Louis Kahn, Design Museum - exhibition review
It’s hard to know whether Louis Kahn’s obsession with ruins was the result of his own scarred face, disfigured in a childhood accident, or part of the more general fascination that architects have with the fragments of lost structures.
This is not a new concern after all: in the 19th century, Sir John Soane commissioned paintings of his Bank of England as decayed fragments before his work on the bank was finished. Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, was urged to design fascist buildings whose eventual ruins would stand as testimony to the glory of a 1,000-year Reich.
Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture, just opened at the Design Museum, traces the output of the late US architect whose career culminated in a series of monumental structures whose forms and spiritual qualities have the deliberate aspect of ruins to them — a parliament for Dacca, Bangladesh, from a stone age, an Indian business school designed like a monastery, a Californian laboratory like a cliff-top keep. With his almost sacred geometry, Kahn “wrapped ruins around buildings” using brick and concrete arches or carving circles out of façades.
Kahn was born in Estonia in 1901 but his family emigrated to Philadelphia where he appeased playground taunts of “scarface” by making drawings for his tormentors. He made work that was influential within the profession, if not making him a household name. But few architects were well-known in the Sixties and Seventies when Kahn was at his peak. He may never have built in London but the consequences of his influence are all around us.
Put together by the Vitra Design Museum in Germany and featuring 60 models, this is the first major survey of his work in decades. On display are films, photographs and notebooks, his passport, postcards and suitcase, illuminating an enigmatic life and death (he died in Penn Station’s toilets, his body left unclaimed for days) as well as his splendid work.
Until Oct 12 (020 7403 6933, designmuseum.org)
