Two Louis Kahn Books

This week's dose features two publications on Louis I. Kahn released in 2022: the revised and expanded second edition of Robert McCarter's monograph on Kahn; and a facsimile edition of one of the architect's first monographs, edited by Richard Saul Wurman and accompanied by a new reader's guide. Be sure to scroll all the way down for a list of other Kahn titles of interest.Louis I Kahn (Revised and Expanded Edition)by Robert McCarterPhaidon, March 2022Hardcover | 9-3/4 x 12-1/4 inches | 528 pages | 800 illustrations | English | ISBN: 9781838663049 | $150.00 | "A thoroughly updated and redesigned edition of McCarter’s esteemed monograph on the globally-revered modern master – includes Roosevelt Island, Four Freedoms Park, which was completed after Kahn's death" (click here for publisher's description and author bio)REFERRAL LINKS:   REVIEW:According to his page on the website of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University, architect Robert McCarter has authored around a dozen monographs, on architects both living and dead. Recent contemporary monographs feature WG Clark, Grafton Architects, Hermann Hertzberger, Steven Holl, and MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects, while the historical monographs are devoted to Alvar Aalto, Marcel Breuer, Aldo van Eyck, Louis I. Kahn, Carlo Scarpa, and Frank Lloyd Wright. The monograph on Kahn was first published by Phaidon in 2005, but with the subsequent completion of the FDR Four Freedoms State Park on Roosevelt Island, the eponymous book has been expanded, enlarged, and updated. I have not seen McCarter's first book on Kahn, but I don't feel the need to search it out — the second edition is so good, in both its scholarship and its visual documentation, that it easily supplants the first edition. And if people plop down $150 on it, I'm sure they might be encouraged to feel the same way. This is not to say that McCarter's book is the definitive book on Kahn — no book can accomplish that, given Kahn's built output, poetic lectures, and dramatic personal life — but anyone looking for a comprehensive overview of his architecture will not be disappointed with this monograph.Comprehensive means just that: McCarter starts the book with Kahn's upbringing, education, and early work in the offices of other architects, giving as much attention to those decades than the ones that happened after his much-documented residency at the American Academy in Rome in 1951, when he traveled around the Mediterranean and "found himself as an architect," in McCarter's words. Still, the bulk of the book's half-dozen sections — with such titles as "Rediscovering an Architecture of Mass and Structure" and "Inspired Compositions in the Poetics of Action" — consist of case studies devoted to Kahn's masterpieces from the 1960s and 70s: the Salk, the Kimball, the Yale Center for British Art, etc. Alternating with subsections on themes in Kahn's work, where his residential projects tend to be discussed, the case studies of buildings and unbuilt projects (many of the latter are rendered by Kent Larson, author of Unbuilt Masterworks) are the most helpful parts of the book, especially for those most interested in the way Kahn's designs evolved over the course of a project; the visual documentation is especially important in showing how the designs changed in sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic ways. Using the FDR Four Freedoms project as an example, McCarter's descriptions are heavy on formal descriptions but light on historical facts; the story of how the design was completed decades after Kahn's death in 1974, for instance, is relegated to a footnote, of which there are many in the back of the book.Holding the massive undertaking together are the beautiful construction of the book — from its large size and layered chip board cover to its paper selection — and the page design. In regards to the latter, a couple of things are worth pointing out: the images and captions are done well, with many of the images large on the page and all of them clearly numbered and keyed within the text. Second is the text itself, which moves in a subtle way from one-column to two-column and then three-column layouts across from subsection to subsection; the Salk Institute case study pictured above, for example, has a three-column layout, but the preceding subsection, "Wrapping Ruins Around Buildings," has one and the following subsection, which concludes the section of the book it is in, has two. This approach to text columns, which further organizes images and captions, is commendable, since Louis I. Kahn has a lot of text and the variation between subsections help keep the reader from being overwhelmed or bored with the text. Put another way, the design helps McCarter's text — readable but not exactly full of flair — go down a little easier. Of course, this monograph is hardly meant to be read cover to cover, but those who do will learn a great deal about the life, philosophy, and architecture of on