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Louis Kahn: The 'Sensuous Search'
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19950 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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8 / 1992 |
1,989 Words |
| Author
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Judith Bell
Judith Bell is an art historian and novelist based in
Arlington, Virginia. |
All material in nature, the mountains and the streams and the air and we, are made of light which has been spent, and this crumpled mass called material casts a shadow, and the shadow belongs to light.
--Louis Kahn
Had Louis Kahn not been an architect, he would surely have been a poet. He saw the manipulation of space as a philosophic exercise. For him, architecture, that most pragmatic of art forms, was a spiritual path, one that afforded him connections to humanity's distant past, to the buildings of ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt; one that made him constantly question the basic truths of architecture--what is a window, a door, a street? "What does the building want to be?" he asked. It was a question that at once gave his structure dignity and animation, that reflected the architect's respect for materials and function. Values of the heart and mind concerned him as much as architectural aesthetics. His was, Vincent Scully has said, "a sensuous searching excellence."
Kahn embarked on the quest for these truths in earnest in his fifties. Finding that the Modernism he had practiced since the thirties lacked an undefinable sense of order he felt was imperative, he began a reexamination of Modernist theory that would revitalize the International Style. In the quest "to find his way back to history" as Scully has said, Kahn discovered a sense of completion that informs each of his late buildings. They stand alone, independent monuments to Kahn's unflagging courage to reinvent, to go beyond the successes of what had come before.
Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture, the retrospective organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and made possible by ford Motor Company, confirms that Kahn's late buildings are not only his finest, they are also some of our nation's very best.
Louis Isadore Kahn was born in 1901 on the Baltic island of Saarama, Estonia. His family emigrated in 1905 to Philadelphia, where they settled in a poor immigrant district. His father, a designer and glass painter, found little skilled work. After a back injury caused him to stop working as a laborer, they were supported principally by his mother's piecework.
Soon after the family's move to Pennsylvania, Kahn contracted scarlet fever, an illness that subsequently raised the pitch of his voice and delayed his
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