Introduction

Few modern architects can be said to have enjoyed so formative a relationship with a city as Louis Kahn with Rome. From the 1960s onwards, For Kahn, this relationship and its progress were something unique; one cannot say the same, for other architect–city associations, even powerful ones such as Le Corbusier with Paris or Marseilles, or Mies with Berlin or Chicago. Kahn also exerted a major impact on Italian architecture, and nowhere more so than in Rome, where in many ways he influenced its future direction and development. The basic problem was finding a way out of the crisis that the International Style found itself in, and re-establishing a modern relationship with the past, and Kahn appeared to be offering Italian architects a solution that enabled them to see things at a proper distance. The failures, reversals and disappointments of modern architecture in fact never really affected Louis Kahn.