Tradition as Mediation

Through a carefully focused study of two major projects by Louis Kahn's, this important book clarifies the architect's crucial and often misunderstood relationship to history. Questioning previously held assessments of Kahn's work, Dana Margalith reveals the originality and contemporary pertinence of Kahn's approach, engaging cultural habits and traditions hermeneutically that crystallize in significantly innovative projects. Such approach is mischaracterized by the simple appellations of modernism or postmodernism, going beyond a merely progressive or reactionary use of forms for the sake of novelty. Alberto Perez-Gomez, Bronfman Professor of Architectural History, McGill University, Canada. Louis I. Kahn redirected the entire tradition of modern architecture, though that was not the aim of his 'patient search,' for he was much too focused on the very topics creatively studied in this book: human association, as evident in the meaningful situations of our lives, that have been shaped historically, as well as the spatial and material interactions between buildings and their environments, the order of which projects both interpret and transform. Two unbuilt projects focus the book's arguments, inviting the reader to discover in both written and drawn traces of thought real possibilities for an architecture of our time that can be beautiful, significant, and poetic. David Leatherbarrow, University of Pennsylvania, USA.