Review: Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture; Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture; and Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture

Abstract

Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam 6 September 2012–6 January 2013 Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany 23 February–11 August 2013 National Museum, Oslo, Norway 18 October 2013–26 January 2014 Since the end of the 1960s, Louis Isadore Kahn’s reputation as one of the most important architects of the twentieth century has grown. Kahn’s concrete-and-brick buildings, with their enigmatically monumental appearance, can be experienced only through costly trips to the United States, South Asia, and Israel. The Kahn retrospective (in Weil am Rhein at the time of writing and exhibited previously in Rotterdam) was only the second opportunity since an exhibition at the ETH in Zurich in 1969 for those on the European continent to take a look at his work. Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture , organized by the Vitra Design Museum, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam, showed a new generation of the European architectural community the work of the architect in an exhibition that was enormously rich in material. The concept of the exhibition was developed by the Swiss architectural theorist Stanislaus von Moos and the Vitra curator Jochen Eisenbrand. They aimed for a picture of Kahn in the context of the latest scholarly research, concentrating on Kahn’s biography and his discerning, philosophically inspired understanding of nature. The exhibition was conceptualized as a thematically structured multimedia show. Frank Gehry’s Vitra Design Museum (1989), a sculptural conglomerate of nested geometric bodies that at times tilt into one another, would seem at first fully opposed to the archaic strength of Kahn’s architectural language. Inside the exhibition rooms, the strain between Gehry’s deconstructive staging and Kahn’s almost always right-angled forms nonetheless largely resolved itself. They impinged upon each other occasionally, as when in the upper story Gehry’s asymmetrically angled skylights met the iconic monumentality of Kahn’s parliament and administrative buildings for Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Ahmedabad, India. The exhibition summarized Kahn’s work under seven main headings, the first focusing on biography, followed by …