Notes on the architecture of Louis I. Kahn

The idea of collecting several papers dedicated to specific aspects of the architecture of Louis Kahn occurred to me some years ago during the academic year 2011-12 in connection with the exercises on my Urban and Architectural Composition course dedicated to the Twentieth century master*. At that time I and other members of the teaching group had a few doubts about the subject. Limiting ourselves only to the one-family dwellings Kahn actually built, we asked the students to develop a small independent supporting building located nearby. However, the exercises convinced us to deepen the projects on the master together with the pupils since some of our reflections would be useful to future students. As mentioned above, the papers deal with specific aspects of Kahn’s architecture. Firstly, I looked at the materials and construction elements that both Kahn and the neo-brutalist movement used in the 1950s and that superseded the theoretical positions of the Modern Movement. Together with the Smithsons’ projects, the frank exposure of the material and the undiluted exhibition of the construction process in Kahn’s architecture still influence a lot of creations in architecture today, above all in Switzerland and England. The papers contributed by Adriano Rabacchin are dedicated to the one-family dwelling, a project theme that Kahn practiced continuously but about which relatively little is known in both the master’s introductory studies and examples he developed. So Rabacchin analyses the Ehle house. Alessandro Dalla Caneva’s contribution is a theoretical consideration of the subject of building composition in the Latvian master’s projects. On the one hand, the project experience concerns understanding the importance of representation in the form and on the other hand understanding the methods through which the idea can be recognised in the form of the construction. Jia Lu is a Chinese architect who trained at the University of Harbin. In his chapters in this book he looks at the way Kahn used light by examining extraordinary examples in the Fisher house and the Korman house. Lastly, given the complexity of thought and complexity of the projects by the man who for many is the most important architect of the last century, and while this book is a fragmented study, the report it presents concludes that he was the most appropriate architect for fulfilling projects with a multiplicity of characteristic features that cannot be reduced to a single unit.