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JSAH7302 07 ReviewKahn Exhibition PDF
JSAH7302 07 ReviewKahn Exhibition PDF
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his famous essay “Form and Design,” in a renewal of Philadelphia that were never competition design—concealed during
direct—and also affirmative—relationship realized. A concept study, applied to the Kahn’s lifetime—for a Lenin Memorial.1
to his buildings. The claim to give pre wall, showing huge, cylindrical parking Kahn reached back for the memorial, a
existing form an architectural shape, anal towers grouped around Philadelphia’s circular island penetrated by a wedge-
ogous to the Platonic concept of the Idea, Center City, an experimental film, and dia shaped bridge flanked by a pair of enor
formed the philosophical basis of Kahn’s grams of traffic flowing through colossal mous skyscrapers glazed in red, to the
postutilitarian, modern architecture. viaducts conveyed the inventive laboratory abstract codes of El Lissitzky’s revolution
In the large biographical section open atmosphere out of which Kahn’s urban ary image, Beat the Whites with the Red
ing the exhibition, a plentitude of material designs arose. Wedge (1919).
and media, including clips from Nathaniel The model of the Franklin D. Roosevelt The next section of the exhibition
Kahn’s film My Architect (2003), makes Four Freedoms Park, which opened post showed models of realized buildings under
the chapters of Kahn’s life comprehensible. humously in New York in 2012, showed the heading “Science.” Setting the tone
The chronologically organized mass of Kahn’s use of geometrical forms for the here was the 4-meter-high model of the
material—the walls of the ground-floor plan. In 2010 Michael J. Lewis conclu unrealized City Hall Tower of 1952–57
exhibition area impart almost a horror sively traced the formal language of that Kahn designed together with Ann
vacui—delivers an excellent view of Kahn’s the Roosevelt memorial back to a 1932 Tyng. The tower, with its open, spiraling
environment and his creative development.
That the artistically talented young man
supported his family for eight years while
they were living in the slums of Philadelphia
by playing piano accompaniments to silent
films, in the era of the early masterworks
of Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith, was
explained in as much detail through sketches
and documents as it was through Kahn’s
study tours of Europe and his influential
teaching at Yale and the University of
Pennsylvania.
Throughout, the exhibition presented
Kahn’s artistic oeuvre as being as signifi
cant as the architectural work and showed
Kahn’s drawings with their half-abstract
forms as a reflective medium in direct
juxtaposition with his models. Thus a
watercolor of the medieval towers of
San Gimignano is displayed alongside
the Richards Medical Research Center
(1957–65), erected about thirty years later
in Philadelphia. Kahn’s strikingly analo
gous formation of the looming tower-like
ventilation and stair shafts and of the
urbanistically articulated complex of the
laboratory buildings exemplifies his orien
tation toward historical types, unthinkable
for functional modernism (Figure 1).
After the biographical exhibition came
Kahn’s urban planning for Philadelphia,
under the heading “City.” The young
Kahn had designed radical urban plan
ning on Le Corbusier’s model in the
1930s during the Great Depression; in
1939 he even formulated a “Voisin Plan”
that envisioned the demolition of Phila Figure 1 Louis Kahn, Alfred Newton Richards Medical Research and Biology Building, Philadel-
delphia. Between 1949 and 1970, Kahn phia, 1957–65 (copyright Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania; photo by Malcolm
developed concrete plans for the urban Smith, copyright Vitra [www.vitra.com]).
exhibitions 301
space frame structure, stood for Kahn’s Florschuetz’s photographs. They show Sauter’s essay on Kahn’s philosophically
“structuralistic” approach. The City Hall with extreme clarity of detail the deliber tinged understanding of nature.
Tower can be counted as a direct predeces ate rawness of the wall surfaces of the Salk With its wealth of objects, the exhibi
sor of the Japanese Metabolist Kisho Institute and of the Parliament Building in tion offered an excellent insight into Kahn’s
Kurokawa’s Helix City Project. The influ Bangladesh. work. However, the universal concepts used
ence of Kahn on the Japanese Metabo The wealth of exhibits on the ground for the organizing themes, such as “House”
lists, which motivated the choice of Arata floor gave way in the upper story to a more and “City,” conform perhaps too easily to
Isozaki as designer of the 1991 Kahn ret generously spaced presentation. Kahn’s Kahn’s own formal claims for his projects.
rospective in Los Angeles, was mentioned institutional buildings in India and Ban This allows the coherence of Kahn’s work
in the catalogue but not illustrated in the gladesh, the project for the Monument to and ideas to seem at times overbearing.
exhibition. the Six Million Jewish Martyrs (1966–72), The same goes for the history of his recep
The spectacular geometrical structures and also his realized and projected sacred tion, which is intimated only in the very
on display from the workshop of Kahn’s buildings were exhibited under the head affirmative tone of the filmed interviews
colleague Robert Le Ricolais somewhat ings “Eternal Presence” and “Community.” with architects. A somewhat less filtered
overshadowed Kahn’s hollow columns of Here was displayed Kahn’s rediscovery picture would certainly have added a rele
the same time. Kahn developed them out within modernism of the formal vocabu vant contextual dimension to Kahn’s sig
of the Palladian separation of served and lary of antiquity—mediated through Pira nificance, strengthening it in the process.
servant spaces. Hollow columns like the nesi, whose plan of the Roman Campo
ventilation towers of the Richards Medical Marzio of 1762 hung in Kahn’s office. The franziska wilcken
Center bundled the services together and concentrically laid-out plan of the govern Technische Universität Kaiserslautern
kept them away from the served spaces. mental complex in Dhaka (1962–83) and
That Kahn’s buildings were also con the business school campus in Ahmedabad Related Publication
troversial was not discussed in the exhibi (1962–74), with their exterior walls perfo Mateo Kries, Jochen Eisenbrand, and
tion. The Richards Medical Center was rated by geometrical circles and triangles, Stanislaus von Moos, eds., Louis Kahn:
sharply attacked by Nikolaus Pevsner in represent Kahn’s ideal architecture for The Power of Architecture (Karlsruhe: Vitra
his European Architecture. Pevsner suspected democratic institutions. In his key text Design Museum, 2012), 354 pp., ca. 250
that Kahn had orchestrated the “hard and “Monumentality” (1944), Kahn positioned color and 250 b/w illus. €79.90, ISBN
closely packed towers … as a welcome democratic institutions as the highest- 9783931936921
vision” without functional legitimacy. 2 ranking building type.3 Nathaniel Kahn’s
Pevsner’s criticism also explains the out documentary film about Dhaka, made
sider position that Kahn held in relation to especially for the exhibition, was also on
Notes
the mainstream of classical modernism as view. The noisy daily life that unfolds in
1. Michael J. Lewis, “Louis I. Kahn and His
represented by Pevsner. the parliament building is evident in the
Lenin Memorial,” JSAH 69, no. 1 (2010), 7–11.
Kahn’s domestic and landscape com film, and it appears as if Kahn’s ideal of a
2. Only in the German edition; Nikolaus
missions were grouped under the head peaceful, democratic utopia has been real Pevsner, Europäische Architektur von den Anfängen
ings “House” and “Landscape” in the last ized in the present. bis zur Gegenwart (1957; Munich: Prestel, 1994),
exhibition room on the ground floor. The Along with a list of works, the opulent 399–400.
material quality of these buildings, so dif catalogue collects essays by such renowned 3. Louis I. Kahn, “Monumentality,” in Louis
ficult to address in an exhibition, is impres Kahn scholars as Kenneth Frampton and Kahn: Essential Texts, ed. Robert Twombly
sively visible in the catalogue in Thomas examples of new research, such as Florian (New York: Norton, 2003), 26–27.
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