Louis Kahn's Situated Modernism by Sarah Williams Goldhagen
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 in Bangladesh, as well as of such previously understudied or misunderstood works as his essay on monumentality and his AFL Medical Services building in Philadelphia. Goldhagen theorises Kahn's architectural principles to show that he struggled with modernism rather than against it, reconceptualising it into a singular and powerful new vocabulary that retains architectural and social relevance today.
"This book will durably change the paradigm by which we have viewed Louis Kahn now for several decades" Francesco Passanti Sarah Williams Goldhagen is lecturer in architectural history at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University."
Goldhagen, Sarah Williams: -
Sarah Williams Goldhagen taught at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design for ten years and was the New Republic's architecture critic until recently. Currently a contributing editor at Art in America and Architectural Record, she is an award-winning writer who has written about buildings, cities, and landscapes for many national and international publications, including the New York Times, the American Prospect, and Harvard Design Magazine. She lives in New York City.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780300077865 |
| ISBN 10 | 0300077866 |
| Title | Louis Kahn's Situated Modernism |
| Author | Sarah Williams Goldhagen |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Yale University Press |
| Year published | 2001-06-10 |
| Number of pages | 336 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |