Dialectics of vision : the voyages of Louis I. Kahn, 1950-59

Abstract

Kahn's genre of travel sketches offers us a visual basis to map his philosophical meandering. This thesis addresses the sketches produced from Kahn's voyages around the Mediterranean in 1950-51 and 1959 with an aim to understanding the premises that underlie them. During the trips, Kahn conjectured in his graphic oeuvre a dialogical method with the built forms of antiquity. On the one hand, he sought answers to his architectural and epistemological questions to these buildings; at another level, he re-contextualized the buildings in an imagined landscape that would in tum inform his imperatives. The sketches also permit an interesting theoretical commentary as they parallel Kahn's emergence into active architectural career in the fifties. At first encounter, some of them seem to be perplexing, but once extended into the context in which Kahn operated, they reveal an interwoven terrain of concepts that would continuously flower. There is no doubt that in his travel sketches Kahn was fighting a protracted battle about his architecture and that he benefited from the buildings of the past--but mostly at an epistemological level. Kahn raised questions on architecture that could have not been addressed by a formal retrieval of history. In that sense Kahn's travel sketches reappraise and re-propose the lessons of history.