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Product Description
Like few others, Louis Kahn cultivated the craft of drawing as a means to architecture. His personal design drawings - seen either as a method of discovery or for themselves - are unique in the twentieth century. Over two hundred - mostly unpublished - drawings by Kahn and his associates are woven together with a lively and informed commentary into an intimate biography of an architectural idea. Unfolding around the iconic project for the Dominican Motherhouse (1965 - 69) the drawings form a narrative which not only reveals the richness and hidden dimensions of this unbuilt masterpiece, but provides compelling insights into Louis Kahn's mature culture of designing. Kahn - long considered an 'architects' architect' - emerges as a vivid and instructive guide, provoking reflection on questions which continue to remain relevant: on how works are conceived, on how they might be perceived, on how they become part of human experience. Fascinating not only in their beauty, the drawings open a new and stimulating perspective on one of the past century's great architects.
About the 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.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
The vigor of drawing
9 July 2011
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Mr. Merrill's research has been thorough and his historical review of this unbuilt project is written in clear language without pretension. That is unusual in architectural writing. His selection of drawings is excellent and he makes a fairly clear sequence out of a very complex process, i.e. Louis Kahn's design explorations which were always reflective and often closely personal.
As one who has witnessed Kahn's sketch-quests close up I find this particular series very stimulating because they reveal the driving vigor behind Kahn's restless curiosity to explore. Drawing for him was a vehicle which shaped a journey into the un-preplanned and evolutionary possibilities of spatial and formal order.
And these drawings carry one along in the excitement. But they carry one, alas, to the sad fact that the whole project remains in the imagination, a realistic imagination of tangible walls and light-shaping spaces, but nevertheless still a dream of what might have been.
Most important, however, is the fact that the planning of conventual/communal architecture remained fairy static, conceptually, since the 9th century Plan of St. Gall, until two 20th century architects presented radical new options, Le Corbusier in the completed Dominican monastery of La Tourette and Louis Kahn in this design proposal for a Dominican motherhouse in Philadelphia.
I get tired of exhaustive academic discussions of unbuilt works of the Masters, but here is one that rises above intellectual clutter. The drawings are allowed largely to speak for themselves and they certainly do. A book worth having if you value original thinking.
Patrick J. Quinn, FAIA.
As one who has witnessed Kahn's sketch-quests close up I find this particular series very stimulating because they reveal the driving vigor behind Kahn's restless curiosity to explore. Drawing for him was a vehicle which shaped a journey into the un-preplanned and evolutionary possibilities of spatial and formal order.
And these drawings carry one along in the excitement. But they carry one, alas, to the sad fact that the whole project remains in the imagination, a realistic imagination of tangible walls and light-shaping spaces, but nevertheless still a dream of what might have been.
Most important, however, is the fact that the planning of conventual/communal architecture remained fairy static, conceptually, since the 9th century Plan of St. Gall, until two 20th century architects presented radical new options, Le Corbusier in the completed Dominican monastery of La Tourette and Louis Kahn in this design proposal for a Dominican motherhouse in Philadelphia.
I get tired of exhaustive academic discussions of unbuilt works of the Masters, but here is one that rises above intellectual clutter. The drawings are allowed largely to speak for themselves and they certainly do. A book worth having if you value original thinking.
Patrick J. Quinn, FAIA.
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