Notebooks and Drawings of Louis I. Kahn

This is a collection of drawings and statements by a master architect. They mirror the vigor and perception manifest in his buildings and personal teachings. The book is divided into two sections. The first is a group of sketches produced during his European travels, which are reproduced here actual size. The second section consists of early sketches as well as finished renderings of some of Kahn's buildings and visions. They are arranged as close to chronological order as overlapping projects allow. The text is based largely on transcriptions of unpublished speeches delivered by Kahn. He completely reworked these speeches for the book, transforming them from the spoken to the written word. There are also selections from his Voice of America broadcast, a Universal Atlas Cement folder, the Museum of Modern Art booklet on the A. N. Richards Medical Research Building at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as an introduction written for the book. There Kahn states that "The editors chose sketches of mood and development of a few projects rather than isolated drawings of a greater number of projects. Such a decision appeals to the architect who starts, like the writer and the painter, with a blank piece of paper, upon which he imprints the gradual steps in the development of something he wants to make exist." The drawings in the first section were made in Karnak, Luxor, Delphi, Athens, Albi, Florence, Pisa, and Venice. Those in the second show stages in the development of the following projects: the sculpture court of the Yale University Art Gallery; studies for the Philadelphia center city (1956 and 1962); the A. N. Richards Medical Research Building; the General Motors Exhibition Building, 1964 World's Fair, New York; the Meeting House and laboratory complex, Salk Institute of Biological Studies; and the Mikveh Israel Synagogue, Independence Mall, Philadelphia. The book, which is being republished under the imprint of The MIT Press, originally appeared in 1962.Wurman, Richard Saul is the author of 'Notebooks and Drawings of Louis I. Kahn', published 1973 under ISBN 9780262230650 and ISBN 0262230658.