Four decades after his death, Louis Kahn remains one of the world’s most influential 20th-century architects. And nowhere is he more renowned than in Philadelphia—a somewhat ironic reality, since most of the iconic projects for which he is best known, such as the Salk Institute, the Kimbell Art Museum, and the Library at Philips Exeter Academy, are located elsewhere. But Philadelphia was Kahn’s home for most of his life, from the age of five, when he emigrated from Estonia. He studied architecture there, practiced there, and taught there. It is fitting then, that a major traveling retrospective of his work, Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture, is finally being shown in Philadelphia, five years after it first opened at Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI), in Rotterdam.
The exhibition, at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Center City, was organized by the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany, in collaboration with NAI and the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, the steward of Kahn’s archives. Since its first showing in 2012, The Power of Architecture has toured the world, with venues in eight other cities, including London, Taipei, Oslo, and Fort Worth, where it was shown at the Kimbell. Philadelphia is the show’s last stop—and the only one on the East Coast.
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