Sierra Rasberry

Kahn-




Louis Kahn is known as one of the most influential architectural practitioner, theorist, and philosopher of the 20th century. He is highly revered by his peers, as well as by the general public for his “masterpieces” such as the Exeter Library, Dhaka Assembly Center in Bangladesh, The Salk Institute, and the Kimbell Art Museum. His style was one that did not fit a particular category, but he took the ideas and theories behind many important works and meshed them into his own unique brand.

Idea, light, geometry, materiality, and “monumentality” were his most important ideals when it came to designing. I found it interesting that instead of hard lining most of his drawings, he would take softer leads like charcoal and smear them to create deep shadows in his sketches and drawings. He was more concerned with the atmospheric qualities that light could have within the spaces he designed than the minute detail that thin lines showed.

He was trained in the Academy of Beaux Arts, and therefore was aware of the importance of the parti and centralizing idea and concept. His executed these profound ideas with organizing spaces with geometry. This can easily be seen with almost any of his major works. The plan for the Exeter Library is basically a square broken up into a smaller grid. As simple of this may sound, the spaces he created were fairly complex.

Neither a minimalist, a modernist, nor a classicist—he was in his own field, but utilized the lessons and ideals he learned from each of these things. He received a scholarship to travel to Rome for one year to study; this is where he would forever be changed. He was taken throughout the ancient ruins of Roman civilization. This is where his core belief was formed: ancient buildings have a monumental quality about them; monumentality is spirituality; this is achieved through using massive material (like stone) and designed with geometrical rigor. When he returned to his home, the modernist movement was beginning to take off. Le Corbusier, Mies Van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius had begun to make names for themselves for their new style. Kahn was very observant of what was going on in the world of architecture and began to synthesize his ideas of the Monumentality of the Roman ruins, and the ideas and constructions techniques of the new movement. Here is what Kahn says in his essay, “Monumentality”:

No architect can rebuild a cathedral of another epoch embodying the desires, the aspirations, the love and hate of the people whose heritage it became. Therefore the images we have before us of monumental structures of the past cannot live again with the same intensity and meaning. Their faithful duplication is unreconcilable. But we dare not discard the lessons these buildings teach for they have the common characteristics of greatness upon which the buildings of our future must, in one sense of another, rely.