Louis Kahn: on the Thoughtful Making of Spaces

- Blurb -

It was not by chance that Louis Kahn' s move into his profession' s spotlight coincided with the crisis of modern architecture: representing, as his work increasingly did, those aspects of space which modernism had so ambitiously removed from its program. Kahn' s rethinking of modern architecture' s paradigm of space belongs to his most important contributions to the metier. In tracing the genesis of the unbuilt project for the Dominican Motherhouse (1965 69), we are given a close-up view of Kahn at work on a few fundamental questions of architectural space: seeking the sources of its meaning in its social, morphological, landscape and contextual dimensions. This rich and multivalent project opens the way to a second section, which sheds new light on several of major works in a timely reappraisal of Kahn' s work. The result of extensive research, illustrated with unpublished archival material and new analytic drawings, this affordable volume is an indispensible companion to Louis Kahn: Drawing to Find Out. AUTHOR: Michael Merrill, Dr. -Ing. , is a practicing architect in the USA and Germany and assistant professor for Architectural Design at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. ILLUSTRATIONS 200