And I Also Saw the Movie: Looking at Louis Kahn

The pantheon of American architects is actually a triumvirate, according to conventional wisdom: Henry Hobson Richardson, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Additional members are nominated from time to time, among them perennial favorites as diverse as “neo-classicist” Thomas Jefferson, “neo-neo-classicist” Stanford White, and “minimalist” Ludwig Mies van der Rohe who, despite determined advocates, nevertheless remain also-rans. Dark horse candidates emerge periodically, like “brutalist” Paul Rudolph or “modernist” Walter Gropius fleetingly riding ever-changing fashion or ideological currents only to return to architectural limbo whence they came. For decades now, the Big Three has remained just that.

But of late it looks like a quadrumvirate is forming. Among Louis I. Kahn’s masterpieces are the Jonas Salk Institute for Biological Studies (1959–65), La Jolla, California; the Indian Institute of Management (1962–74), Ahmedabad; Shere-Bangla Nagar (“City of the Punjab Tiger,” the Bangladesh government center complex, 1962–83), Dhaka; Philips Exeter Academy Library (1965–72), Exeter, New Hampshire; Kimball Art Museum (1966–72), Fort Worth, Texas; and the Yale Center for British Art (1969–74), New Haven, Connecticut. An equally impressive list of designed but never built masterpieces includes Mikveh Israel Synagogue (1961–72), Philadelphia; memorials to Six Million Jewish Martyrs (1967–72) and to Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1973–74), both in New York City; Hurva Synagogue (1964–74), Jerusalem; and the Palazzo dei Congressi (1968–74), Venice. Although he designed comparatively few structures for someone of his stature, two hundred or so during a fifty-year career of which he executed a mere seventy, a consensus is growing that Kahn was, as Carter Wiseman writes, “a monumental figure in the history of architecture” (p. 11).

Certainly he was widely acclaimed well before his 1974 death (born in 1901, he received his first commission in 1925, opened his own office in 1947, and came to national attention in the early 1950s), but beginning in the mid-1980s his oeuvre has been lionized, dissected, scrutinized, and queried as never before in an ever-growing spate of exhibition catalogs, complete works, memoirs, compilations of texts and letters, monographs on single structures or on aspects of his design philosophy, and photo-essays on one or more buildings, as well as in an Academy Award-nominated 2003 feature length film by Nathaniel Kahn entitled My Architect: A Son’s Journey. In short, Kahn has been the centerpiece of all sorts of formats save biography. Until now.

Carter Wiseman is well equipped for the task. As architecture critic for New York magazine from 1986 to 1990, author of books on I. M. Pei and twentieth-century American architecture, current MacDowell Colony board president and Yale School of Architecture professor, Wiseman has the research skills of a scholar without pedantry, prose fluidity without journalistic showmanship, and the broad outlook of one who has worn multiple professional hats. The result is a judicious, sensitive, well informed, occasionally witty analysis of an unusually complex artist that, while not as comprehensive or compelling as, say, Tim Hilton’s stunning two volume biography of an even more complex John Ruskin, ought nevertheless to serve for some time as the single best source for beginning to understand Louis Kahn. If one excludes his son’s film.

My Architect opens with the younger Kahn (then about forty) scanning The New York Times of late March 1974 (when he was twelve) for stories about his father’s death. “Besides his wife,” read the obituary on the 20th, “Mr. Kahn leaves a daughter, Sue Ann.” No mention of himself, and who is this Sue Ann? he wondered. So began a search from which he learned that his father in fact had three children: Sue Ann in 1941 by his wife Esther with whom he “shared the same double bed for their entire [44-year] marriage,” the daughter reported (p. 259); Alexandra by his design collaborator Anne Tyng in 1954; and Nathaniel himself in 1962 by...