When Louis I. Kahn died, at age seventy-three, of a heart attack in the men’s bathroom of Pennsylvania Station in New York City, he was nearly half a million dollars in debt and had neither a will nor any expressed provisions for the distribution of his estate. The contents of Kahn’s office—the family’s principal asset—were legally frozen and eventually sold in their entirety to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, becoming the Louis I. Kahn Collection at the University of Pennsylvania’s Architectural Archives. To make a long story short, these unfortunate and characteristically messy personal circumstances resulted in an archive that offers nearly completely unculled documentation of Kahn’s artistic process and work: drawings and sketches; photographs and slides; sketch, study, and presentation models; professional correspondence; journals; lecture transcripts; and whatever personal correspondence and notes happened to be in the office on the day that his family learned of his passing.For any scholar with the patience and dedication to sift through it all, the archive thus offers an unusually deep and detailed picture of Kahn’s artistic process, and, fortunately for the architecture world, we have that scholar in Michael Merrill, the author of two previous books on Kahn and director of research at the Institute for Building Typology at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Merrill’s recent edited volume Louis Kahn: The Importance of Drawing focuses on drawing as Kahn’s primary mode of exploring, designing, playing, analyzing, creatively expressing, teaching, communicating, and presenting to clients. What a treasure trove Kahn produced, more than six thousand drawings and sketches waiting in the archive for someone with Merrill’s bent and skill to come along. The book contains essays by seasoned Kahn specialists such as Michael J. Lewis (who offers a superb essay on Kahn’s debt to the Beaux-Arts tradition), David Van Zanten, Michael Benedikt, and Robert McCarter. It also features musings by Kahn’s friends and associates, including his longtime right-hand employee Marshall Meyers, and members of Kahn’s family, including two of his children, Nathaniel and Sue Ann Kahn, as well as Harriet Pattison, Nathaniel’s mother and a landscape architect who worked with Kahn on the Kimbell Art Museum.But the essence and the great contribution of the book lies in Merrill’s own writing, which constitutes the bulk of the text. In addition to chapters examining the design process for critical unbuilt projects such as the Dominican Mothers House and the Meeting House at the Salk Institute, Merrill offers an exemplary sequence of chapters devoted to Kahn’s use of architecture’s fundamental drawing modalities—plan, section, elevation, perspective, and axonometric. These present architectural history and analysis at its finest.Drawing by hand, of course, is less and less common in contemporary architectural practice, having been largely supplanted by the panoply of digital tools that make putting hand to pencil to paper a seemingly quaint if not wholly anachronistic practice. Merrill’s quiet but insistent mission goes well beyond illuminating Kahn’s artistic process—which he does in many cases brilliantly—to advance a more general set of reasons why drawing by hand still matters. Merrill’s argument, at once correct and profound, is one every architect and architectural historian needs to hear.Merrill argues—so gently that a reader might not even recognize it for the polemic that it is—that, contra digital drawing, designing buildings with one’s actual hand, connected to one’s actual body, patiently layering the varied canonical forms of architectural representation into a holistic vision, one stands a better chance of creating buildings and spaces that both manifest and further the fundamental principles of humanism and humanistic (lowercase h) experience. Maintaining that “the four-square conventions of orthographic drawing are grounded in the natural geometry of the human body in relationship to earth, cosmos, and others” (112), Merrill asks, rhetorically, “What are the spatial consequences when volume- or image-generating software replaces orthographic representation? And what happens when a strongly embodied practice is replaced by a largely visual one?” (495). Digital tools, for all their indispensable ease of use, for all their convenience, remain ocular-centric in their representational capacities. They fail to capture the fundamentally corporeal, enactive, and multisensory dimensions of architectural experience.Even though Merrill does not articulate it this way, what he prizes out of his painstakingly fine-grained project and thematic analysis is Kahn’s profound appreciation for, and intuitive understanding of, the principles of embodied cognition. The study of embodied cognition is acquiring increasing intellectual currency as research in the sciences (specifically, cognitive neuroscience and scientific psychology) deepens our knowledge of human perceptual and lived environmental experience, thereby substantiating with quantitative evidence what previous generations knew as a primarily philosophical set of musings called phenomenology. Essentially, embodied cognition (also variously called “situated” or “4E” cognition, with the Es standing for embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended) emphasizes how human thinking and perceptual experiences are structured and invariably filtered through the mind’s inhabitation of the human body and the mind-body’s inhabitation of the incarnate, corporeal world.Like any architect, Kahn deployed drawing in plan to work out functional adjacencies, but he also used it to “mediate between geometry of body and geometry of world” (112). Merrill’s superb analysis of the Meeting House for the Salk Institute, Kahn’s greatest unbuilt project, shows Kahn working through planning ideas to manipulate visual and processional axes that conceal, then slowly (or elsewhere, suddenly) reveal monumental views of the Pacific, and orchestrating sequences of voids and spatial containment by composing episodes of compression, partial containment, containment, release, and so on. “Guests are led by seduction rather than coercion, choosing between routes as rooms and passages emerge over diagonal views and as spaces expand and contract both vertically and horizontally” (135). Merrill offers a similarly nuanced analysis of Kahn’s little residential gem, the Fisher House, demonstrating how an ostensibly formalist conceit relying on a simple geometric trope—two cubic prisms, one abutting and canted off axis from the other—is in reality an intensely site-specific composition organized to offer constructed views outdoors and to admit natural light indoors all day long without creating glare. In the Fisher House as in all of Kahn’s work, Merrill points out, “light must always navigate a threshold” before entering the space (163).Merrill’s argument comes to a climax in his chapter on Kahn’s deployment of the section. Kahn’s sections nearly always contain scale figures, substantiating Merrill’s contention regarding Kahn’s attentiveness to—or obsession with—body–scale relationships in his work. Sections (as well as axonometrics) also helped Kahn to think through how phenomenological experience relates to the actual construction of the building-as-object, thereby enabling him to ensure that his design would address “our embodied sense of gravity” (157). If there is one to-die-for drawing in Merrill’s beautifully produced, heavily illustrated book (with color reproductions so fine-grained that you feel as though you could peel the yellowing tracing paper off the page), it is Kahn’s section-perspective for the unbuilt Mikveh Israel Synagogue. Here Kahn works out the building’s construction, body–interior scale relationships, and visual axes—a masterful visualization of embodied architectural experience crystallized in one single hand-drawn image (Figure 1).Phenomenology is often (unjustly) criticized as overly focused on individual experience at the expense of the social dimensions of human interaction, but for Kahn’s situated vision the way that buildings constitute social worlds was foundational. Merrill correctly adduces that Kahn’s well-known theory of institutions rests on the recognition that architecture is nothing less than an instrument for shaping human behavior and relations. Kahn often spoke derisively of functionalism, maintaining that the architect’s task is less to accommodate the specificities of a client’s programmatic demands and more to excavate and give form to the essence of a particular genre of human social interaction. This is why Kahn insisted on mining not the character of, for example, a specific library (high school kids at Phillips Exeter) or governmental complex (Bengalis in postcolonial Dhaka), but rather the idealized, essential nature of the social activities that a building housed: reading and learning, or democratic participation. High schools and governments rise and fall, come and go, but they manifest and embody ways of human interacting, social imperatives, that (we hope) will always exist. Hence Kahn’s focus on typology rather than function: he was a man obsessed with permanence (98) or, as he wrote in a letter to Harriet Pattison, lasting values. “I wanted to prove,” Kahn once wrote about drawing trees as a child, “that I was made of that which is constant” (50).It has always been somewhat of a mystery to admirers of Kahn’s architecture, so overflowing with the pathos of humanity, so full of vitality and compassion, that Kahn, the man, could have treated the women and children in his own life with such callous disregard, even cruelty. In addition to who knows how many fly-by-night operations, Kahn sustained one longtime marriage concurrent with two successive decade-long romantic partnerships. Each of the three relationships produced a child, and for his two out-of-wedlock children Kahn took virtually no financial or caretaking responsibility. Now Harriet Pattison, a landscape architect and Kahn’s sunset consort, offers Our Days Are Like Full Years, a straightforward chronological account of their relationship documented with Kahn’s numerous, previously unpublished letters to her. Scholars have often concluded that Kahn’s sensitivity to landscape in his later work reflected Pattison’s influence (she was twenty-seven years his junior), but if this was the case, her book provides little evidence to support the claim. This presents a significant contrast to Anne Griswold Tyng’s monumental influence on Kahn: it was Tyng who turned Kahn toward the geometries that he explored for the rest of his career. Merrill’s book intimates that Kahn’s attentiveness to landscape was activated by the challenge of working with the spectacular site for the Salk Institute in La Jolla, a commission Kahn landed in 1959. While he and Pattison began their relationship that same year, Pattison herself dates her interest in landscape to 1963, four years later.Kahn and Pattison were together infrequently. For years Pattison lived in Maine or Vermont, raising their son, Nathaniel, while Kahn cohabited with his wife, Esther, in Philadelphia, traveling from there to lecture and work in California, Angola, Russia, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Israel. Pattison’s frank and mostly clear-sighted account of their relationship, interspersed with Kahn’s observations, quips, searchings, ideas, and frustrations about various aspects of his projects, makes for charming reading: as always, Kahn’s voice is full of urgent passion. Moreover, exhibiting a strength that not all architects possess, he wrote well, even lyrically. From one loving letter of his comes the title of Pattison’s book: “Our days are like full years.”Even in light of Pattison’s account, Kahn remains, ethically, as opaque as ever. Most striking about the book is the disconnect between how little time Kahn spent in Pattison’s actual presence and how over-the-top are his many testaments to their undying and towering love for one another. Perhaps that is the sad reality that constitutes the through line between Kahn’s chaotic personal life and his humanistic aspirations for his monumental architecture: idealization über alles. Idealization of what an institution (parliament, library, house of worship) should be; idealization of what a loving relationship should be. The nettlesome realities of everyday life—paying the bills, treating one’s spouse decently, meeting the day-to-day obligations of rearing a growing child—all of these always landed outside the carefully maintained hedgerows of Kahn’s internal world. His gaze was doggedly trained on permanence, on only the very best of human communal aspirations, emotions, and experience. “Nobody was cynical,” commented David Slovic, one of Kahn’s employees, in describing the Kahn office culture (quoted in Merrill, 304). That single sentence encapsulates both the best of Kahn—suggesting why architects continue, and should continue, to study and even revere his work—and perhaps also the worst of him, revealing why, when it comes to Kahn’s personal life, perhaps we should just continue to plug our ears and look the other way. In Kahn’s work, the architecture is what matters. That is how Kahn saw it, and what he wanted, he got: a lasting body of extraordinary work from which generations of architects will continue to draw lessons and inspiration.