Landscape architect Harriet Pattison died on Monday, October 2. She was 94. She collaborated with Louis Kahn on several projects including the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island in New York. Her complicated relationship with Kahn was revealed in a 2003 documentary, My Architect, by her son with Kahn, Nathaniel Kahn, her only survivor. She would go on later to detail her 15-year-long life with the much-admired architect in a 2020 memoir, Our Days Are Like Full Years: A Memoir with Letters from Louis Kahn, reviewed by RECORD below.
If you ask architects today whose work they most revere, “Louis Kahn” is a constant reply. Nearly half a century after his death, his architecture maintains a powerful hold on the imaginations of younger generations of practitioners. Yet the man who created buildings of timeless monumentality and ethereal light lived much of his life on shaky ground. His firm in Philadelphia teetered financially, his clients were often fickle, his travel schedule was punishing—and, at the height of his career, his family was splintered among three households: one with his wife and daughter Sue Ann, and two others with the women who each had a child with him.
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