Within the text of Kahn

Abstract

This thesis addresses the published writing, lectures and interviews of Louis I. Kahn between 1931 and 1974. It attempts to map the elaboration and unfolding of meaning that occur in four of his major concepts: Form and Design, realization, expression and Silence and Light. His textual production is aimed at trying to understand the nature of architecture and its beginnings. This interest leads him into ever widening fields of inquiry into the nature of nature, the nature of man and the nature of beginnings. Most of his concepts can be reduced to a polarity of the measurable and the unmeasurable. His thinking to has two distinct phases: in the first period, 1931 to 1960, he focuses on the tangible concerns of the nature of architecture; in the second phase, from 1960 to 1974, he investigates its more spiritual aspect. The premise of the thesis is that Kahn's writing is cryptic only insofar as one does not understand his particular meanings and definitions for words. The paper traces the continual transformation of specific concepts and their meaning and shows their remarkable consistency. It also demonstrates how Kahn achieves clarity through a strategy of differentiation. Kahn's underlying motivation is to understand the unmeasurable so that he can embody a sense of the eternal in his architecture.