Volume 40, Number 4 · February 11, 1993
He's the Top
By Martin Filler
The Paintings and Sketches of Louis I. Kahn
by Jan Hochstim, Introduction by Vincent Scully
Rizzoli, 340 pp., $85.00
Louis I. Kahn: Writings, Lectures, Interviews
edited and with an introduction by Alessandra Latour
Rizzoli, 352 pp., $35.00 (paper)
Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture 1991–January 5, 1992), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (March 5–May 4, 1992), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (June 14–August 18, 1992), the Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, Japan (September 26–November 3, 1992), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (March 7–May 30, 1993), Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth (July 3–October 10, 1993), Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus (November 17, 1993–February 1, 1994)
an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (October 20,
Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture
catalog of the exhibition by David B. Brownlee, by David G. De Long
Rizzoli, 448 pp., $40.00 (paper)
The Art Museums of Louis I. Kahn University Museum of Art by
catalog of an exhibition at the Duke Patricia Cummings Loud, foreword by Michael P. Mezzatesta
Duke University Press/Duke University Museum of Art, 303 pp., $30.00 (paper)
The great misfortune of Louis Kahn's long-thwarted but ultimately triumphant career was in his being born in 1901, a poor year for modern architects. Too young during the first flood of modernism after World War I, Kahn was out of phase with cycles of economics and politics that largely determine when, what, how, and how much an architect builds. This leviathan was often marooned by circumstances that destroyed lesser figures, as poverty in the 1930s and war in the 1940s took their toll on his contemporaries. Thus one of the wonders of Louis Kahn's professional life is that this most slowly developing of modern masters was able to persevere against immense odds and to be considered—after a mature phase of just twenty years, from the early Fifties to the early Seventies—by most historians as the leading mid-century American architect.
Review, 4840 words
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