Louis I. Kahn was one of the most influential architects, thinkers and teachers of his time. This book examines the important relationship between his work and the city of Rome, whose ancient ruins inspired in him a new design methodology. Structured into two main parts, the first includes personal essays and contributions from the architect’s children, writers and other designers on the experience and impact of his work. The second part takes a detailed look at Kahn’s residency in Rome, its effects on his thinking, and how his influence spread throughout Italy. It analyses themes directly linked to his architecture, through interviews with teachers and designers such as Franco Purini, Paolo Portoghesi, Giorgio Ciucci, Lucio Valerio Barbera and the architects of the Rome Group of Architects and City Planners (GRAU). Rome and the Legacy of Louis I. Kahn expands the current discourse on this celebrated twentieth-century architect, ideal for students and researchers interested in Kahn’s work, architectural history, theory and criticism.

This book examines the idea of organism in the work of Louis I. Kahn, from the turning point of Rome to the project for Venice. It presents an original interpretation of the work of Kahn during one of the most fruitful periods of his career, when he was working on a particular design method based on an entirely novel way of interacting with the past. Beginning with a meticulous documentation and analysis of Kahn’s experiences in the twenty years from 1930 to 1950, the book sheds new light on the relationship between Kahn’s work and the modern movement. The arguments are supported by case studies, including that of the Palazzo dei Congressi in Venice based on Kahn’s words (like his lessons in Venice at IUA, International University of Art, in 1971) and others as the Trenton Bath House, the Salk Institute (La Jolla), the Kimbell Museum (Fort Worth), the Yale Gallery and the Mellon Center for British Art (New Haven) and more. Unlike much of the by now well-established literature on Kahn’s work, Louis I. Kahn in Rome and Venice suggests that the basic premise of Kahn’s invention is the idea of spatial, constructive organism, which explains how he created forms that were inextricably anchored in the past, without imitating any one kind of ancient architecture. The main objective of the book is to explain Kahn’s methodology to architects and students, showing how he was able to design an architectural object with the characteristics of the best designed objects: organisms, in which each part contributes, with the whole, to creating "something made of indivisible parts".

There is ample evidence as to how the modern masters, in their shared pursuit of formal inventions and constructional inventions, variously referred to past examples they had freely chosen as guides that could inspire and support them in their strenuous pursuit of new things. The buildings shaped like soft clouds and gelatinous bowels, or the spiked bravura pieces designed by today's fashionable architects have no relation with either construction or history. Louis Kahn, instead, kept form, structure and history paradigmatically together. The book systematically reviews the intense structural experimentation that, in terms not just of building engineering but of spatial and representational potential, marked Kahn's work since the beginning and would eventually lead him, after a long apprenticeship, to an almost constant adoption of 'hollow' structural forms. By reviewing this long and intense journey of research, the book underlines how Louis Kahn, in each work and based on a constant dialogue between structural innovation, building tradition and figural evocation, succeeded in awakening our interest in a new 'fascinating' structure and at the same time our emotion for a deeply meaningful, universal and timeless form.

This book presents the proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Graphic Design in Architecture, EGA 2020, focusing on heritage – including architectural and graphic heritage as well as the graphics of heritage. Consisting of two parts: “Representation and Analysis” and “Concept and Creation”, this second volume gathers selected contributions on topics ranging from graphic representation to the graphic presentation of ideas, i.e. artistic creation, to bridge the gap between graphic heritage and the graphics of heritage. Given its scope, this volume will appeal to architectural and graphic designers, artists and engineers, providing them with extensive information on new methods and a source of inspiration for future research and interdisciplinary collaborations.

First ed. published as: Louis I. Kahn: talks with students. 1969.

The American architect Louis Kahn (1901 - 1974) is regarded as one of the great master builders of the twentieth century. With complex spatial compositions, an elemental formal vocabulary and a choreographic mastery of light, Kahn created buildings of archaic beauty. As the first comprehensive publication on this architect in 20 years, the book �Louis Kahn - The Power of Architecture� presents all of his important projects. It includes essays by prominent Kahn experts and an expansive illustrated biography with many new facts and insights about Kahn's life and work. In a number of interviews, leading architects such as Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, Peter Zumthor and Sou Fujimoto underline Kahn's significance in today's architectural discourse. An extensive catalogue of works features original drawings and architectural models from the Kahn archive. The compendium is further augmented by a portfolio of Kahn's travel drawings as well as photographs by Thomas Florschuetz, which offer completely new views of the Salk Institute and the Indian Institute of Management.

"When Jonas Salk founded his eponymous research center for biological studies in 1960, he envisioned a humanist, nearly monastic community of scientists devoted to the prevention and cure of disease. In architect Louis I. Kahn, Salk found a kindred spirit, and together the two created one of the great masterpieces of modern architecture - in Salk's words, "a work of art to serve the work of science."" "Charged by Salk to "invite Picasso to the laboratory," Kahn responded with a series of austere, spiritual spaces for the complex, which was set on a coastal site in the San Diego, California suburb of La Jolla. Kahn's design integrated commodious laboratory and study spaces while offering lush gardens for reflection and the now-famous courtyard with its transcendent perspective of the Pacific Ocean. Interlocking volumes unfold time and space throughout Kahn's bravura orchestration of concrete construction." "In this volume, acclaimed architectural photographer Ezra Stoller, whose images of the Salk Institute have become iconic themselves, captures the timeless grandeur of this unique monument to scientific understanding and artistic achievement."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This book presents an architectural overview of Dublin’s mass-housing building boom from the 1930s to the 1970s. During this period, Dublin Corporation built tens of thousands of two-storey houses, developing whole communities from virgin sites and green fields at the city’s edge, while tentatively building four-storey flat blocks in the city centre. Author Ellen Rowley examines how and why this endeavour occurred. Asking questions around architectural and urban obsolescence, she draws on national political and social histories, as well as looking at international architectural histories and the influence of post-war reconstruction programmes in Britain or the symbolisation of the modern dwelling within the formation of the modern nation. Critically, the book tackles this housing history as an architectural and design narrative. It explores the role of the architectural community in this frenzied provision of housing for the populace. Richly illustrated with architectural drawings and photographs from contemporary journals and the private archives of Dublin-based architectural practices, this book will appeal to academics and researchers interested in the conditions surrounding Dublin’s housing history.

Louis I. Kahn is widely known as an architect of powerful buildings. But although much has been said about his buildings, almost nothing has been written about Kahn as an unconventional teacher and philosopher whose influence on his students was far-reaching. Teaching was vitally important for Kahn, and through his Master’s Class at the University of Pennsylvania, he exerted a significant effect on the future course of architectural practice and education. This book is a critical, in-depth study of Kahn’s philosophy of education and his unique pedagogy. It is the first extensive and comprehensive investigation of the Kahn Master’s Class as seen through the eyes of his graduate students at Penn.

An examination of the influential Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri's historical construction of contemporary architecture. The influential Italian architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri (1935–1994) invoked the productive possibilities of crisis, writing that history is a "project of crisis" (progetto di crisi). In this entry in the Writing Architecture series, Marco Biraghi explores Tafuri's multifaceted and often knotty oeuvre, using the historian's concept of a project of crisis as a lens through which to examine his historical construction of contemporary architecture. Mindful of Tafuri's statement that there is no such thing as criticism, only history, Biraghi carefully maps the influences on Tafuri's writing—Walter Benjamin, Karl Krauss, Massimo Cacciari, and the architect Ludovico Quaroni, among others—in order to create a portrait of one of the most complex minds in twentieth-century architecture and architectural history. Tracing an arc from Tafuri's first articles in the magazine Contropiano to the idea of contradiction at the center of the project of crisis, Biraghi cites Tafuri's writing on some of his contemporaries, including Louis Kahn, Le Corbusier, Robert Venturi, Aldo Rossi, and the "Five Architects" (Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk, and Richard Meier). Tafuri's historical construction of the contemporary, Biraghi explains, is based on the idea that the past is open, providing the present with ever-changing and indeterminate form. There is no contradiction between Tafuri the historian and Tafuri the contemporary critic, only the greatest possible integration. The importance of Tafuri's interpretation of architecture goes beyond mere academic or historiographic interest, Biraghi argues; Tafuri's notion of the project of crisis is fundamentally important in understanding our present-day architectural condition