ABSTRACT
The pavilion is the architectural type at the heart of Louis Kahn’s mature work (Illustration 5.1). For a large number of his interpreters, Kahn’s pavilion is the pavilion of Ledoux, rescued from the soulless utility to which Durand had condemned it. Kahn calls up Boullée and Laugier, or Hadrian, or the ur-architect of Solomon’s Temple. It was in celebration of Kahn’s work—and also Philip Johnson’s—that the word “archetype” came back into architecture in the twentieth century. But the pavilion cluster that is the paradigm of the Trenton Bath House is called “hardly new” by Kahn scholars; to them, it is a familiar if not quite common form in progressive architecture, of Kahn’s present as well as the past. 1 I do not intend to problematize those judgments here, or present any kind of Unified Field Theory of Louis Kahn. This chapter, when it deals with Kahn, will do so rather narrowly. I would like here to reconvene the actors in Kahn’s architectural culture, also makers of pavilions.
