June 29, 2013

LOUIS KAHN AT VITRA DESIGN MUSEUM


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LOUIS KAHN AT VITRA DESIGN MUSEUM
The Power of Architecture
February 23, 2013 – August 11, 2013
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LOUIS KAHN: THE POWER OF ARCHITECTURE AT
VITRA DESIGN MUSEUM
February 23, 2013 – August 11, 2013
The American architect Louis Kahn (1901-1974) is regarded as one of the great master builders of the twentieth century. With complex spatial compositions and a choreographic mastery of light, Kahn created buildings of archaic beauty and powerful universal symbolism. Among his most important works are the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California (1959-65), the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (1966-72), and the National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh (1962-83). The exhibition ‘Louis Kahn — The Power of Architecture’, presented by the Vitra Design Museum, is the first major retrospective of Kahn’s work in two decades.
The exhibition encompasses an unprecedented and diverse range of architectural models, original drawings, photographs and films. All of Kahn’s important projects are extensively documented — from his early urban planning concepts and single-family houses to monumental late works such as the Roosevelt Memorial in New York City (1973/74), posthumously completed in October 2012. The view of Kahn’s architectural oeuvre is augmented by a selection of watercolours, pastels and charcoal drawings created during his travels, which document his skill as an artist and illustrator. Highlights of the exhibition include a four-meter-high model of the spectacular City Tower designed for Philadelphia (1952-57), as well as previously unpublished film footage shot by Nathanial Kahn, the son of Louis Kahn and director of the film ‘My Architect’. Interviews with architects such as Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, Peter Zumthor and Sou Fujimoto underscore the current significance of Kahn’s work, which is being rediscovered and made accessible to a wide public audience with this exhibition.
The exhibition begins with an extensive biographical section that employs films, personal documents and drawings to introduce visitors to Kahn’s life and work. Growing up in Philadelphia as the son of Jewish immigrants from Estonia, Kahn discovered his interest in art at an early age and subsequently studied in his home city at one of the nation’s best architectural schools. During the late 1920s, the young Kahn embarked on his first Grand Tour, travelling through the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Greece. He returned to Europe in 1950 as Architect in Residence at the American Academy in Rome and also visited Egypt. While Kahn soon established a revered reputation as a lecturer and professor at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania, he did not experience his international breakthrough as an architect until he was almost 60 years old. His early work in the 1940s and ’50s was mainly devoted to residential building and urban planning, but from 1960 onward he became primarily known for his institutional structures: museums, laboratories, sacred edifices, a university and a national assembly building. First revealed publicly in the film ‘My Architect’, Kahn’s complex private life included several separate families: in addition to his early marriage with his lifelong wife Esther, he maintained long-term relationships with the architect Anne Tyng and the landscape architect Har-riet Pattison, both of whom had a significant influence on his work.
The biographical introduction to the exhibition is followed by six thematic areas that illustrate the development of Kahn’s work over time. The leitmotif of this progression is found in Kahn’s quest for origins: in architecture and art, but also in the natural sciences — and even in the observation of human behaviour and society.
The first section of the exhibition, entitled City, is closely connected with Kahn’s biography in its ex-amination of the architect’s relationship to Philadelphia, which he came to regard as his home after immigrating to the US, and which became a kind of laboratory for the development of his own urban-istic and architectural principles. In the 1940s, Kahn became a pioneering figure of the urban renewal movement in America, planning neighbourhood redevelopment projects with a high degree of social engagement and pragmatism. In the 1950s and ’60s, he publicly advocated increasingly radical and visionary proposals for the reconstruction of Philadelphia’s city centre. These ranged from ideas for a fundamentally new organisation of urban traffic, to a conception of the central district as an expansive pedestrian zone surrounded by gigantic parking towers, to plans for a projected 1976 world exhibition in Philadelphia.
The second exhibition category, Science, demonstrates how Kahn studied the structural laws inherent in nature as a means of establishing a foundation for the renewal of architecture. Commencing in the 1950s, this work was related to his teaching activities at Yale and in Philadelphia. Inspired by Anne Tyng, who worked in his office during this period, as well as the French-born engineer Robert Le Rico-lais, Kahn created a new architectural vocabulary with geometric structures that corresponded to the forms identified in microbiological research as the building blocks of life. In connection with these efforts, he maintained a close association with Richard Buckminster Fuller, who also taught at Yale. The breakthrough of Kahn’s structural thinking was marked by the completion of the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven (1951-53) and the Richards Medical Laboratories in Philadelphia (1957-65), for which Kahn developed completely novel methods of concrete construction in collaboration with the engineer August E. Komendant, a fellow immigrant from Estonia. With the daring project of a 180 meter high office tower for the city administration of Philadelphia (1952-57), Kahn’s ‘structuralist’s approach reached its zenith. Conceived as a space frame structure, the City Tower anticipated the architecture of metabolism by years, proposing forms for high-rise structures that were first proven viable half a century later. 




In the third section, Landscape, it becomes clear that nature was not only a source of inspiration for Kahn, but that it became increasingly important as a context for his buildings. This is evident in the planning of gardens as an extension of the architecture, exemplified in the Kimbell Art Museum (1966-72), a collaboration with Harriet Pattison, as well as the Adele Levy Memorial Playground in New York (1961-66, unbuilt), designed together with Isamu Noguchi as a playscape with a sculpturally shaped ground surface. Of similar importance to Kahn were the utilisation of traditional and regional building techniques and the achievement of passive climate control in buildings by taking local environmental conditions into account, such as the position of the sun and wind patterns. These concerns were dramatically heightened and stylised through a sophisticated choreography of incident daylight.
Kahn’s desire to create a stronger connection between architecture and the surrounding environment also formed the basis of his residential designs: he regarded the House as an archetype and starting point for his understanding of architecture and community. While Kahn initially explored the ideas of functionalism — as seen in the modular prefabricated Parasol House (1944, unbuilt)  his residential designs from the mid-1940s onward were increasingly inspired by regional sources, such as the buildings of early American settlers or Shaker furniture. At the same time, Kahn recognised a close correspondence between the organisation of a city and that of a house, correlating the bedroom with a city’s residential districts, the kitchen with industrial areas and the corridors with streets. Striking characteristics of Kahn’s detached houses, such as the Esherick House (1959-62), the Fisher House (1960-67) or the Korman House (1971-73), are the directional distribution of light, the rhythmic disposition of the façade and the refined combination of natural stone, wood and glass, which required extremely precise craftsmanship.
Kahn’s increasing success as an architect was accompanied by the evolution of an architecture that was closely linked to the timeless foundations of traditional building, yet radically innovative and future-oriented in terms of technology and construction. The underlying ideal of an Eternal Present resulted from Kahn’s intense engagement with architectural history and archetypical structures, some-thing that is vividly documented in his travel drawings from Italy, Greece and Egypt. Kahn’s fascination with ruins was a focal motif; free of stucco and ornamentation, architectural ruins reveal their true structure and eventually recede back into the landscape as they deteriorate. This motif is reflected in the austerity and elemental materiality of projects like the Hurva Synagogue in Jerusalem (1967-74, unbuilt). In Kahn’s designs for monuments and memorials, his interest in aspects of monumental architecture is also clearly evident; examples include the unbuilt Memorial to the Six Million Jewish Martyrs (New York, 1966-72), or the massive granite block memorial to American President Franklin D. Roosevelt (designed 1973-74) on the tip of Roosevelt Island in New York’s East River, which was posthumously completed in October 2012.
The conclusion and climax of the exhibition is represented by the section community, which demonstrates how essential the social significance of architecture was to Kahn, and how he derived new forms for public buildings from it. Kahn is probably the only architect ever to have designed a church (First Unitarian Church, Rochester NY, 1959-62) as well as several synagogues and a Muslim prayer room. They bear witness to the fact that Kahn’s spatial concepts were always physical manifestations of his social and political ideas, above and beyond their designated functions. This is especially evident in the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (1962-74), and in the National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh (1962-86), which can be viewed as the epitome of Kahn’s architectural work. Erected with the help of hundreds of local labourers under the restricted conditions of regional construction methods, these structures became architectural icons of the two young nations for which they were built within a very short period of time. Their public and semi-public spaces not only facilitate a maximum amount of interaction and communication between people, but also provide a stage for the daily lives of their visitors. Merging regional building traditions with a modern architectural idiom, these structures are quintessential examples of an architecture which transcends national and cultural boundaries, and which reinvents the qualities that give meaning to the art of building.
Taken as a whole, the seven sections of the exhibition reveal a new view of Louis Kahn’s oeuvre that defies the common classifications of modernism or postmodernism. Kahn’s uniqueness lies in his synthesis of the major conceptual traditions of modern architecture from the École des Beaux-Arts and the constructive rationalism of the nineteenth century to the Arts and Crafts movement and Bauhaus modernism - enhanced by the consideration of indigenous, non-western building traditions. Kahn gained important impulses from architectural movements such as metabolism or brutalism. He anticipated aspects of building that are highly relevant today, including a return to local resources and ‘soft’ factors such as air, light and water. He saw himself as part of a tradition that spanned thousands of years and that understood architecture not only as a means of satisfying utilitarian needs, but as an instrument of artistic speculation and a means of contemplating nature, history and human community.
Louis Kahn died on 17 March 1974 in New York’s Pennsylvania Station, on his way home to Philadelphia after a trip to India.
The exhibition is a cooperation of the Vitra Design Museum, the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and the NAI part of The New Institute, Rotterdam. Vitra Design Museum thanks global sponsor Swarovski for its generous support as part its cultural programme, which makes an important contribution to the rediscovery of a seminal architect.


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