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The architect Louis I. Kahn (1901-74) was a classic late bloomer. He was nearly sixty when Richards Medical Laboratory, his first project to be internationally celebrated, was built at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. At an age hen many artists are wrapping up their careers, Kahn was just beginning his. Over the next fifteen years he produced a solid body of work that met with almost uniform critical acclaim, something true of none of his contemporaries. Of these buildings the best known are the Jonas Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, the library at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, and the new capital for Bangladesh in Dhaka. When he died in 1974 he was at the peak of his influence, a kind of architectural oracle in Philadelphia, where he had moved as a child from his native Estonia and where his career had always centered.
That career is now the subject of a vast exhibition, "Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture," which will open in June at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, after showings in Paris and Philadelphia. Long overdue, the exhibit is the first major retrospective of Kahn's work and the first study of this architect that is historical and critical, and not merely hagiographical. It has been intelligently and gracefully assembled, and is distinguished by its liberal use of models and photographs, Kahn's work being especially photogenic. Accompanying the exhibition is a comprehensive catalogue containing a meticulous and impeccably researched essay by David B. Brownlee and David DeLong.* Here Kahn's biography and works are discussed, and here his mythic position in America's postwar architecture is assessed.
As myths go, it is a good one, with broad themes and boldly drawn battle lines, and as with all good myths there is much truth to it. According to the story, modern architecture in the late 1950's had become stagnant, either reduced to tired modernist formulas or else degenerating into idiosyncratic personal experiments, like Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum or Eero Saarinen's TWA terminal at Kennedy airport. Onto this stage strode Kahn, who returned modern architecture to a state of vitality. This he did by elemental and powerful means--by using solid and substantial materials, by bathing these materials in...