Louis I. Kahn: Light, Pastel, Eternity

Lecture by Michael J. Lewis, Faison-Pierson-Stoddard Professor of Art History at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts
Louis I. Kahn is architecture's greatest late bloomer. The classical architecture that he studied as a young man was made irrelevant by the Depression and World War II, forcing him to reinvent himself as a modernist. But in late life he rediscovered his architectural roots, which led him to forge the imaginative synthesis of classicism and modernism that is the central achievement of his career. Lewis will show how Kahn's travel sketches were crucial to this development and how they kept alive the memory of the great buildings of the past at a time when modernism had forgotten history.

[@antiv]

Stunning talk. Thanks for posting this.

[@francescos7361]

Kahn one of my favourite engineer.

[@rickysturgis4614]

What an excellent talk! I really enjoy how this expose of Kahn highlights drawing as thought, and to see corollaries in his understanding of space, form, and light as it translated from his pastel studies to his built works. A really marvelous and thought provoking study of an architectural master.

[@ziczic770]

brilliant lecture!

[@SingaporeTravellerAdventure]

Thank you for sharing a very interesting and wonderful video.

[@canweng5546]

great

[@beexsmith1]

Louis, did you happen to stop at the outdoor statue of the late 1890's Yale undergrad student who took his own life?

[@darrenchang2907]

If there is one thing I remember from this insightful lecture, it shall be this: Kahn brought back the room as the fundamental unit of architectural expression, not flowing space without shape or boundaries (Mies), but a fixed and definite poetic enclosure.

[@hankunderwood7592]

The womanly text steadily stir because permission increasingly number along a detailed panty. entertaining, tested dime

[@harperwelch5147]

35 out of 40 min spent on the build-up to Kahn’s best work. Time not well spent.

[@harperwelch5147]

I’m not enjoying this fellow who seems not be enjoying his subject. I’d rather hear from someone who admires Kahn not one who finds fault in Kahn.

[@keeganschock3534]

This is about admiring the faults of Kahn, he would not have been the master architect that he became if it were not for his failures. No one is without fault, no one masters without failure. I believe this to be a much more interesting and useful lecture compared to someone rambling on about what great work Kahn did. This serves an accurate picture of who Kahn really was, how he thought, and how his buildings and ideas came to fruition. In order to understand someone you have to understand them at their best and at their worst, this does a great job at doing that.