Louis Kahn: the Power of Architecture

Even if one doesn’t agree that Louis Kahn (1901-74) was the best architect of the mid-century years, one cannot disagree that the American architect has been the most admired by architects worldwide, the most influential. There is no better museum in the US to present a retrospective of Kahn’s triumphant career other than the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, TX, because it is here, that Kahn created his masterpiece of light, known also as the most beautiful modern museum in America, perhaps in the world, built between 1966 and 1972. The exhibition ‘Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture,’ which will open at the Kimbell next month comes to survey his career and to summarize his powerful, poetic, monumental, universal architecture. Through his iconic buildings, the National Assembly in Dacca, the Four Freedom Park, the Library of Phillips Exeter Academy, the Salk Institute, and the Yale Art Gallery, just to name a few, the exhibition comes to reveal the secret behind the man who has been called the poet of the architecture world. It focuses on his relationship to his hometown Philadelphia, on the relationship he established with landscape, and on his connection with such key traditions of modern architecture as the École des Beaux-Arts, the rationalism of the 19th century, the Arts and Crafts Movement, and Modernism.

National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Louis Kahn, 1962–83

My Visit to the Kimbell

Library, Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, New Hampshire, Louis Kahn, 1965–72 © Iwan Baan

Louis Kahn in front of a model of the City Tower Project in an exhibition at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, February 1958 © Sue Ann Kahn

Louis Kahn in the auditorium of the Kimbell Art Museum, 1972 © Kimbell Art Museum, photo: Bob Wharton

Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, Louis Kahn, 1951–53 © Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, photo: Lionel Freedman

Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, Louis Kahn, 1959–65 © The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania, photo: John Nicolais

Steven and Toby Korman House, Fort Washington,Pennsylvania, Louis Kahn, 1971–73 © Barry Halkin

Kimbell Museum

Louis Kahn working on Fisher House design, 1961 © Louis I. Kahn Collection, University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission

Yale University Art Gallery

FDR Four Feedoms Park, NYC

Alfred Newton Richards Medical Research and Biology Building, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Louis Kahn, 1957–65 © The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania, photo: Malcolm Smith