ABSTRACT
Louis Kahn's acceptance by the architects of the Group of Architects and City Planners was contingent upon a reassessment of the idea of the organic and of a work of art, existing side by side with Marxist thinking, which was always suspicious of aesthetics. Kahn was certainly the first to make use of compression arches and not false arches, and he takes the credit for demonstrating their static function; in this, he showed a certain affinity with Muratori, not in his actual buildings, but in his way of addressing theoretical problems. As regards critical reception, Kahn obviously was more successful, since, apart from his powerful vocation as an architect, his discovery of history and of the validity of his beaux arts education came about in an intellectual climate much different from that in Italy. Kahn lived at a time when there was no recession; in fact, the economy was booming.
