The fruit of years of assiduous research, Wendy Lesser’s study of Louis Kahn synthesizes his life and work in a literary equivalent of an architectural composition: Lesser’s account oscillates between episodic segments of a life story told in reverse and her own equally episodic experience of five of his major works—the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California (1963); the Philips Exeter Academy Library in Exeter, New Hampshire (1971); the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth (1972); the Indian Institute of Labor Management in Ahmedabad, India (1974), and the posthumously completed National Assembly in Dhaka (1983).
Lesser’s biographical résumé begins with a chapter entitled “Ending” emphasizing the strange circumstance of Kahn’s death on March 17, 1974, in the men’s room of Penn Station, New York. This somewhat sordid demise is bookended by a final chapter entitled “Beginning,” where Lesser’s evocative prose describes the accident that scarred Kahn’s face for life, when as a child he inexplicably played with embers that burst into flames. Equally evocative are the author’s sensitive responses to Kahn’s architecture, which, at times, make you feel that, no matter how often you revisit the work in question, you have yet to be affected by it as profoundly as the author. At the Salk Institute, she responds kinesthetically to the acoustical effects of the fountain in the courtyard where the water perpetually flows in an axial channel as it descends toward the sea. She has an equally tactile response to the smooth concrete, pitted travertine, and weathered teak in the flanking structures. It is significant that the reiterative geometry of the central core of the Exeter library could not be appreciated with the same phenomenological intensity as the Salk, despite the reassuring presence of its foursquare, warehouse-like brick facade.
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