Louis Kahn: Ideas In Things. Models And The Architectural Imagination

Understanding Kahn through his models - a study of design tools, ideas and creative growth. One of the most significant architects of the last century, Louis Kahn continues to provoke and inspire. This book explores Kahn through the architectural models that were integral to his design practice. To create his work, Kahn called upon a broad repertoire of architectural techniques, tools and finesses some derived from the École des Beaux-Arts, others absorbed through key collaborators such as Anne Tyng, Robert Venturi and Isamu Noguchi. The models of Kahn and of those three collaborators are studied to question their roles as design tools, as bearers of ideas and as shapers of thought. With richly illustrated texts, visual essays and new images by photographer Raymond Meier, the publication is timely not only for what it reveals about the architect, but as a means to reflect on how we continue to think with objects in our making of architecture. AUTHORS: Michael Merrill (1960) is an award-winning architect and educator. He has taught architectural design and theory and researched at the Technical Universities in Karlsruhe and Darmstadt. Merrill is the author and editor of a series of books based on the drawings and design artifacts of Louis Kahn. Raymond Meier was born in Switzerland in 1957. At the age of twenty he opened his first photogra-phy studio in Zurich and began working in the field of commercial image-making. In 1986, he moved his studio to New York City where he has been a major influence on publications including Harper's Bazaar, Vogue and The New York Times. 500 illustrations