Rakhshaan Qazi-? Modern Architecture, Essay two Four of the leading architects of the modernist period were Adolf Loos, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies Van der Rode, and Louis Kahn.
These architects drew significantly from each other and explored similar ideas in their establishing of a new standard in approaching architecture. Decoration became a taboo while simpler and more functional forms took their place. I am going to be talking about Loius Kahn and how he is talked abut in different texts. Loius Kahn was both more subtle and radical than all the rchitects mentioned din his book so far. From early on Kahn was interested in housing reform movements and working on mostly government housing projects. Kahn strongly believed that there was a dire need for civic architecture, which would eventually ignite a sense of common purpose and democratic participation.
Kahn went from the modernist tradition to a fusion of Viollet-? de-? Duc and neoclassicism. And eventually to a more or less, unchanging form types. His convergence between the two was suggested by platonic geometries found in nature. He strongly isagreed with the concept of a free plan, and believed in the aggregation of identical rooms, which broke down architecture to its most primitive unit of meaning. When Louis Kahn worked on a space, he would try to understand the spiritual quality of the spaces and put that into the materials that he used for the place. He’d pay specific attention to technical aspects of things and to work precisely.
He had great control over the materials he used. He liked to think of his spaces as servant spaces, meaning that these were spaces in buildings that would erve other spaces and allow each other to exist. He believed strongly that architecture appeals to the community it serves as well as the already recognized structural functionality. He added that architecture should reveal the story of the construction through materiality. His major mission was to put the spiritual sense of the space into the material. He was trying to figure out how to materialize the spirituality of the space.
He had a mastery of monumentality; he understood attempted to integrate as much of nature as possible into his urban work. He hought that nature should become a basis on which American modern architecture should emerge. A lot of his work into the 30s was focused more on giving American society a social form during times of crisis, working on things like decentralized utopia, including cheap single family dwellings, the Usonian houses. These were for middle class families and encouraged them to gather in the same place. This encouraged the concrete slab roofs for the practicality and suggested a new concept for independent living. He was strictly at odds with the international odern movement.
Although his use of slabs can be related to this movement, they were, in actuality, at odds with it due to this specifically American idea of living free in nature. He wanted to fuse function, structure, and idea while being inspired by natural forms. His whole obsession with community planning was based on the idea of spreading away from cities and moving more into suburban areas. He fantasized that people would be able to access the service aspects of urban communities and the facility aspects of rural areas all at the same time.
