Louis I. Kahn

After maintaining a professional and personal relationship with Louis Kahn for seven years, Anne Griswold Tyng departed in the autumn of 1953 for Rome. During her year in Italy, where their daughter was born, Kahn wrote weekly to Tyng, and his correspondence to her is published here for the first time. The fifty-three letters document not only their intense private relationship, but also give a vibrant account of the experience of a brilliant young architect on the cusp of achieving international renown. Kahn's letters, together with Anne Tyng's intimate essays, vividly capture the professional politics of the modern architecture scene - such prominent figures as Philip Johnson, Eero and Aline Saarinen, Vincent Scully, George Howe, Pier Luigi Nervi, and Robert Venturi make appearances - and illuminate the creative processes at work in the early stages of Kahn's emergence as one of the most influential architects of the twentieth century.

This condensed edition of Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture is a definitive and richly illustrated volume that presents the oeuvre of one of this century's most influential practitioners, teachers, and thinkers in architecture. Here is the detailed account of the architecture and philosophy of Louis Kahn, whose buildings have become the very signature of the modernist aesthetic and whose vision permanently changed the direction of American architecture.Kahn's career is documented here with meticulous attention to all aspects of his work-- from his own fascinating biography to the unique philosophy that underlies his buildings to the structures themselves. The stunning range of Kahn's architectural vision becomes fully apparent: his structures are at once solemn and resonant, elemental and musical. Extraordinary, exclusively commissioned color photographs of his masterworks-- the Yale Center for British Art, the National Assembly complex at Dhaka, Bangladesh, the Kimbell Art Museum, the Indian Institute of Management, the Salk Institute-- exquisitely demonstrate how Kahn's architecture wholly reinvents space and light. In all, more than two hundred illustrations, including numerous drawings and floor plans, accompany the painstakingly researched text.This volume-- published in association with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and with the exclusive participation of the Louis I. Kahn Collection-- contains six principal essays that critically address different dimensions and periods of Kahn's architecture. The essays and photography are accompanied by succinct notes and captions, as well as a complete list of buildings and projects and an index, making this book the preeminent scholarly and illustrative source for Kahn's architecture.

"In 1969 and 1970, Louis I. Kahn (1901--1974)--one of America's greatest 20th-century architects--participated in a series of interviews with a young German architectural historian, Heinrich Klotz, then a visiting professor at Yale University, and John W. Cook, who was teaching architecture at the Yale Divinity School. Louis I. Kahn in Conversation provides the first full edited transcript of these candid, illuminating interviews, which provide remarkable insights into Kahn's philosophy of architecture. The conversations touch on many of his iconic works, including the unbuilt City Tower Project for Philadelphia, the Yale University Art Gallery, the First Unitarian Church in Rochester, and major international projects then under construction, as well as the Yale Center for British Art, Kahn's final building, on which he was beginning work at the time. Illustrated with dozens of plans, drawings, and photographs, the book also features an introduction by Jules David Prown, the first director of the Yale Center for British Art, who recommended Kahn as its architect"--

"Louis Kahn (1901-1974), arguably the last great modern American architect, lectured, wrote essays, was interviewed and appeared at panel discussions, and issued countless statements to the press. Kahn published a handful of essays, but he preferred public speaking - whether formal lecture or more often, seemingly improvised remarks. All was not as causal as it may have appeared, however; as with his building, which he rethought, reworked, and reconceived, he prepared typescripts that were usually the result of multiple drafts, and when he repeated a speech to a second or third audience, he rewrote it yet again. Louis Kahn: Essential Texts is a unique anthology of twenty pieces, some never before published, representing his essential thinking as it evolved. Robert Twombly's incisive introduction and headnotes reveal the dynamism of Kahn's language, elucidate his keen aphorisms and sometimes abstruse terminology, and offer a useful distillation of basic Kahnian tenets."--Jacket.

Selected architectural building/complex designs of India.