Louis Kahn The Power of Architecture. The Design Museum 9 July 2014 – 12 October 2014

In 1974 a man was found dead in the washroom at Penn Station NYC. It took three days to identify that it was one of the finest architects of the twentieth century. Louis Kahn died a bankrupt with three children from three different women. A man scarred not just by the coals that destroyed his face but also by the struggle of being a Jewish Estonian immigrant in Philadelphia.

The exhibition at the Design Museum traces his life and career. Architects take time to achieve and Kahn is no exception, well into his 50’s before he completed a major project. Few would underestimate the importance of Louis Kahn, an artist first, and a man who challenged the European modernist dogma.

If anyone ever doubts the value of travel, architects such as John Soane and Louis Kahn prove its worth. In fact Kahn’s three-month Rome residency in 1950 was to influence his work as much as the Grand Tour of the 1770’s influenced Soane. John Soane assembled a collection that would eventually be housed in his London home now the museum, and his work was clearly influenced by the experience. Kahn, a man of few possessions, drew on his trip to Rome, Athens and Egypt and even Scotland for the rest of his career.

Both architects explore the poetics of ruins; both understand the issues of permanence, both are manipulators of light and volume. Soane’s Bank of England was re-imagined as a ruin by Joseph Gandy who worked with Soane for twenty years at the end of the 18^th century. Similarly Kahn believed that to create a work of architecture you need to imagine it as a ruin.

“As time passes, when it is a ruin, the spirit of its making comes back. It welcomes the foliage that entwines and conceals. Everyone who passes can hear the story it wants to tell about its making. It is no longer in servitude; the spirit is back.”

In the context of 1950’s Philadelphia, it is easy to imagine Kahn seeking permanence and materiality and memories of the Baths of Caracalla, Trajan’s Market and the Parthenon are all evident is his built work.

Louis Kahn “The Power of Architecture” at the Design Museum sheds light on the career of Kahn, as well as models, film and photographs, it shows plenty of his beautiful paintings and drawings, and perhaps most touchingly his passports, suitcase and a box of the pastels he took on his travels. But before you go and see it watch the film “My architect” made by his son Nathaniel who was 9 years old when his father died.