Architect Louis Isadore Kahn (1901-1974) is celebrated today in the town where he studied and worked, Philadelphia, with the Louis I. Kahn Memorial Lecture featuring Ted Flato of Lake|Flato Architects (6:30 p.m. at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology).
Kahn first studied architecture at Philadelphia's Central High School and at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1932, Kahn and Dominique Berninger formed the Architectural Research Group, an association of progressive-minded young architects.
The association dissolved in 1933, but Kahn continued to support its ideas and its social preoccupations about "group housing", becoming actively involved in the housing reform movement and supporting communitarian ideas, sharing the belief with many thinkers and writers that there was a need for a civic architecture that could instil in people a sense of common purpose and democratic participation. During the '30s he worked as a consultant to the Philadelphia Housing Authority and, in the '40s, he focused on the design of housing developments in other parts of Pennsylvania.
Kahn founded his own studio in 1935, and also worked as design critic and professor of architecture at the Yale School of Architecture and later on at the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.
He developed his style in his fifties, also influenced by his residence at the American Academy in Rome that allowed him to travel throughout Europe and study monumentality, light, and form from ancient buildings and sites.
Inspired by ancient ruins and by Piranesi, the architect created heavy buildings characterised by a monumentally monolothic style. Up to then architecture had been about shifting aesthetics and choices, but with Kahn it turned once again into a discipline based on masses, elemental geometric solids and the weight of bricks.
Piranesi inspired him the Roman crypto-portici and the underground passages of the fortress-like National Assembly Building in Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, Dhaka, Bangladesh, characterised by what Kahn defined as "servant spaces", that is stairwells, corridors, restrooms, storage spaces or mechanical rooms and made with bricks, bare concrete and travertine marble, materials that could protect from the sun and the rain (while circulation of air was provided by huge geometric openings).
One of the most striking features remains the fact that the National Assembly was conceived as a majestic concrete mass and does not include any single columns, but hollow columns, parts of space enclosures, were adapted as structural supports.
Kahn influenced many architects from Tadao Ando to Renzo Piano and Norman Foster, leaving behind seminal works such as the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut (1951-1953), with its concrete tetrahedral ceiling that allowed him to eliminate ductwork and reduced the floor-to-floor height by channeling air through the structure itself; the Richards Medical Laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1957-1965), with their trademark severe towers that hosted stairwells and airducts and that embodied the "served Vs servant spaces" dichotomy; the laboratories of the Salk Institute, La Jolla, California, and the National Assembly in Dhaka, that he described "ruins in reverse" and that, according to the legend, were spared bombing during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, since they were taken as an ancient historic site.
Fashion-wise Kahn's monolithic masonry is evoked in the solid silhouettes created by Damir Doma in his Pre-Fall 2013 collection that features designs - including oversized coats and jackets with cocooning shapes, sleeveless dresses and sweaters with geometrical embossed motifs - characterised by the same sinister aura that at times surrounds Kahn's buildings.
Kahn is worth being rediscovered for many reasons, in particular for his obsession with solid geometric forms that is at the base of fascinating modern production processes such as 3D printing.
His teachings could also be applied to other disciplines, fashion included: if stuck for inspiration, he once told his students, ask the material you want to use for advice (see video emedded at the end of this post), a principle that should prompt us all to familiarise with and get to know our materials before deciding what to do with them.
If you're gonna miss the Philadelphia lecture, don't despair: the retrospective "Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture" is at the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, until 11th August and next year it will move to London to mark Louis Kahn's 40th death anniversary. Until then listen and enjoy the chamber opera "Architect" inspired by Louis Kahn and written by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Lewis Spratlan in collaboration with Jenny Kallick and John Downey.
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