Michael Merrill

Louis Kahn: On the Thoughtful Making of Spaces

The Dominican Motherhouse and a Modern Culture of Space

It was not by chance that Louis Kahn’s move into his profession’s spotlight coincided with the crisis of modern architecture: representing, as his work increasingly did, those aspects of space which modernism had so ambitiously removed from its program. Kahn’s rethinking of modern architecture’s paradigm of space belongs to his most important contributions to the métier. In tracing the genesis of the unbuilt project for the Dominican Motherhouse (1965–69), we are given a close-up view of Kahn at work on a few fundamental questions of architectural space: seeking the sources of its meaning in its social, morphological, landscape and contextual dimensions.

This rich and multivalent project opens the way to a second section, which sheds new light on several of major works in a timely reappraisal of Kahn’s work.The result of extensive research, illustrated with unpublished archival material and new analytic drawings, this affordable volume is an indispensible companion to Louis Kahn: Drawing to Find Out.

It was not by chance that Louis Kahn’s move into his profession’s spotlight coincided with the crisis of modern architecture: representing, as his work increasingly did, those aspects of space which modernism had so ambitiously removed from its program. Kahn’s rethinking of modern architecture’s paradigm of space belongs to his most important contributions to the métier. In tracing the genesis of the unbuilt project for the Dominican Motherhouse (1965–69), we are given a close-up view of Kahn at work on a few fundamental questions of architectural space: seeking the sources of its meaning in its social, morphological, landscape and contextual dimensions.

This rich and multivalent project opens the way to a second section, which sheds new light on several of major works in a timely reappraisal of Kahn’s work.The result of extensive research, illustrated with unpublished archival material and new analytic drawings, this affordable volume is an indispensible companion to Louis Kahn: Drawing to Find Out.

Also available as an e-book

Author(s): Michael Merrill

Design: Integral Lars Müller

16,5 × 24 cm, 6 ½ × 9 ½ in

240 pages, 215 illustrations

paperback, 1st edition: 2010

2010, 978-3-03778-220-0, English
CHF 40.00

Michael Merrill

Michael Merrill is an award-winning architect and educator. He taught architectural design and theory at the Technical Universities at Karlsruhe and Darmstadt and has served as the director of research at the institute for building typology at KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) since 2017. Michael Merrill is the author of three books on Louis Kahn: "Louis Kahn: Drawing to Find Out”, "Louis Kahn: On the Thoughtful Making of Spaces” and “Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing".