." The drawings in the first section were made in Karnak, Luxor, Delphi, Athens, Albi, Florence, Pisa, and Venice. Those in the second show stages in the development of the following projects: the sculpture court of the Yale University Art Gallery; studies for the Philadelphia center city (1956 and 1962); the A. N. Richards Medical Research Building; the General Motors Exhibition Building, 1964 World's Fair, New York; the Meeting House and laboratory complex, Salk Institute of Biological Studies; and the Mikveh Israel Synagogue, Independence Mall, Philadelphia. The book, which is being republished under the imprint of The MIT Press, originally appeared in 1962.

It was not by chance that Louis Kahn's move into his profession's spotlight coincided with the crisis of modern architecture: representing, as his work increasingly did, those aspects of space which modernism had so ambitiously removed from its program. Kahn's rethinking of modern architecture's paradigm of space belongs to his most important contributions to the metier. In tracing the genesis of the unbuilt project for the Dominican Motherhouse we are given a close-up view of Kahn at work on a few fundamental questions of architectural space: seeking the sources of its meaning in its social, morphological, landscape and contextual dimensions. This rich and multivalent project opens the way to a second section, which sheds new light on several of major works in a timely reappraisal of Kahn's work. The result of extensive research, illustrated with unpublished archival material and new analytic drawings, this affordable volume is an indispensible companion to Drawing to Find Out.

This is a book for people to dip into, as they would walk in and out of the room of a dinner party and embrace their interests. Before Information Architecture, before the rules on how to organize information, before you learn grammar, before you work hard at expanding your vocabulary and go through the exercises of parallel meanings of things as using a Thesaurus and as one writes papers in class, before any learning one must understand. Understanding Understanding precedes the whole process of learning, of giving yourself permission to understand the formations of facts, data, stories, pictures, words, conversations that allow you to understand. This book could be called A Celebration of Conversation or Musings with my Mentors. It is about the fantasy of being the dumbest person in the room and being able to identify all the myriad connections of how others think, talk, explain and visualize. The following is a collection of many of the most interesting idiosyncratic paths of understanding that lead to creation.

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.