Eternal Kahn.

LOUIS I. KAHN

By Robert McCarter. London: Phaldon Press. 2005. [pounds sterling]49.95

It is now over thirty years since the death of Louis Kahn and the time is ripe for a comprehensive critical reassessment of his work. In many respects Robert McCarter's new book achieves this. It is comprehensive in scope, thoroughly researched, well written, extensively illustrated, with both photographs and newly drawn plans, sections and elevations of most of the major projects, and it is beautifully produced by Phaidon. The approach is generally chronological and thematic so that the evolution of the principal stages of Kahn's work is clearly revealed. The design of each major building is traced through the extended process of development by which Kahn almost invariably worked. The finished building is then described in detail, both spatially and tectonically. Through its clear objectivity the book will certainly become an essential reference.

Robert McCarter has previously written in a similarly straightforward way on the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and this leads him to explore the relationship between the works of these two architects. This is interesting to a degree and is expounded in some detail in the introductory chapter on the development of Kahn's 'architectural philosophy'. The formal similarities between, for example, Unity Temple and the Rochester Unitarian Church are clear to see, but hardly surprising. Drawing attention to such connections, while interesting to a degree, doesn't really address the core of Kahn's greatness. When Brahms was told that his first symphony owed something to Beethoven's ninth he retorted, 'Any donkey can see that'. Fortunately, at the very end of the book, McCarter concisely grasps and articulates something of the essential truth about Kahn. In a brief concluding essay that draws upon, among others, T. S. Eliot, Stravinsky, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, George Steiner, Goethe, Paul Valery, Emerson and Andre Malraux, but most effectively upon Kahn's buildings themselves that he has so meticulously described, he demonstrates the centrality of tradition in the making of an architecture for the end of the twentieth century. 'Kahn believed that architecture must be defined by what is permanent and enduring, not by the constantly changing circumstantial requirements of the moment. For Kahn, the archaic was made architectural through engaging the most fundamental of geometries and eternal ordering principles: 'To me, when I see a plan I just see the plan as though it were a symphony, the realm of spaces in the construction and light. I sort of care less, you see, for the moment whether it works or not. Just so I know that the principles are respected which somehow are eternal about the plan'.