Louis Kahn's Situated Modernism Review

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(More customer reviews)... although this IS a book about Kahn's architectural vision, it is so much more. It delves deeply into the science, philosophy and political and social movements that inspired him and left their mark indelibly on his architecture. This book is so much more then than just a book about buildings (although it does go into these as well); it is a substantial contribution to our understanding of a number of major movements of thought that defined a pivotal time in American and world history. Although I like pretty pictures of buildings as much as the next guy, I am grateful and indebted to Prof. Goldhagen for going beyond the norm.

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Louis Kahn is perhaps the most important architect to emerge in the decades following World War II. In this book Sarah Williams Goldhagen dismantles the myths that have cast Kahn variously as a mystical neo-Platonist, a structural rationalist, a visionary champion of Beaux-Arts principles, a rebel against modernism. She demonstrates instead that the essence of Kahn's architecture lies in his deeply held modernist political, social, and artistic ideals. Throughout his life, Goldhagen shows, Kahn sought to rework modernism into a socially transformative architecture appropriate for the postwar world.Goldhagen presents much new archival evidence about Kahn's buildings, his ideas, and his indebtedness to contemporary art and to the many socio-critical and architectural discourses of the postwar years. She offers fresh interpretations of many of his important buildings, including the Yale University Art Gallery and the National Assembly complex inBangladesh, as well as of such previously understudied or misunderstood works as his essay on monumentality and his AFL Medical Services building in Philadelphia. Goldhagen theorizes Kahn's architectural principles to show that he struggled with modernism rather than against it, reconceptualizing it into a singular and powerful new vocabulary that retains architectural and social relevance today.

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