Between Silence and Light: Spirit in the Architecture of Louis I. Kahn

(Paperback)

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Louis I. Kahn's influence on American architecture during his life was great, and his influence has only increased in the 33 years since his death - with interest in his work lately moving into the realm of popular culture through the successful film about him, "My Architect" (New Yorker Films, 2004). John Lobell's classic work presents stunning black-and white photos of some of Kahn's greatest buildings, including the Salk Institute, the Yale Study Center and the Exeter Library, combining them with excerpts from his writings that reveal him as a remarkable creative thinker. Kahn searched for beginnings: the origin of joy and wonder, of intelligence and intuition. He sought the basic principles of being, which he called Silence and Light. He spoke of these things with a tremendous yet gentle power. Reading his words and looking at his buildings, we experience him as architect, visionary, and poet.

Reviews

Ideas change society; architecture changes the visible, functioning environment. Occasionally, one mans creativity spans both; and the way men build to express their emotional and physical needs is never quite the same again. Louis Kahn was such a man.The New York Times

"Like all good books on architecture, this one leaves you wanting to be there, to inhabit Kahn's meaningful and moving spaces. With each passing year, Kahn's importance to architecture and culture becomes evermore clear, his buildings' eternal and circumstantial attributes become evermore evident, and their exceptional quality becomes evermore present in our experience. Kahn loved beginnings, and for those wishing to explore Kahn's work and thought, this beautiful book is a very good place to start."Robert McCarter, Ruth and Norman Moore Professor of Architecture, Washington University in St. Louis, author of Louis I. Kahn

"Between Silence and Light beautifully captures the essence of my father's spiritual ideas about architecture. It is a luminous book."Nathaniel Kahn, Academy Awardnominated filmmaker of My Architect

"Between Silence and Light is an accessible introduction to Kahn's wisdom and oeuvre, and the 2008 edition benefits from a new preface from Lobell as well as a list of additional resources. In Kahn's passing, this 'dialogue' between the modern master and his student Lobell remains a definitive work."docomomo International

Author Bio

John Lobell, an architect and a professor in the School of Architecture at Pratt Institute, studied at the University of Pennsylvania during the years when Louis Kahn was on the faculty there.