Louis Kahn: On the Thoughful Making of Spaces

It was not by chance that Louis Kahn´s move into his profession´s spotlight coincided with the crisis of modern architecture: representing, as his work increasingly did, those aspects of space which modernism had so ambitiously removed from its program. Kahn´s rethinking of modern architecture´s paradigm of space belongs to his most important contributions to the metier. In tracing the genesis of the unbuilt project for the Dominican Motherhouse (1965-69), we are given a close-up view of Kahn at work on a few fundamental questions of architectural space: seeking the sources of its meaning in its social, morphological, landscape and contextual dimensions. This rich and multivalent project opens the way to a second section, which sheds new light on several of major works in a timely reappraisal of Kahn´s work.