Louis I. Kahn: Beyond Time and Style: A Life in Architecture

Since his death in 1974, Louis Kahn's professional reputation has grown to mythic status. Carter Wiseman's hybrid biography uses the life as a framework to analyze the architecture. He turns out to be better at explaining the buildings than the motives of the man who created them.Raised by poor immigrant parents in Philadelphia, Kahn showed an early talent for drawing and music. He attended the University of Pennsylvania on scholarship, and later taught at Penn and Yale. A late bloomer, he didn't achieve significant professional success until he was in his fifties. Once he hit his stride, though, he designed a dazzling series of buildings that continue to generate emotional responses from the public and accolades from other architects. In this county we have (among others) the Salk Institute in San Diego, the library at Phillips Exeter Academy and art museums in New Haven and Fort Worth. Two of Kahn's most brilliant projects are located on the Indian subcontinent: a management institute in Ahmadabad and the Parliamentary Assembly in Bangladesh.Kahn was a complicated, charismatic man with a convoluted personal life. Loyally but unhappily married, he fathered two children out of wedlock by two women who worked in his office. He acknowledged these children, visited them occasionally, but didn't support them financially or emotionally. While he was capable of warm personal and professional relationships, his emotional empathy tended to be situational, which left those who basked in his attention feeling confused or bereft when it was withdrawn. Wiseman doesn't seem that interested in Kahn's personal complexities. You'll get a more in-depth exploration of those from My Architect, the moving documentary by Kahn's son Nathaniel.In the final analysis, Kahn's true love was his work. Wiseman lays out the major buildings in chronological order, with helpful photographs and detailed descriptions of their technical and project management challenges. He shows how Kahn fused the Beaux Arts style he was trained in, the modernism that flowered around him, the classical forms of antiquity and the spatial relationships of medieval cities to create buildings that seem both timeless and utterly new. We learn how the architect made innovative use of indirect natural light and combined concrete, wood and brick in ways that imbue magisterial spaces with warmth and human scale. Unlike some of his more theatrical peers, Kahn was able to remove himself from his creations so their spiritual purpose could shine through.Kahn was far more concerned with "getting it right" in the most profound sense than in completing a building on time or within budget. Despite the acclaim and substantial commissions he received, his firm was almost bankrupt when he died. As with any great artist, the source of Kahn's power resides in a place not readily accessible to us. If Wiseman's book doesn't completely decode the man or the magic of his art, it puts you in position to appreciate what Kahn accomplished. After reading the book, visit the buildings if you can, and feel them wash over and exalt you in the same wordless, swelling way a beautifully executed symphony will.

This is a wonderful book of one of America's finest architects. His life and works all together. Powerful images of Kahn masterpiece's. The text is quite scholarly and informative. Highly recommended.

Everyone knows that books can be turned into movies. Less frequently are buildings turned into movies, but that was part of the appeal of the unique 2003 documentary _My Architect_ by Nathaniel Kahn, about his architect father Louis I. Kahn, whom the son did not know well except through his buildings. The film was an introduction for many people to Kahn's architectural work, but other architects had held Kahn in high esteem. The film showed why, and now Carter Wiseman, an architecture critic and teacher, has written an accessible and handsome biography, _Louis I. Kahn: Beyond Time and Style: A Life in Architecture_ (Norton). The documentary excited the curiosity of many who will now want to look at Kahn's life and works in more detail, and while Wiseman's book does not have the personal quest of the film, it does an exceptional job of explaining the life of an enigmatic figure whose importance in architecture is, over thirty years after his death, increasingly well appreciated. Many rank Kahn as second in importance to twentieth century architecture only to Frank Lloyd Wright himself.Kahn came with his family from 1901 in Russian-controlled Estonia, moving to Philadelphia in 1906 when he was five. He quickly showed skill in drawing, and got into a public art school for talented youths, then to the University of Pennsylvania to study architecture. In 1930 he married Esther Israeli, a scholar pursuing her masters in psychology. They would remain supportively married for 44 years until his death, but he had many affairs and children by two other women by whom he had children (one of whom was the documentary filmmaker Nathaniel) and with whom he maintained a type of family life. The problem in his relationships was not that he was promiscuous, but that his devotions were simply not marital; his widow said that "his first love was architecture and everything else came second." Like so many other artists with peculiar private lives, however, he is best judged simply on his art. That art is surprising and humane. Wiseman's book has scores of photographs of Kahn's most important works. The Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, has a gorgeous courtyard encompassing a view of the Pacific, flanked by study towers for the researchers, each of which has a view of the ocean. The Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, is an astonishing huge crystal of cubes and cylinders that emerges from a moat, with an interior of Piranesi-style complexity that obliges members of parliament to interact with staffs and public. The Phillips Exeter Academy Library is ostensibly a solid masonry cube on the outside, but with huge circular concrete facades inside, a celebration of circular and cubic geometry that allows a public space with vantages for anyone to see what others are doing in the building.What is wonderful about one building after another is that the brutalism associated with massive poured concrete is lightened and humanized; these are sensitive, even poetic, works, with none of the oppressiveness of modernism. Wiseman quotes David Rinehart, Kahn's friend and fellow architect: "For Lou, every building was a temple. Salk was a temple for science. Dhaka was a temple for government. Exeter was a temple for learning." Kahn may have been Jewish, but he was never observant of religious custom. His buildings, however, show an intense spirituality; viewing even pictures of them, it is easy to understand how people entering them have feelings of awe as if they are entering cathedrals. Wiseman's portrait of the man and the buildings is a welcome tribute to a twentieth century master.

Yes, it's a great book, entertaining, insightful and easy to read. Covers Kahn's life, personal disasters, client relationships, etc. and also covers a lot of ground describing his design philosophy and the major ideas behind his buildings. What you won't find, however, are drawings, plans, elevations, or comprehensive photos of the projects. As in most books, Kahn proves such a fascinating character that the exploration of the man outweighs the analysis of the work. This book is more balanced than most, but still more of a biography than a serious look at the buildings that made him famous.