ABSTRACT
At the time of his death in 1974 Louis Kahn was returning from a visit to his National Assembly building in Dacca, Bangladesh. He also happened to be carrying a sketchbook containing ideas for one of his nal commissions of national signicance, the Four Freedoms Park in New York City, a project representing Roosevelt’s presidential speech upholding freedom as a core American value.1 Kahn’s interest in the problem of nation building was thus far from episodic, and despite the apparent conict between his international status and grounded patriotism he consistently put forward views on national expression in architecture, in contrast – as he put it – to ‘people in this world who can’t even dare…to think about it’.2 In addition to public projects of national signicance for which he became so well known, Kahn’s engagement with the national question was occasionally unorthodox as demonstrated by an address to a group of naturalized citizens in Pennsylvania’s Eastern District Court in 1971. One of numerous instances where Kahn tried to capture the inspirational qualities of the US, he wrote ‘I think that a nation is measured by the character of its institutions. And I believe this country is the richest in institutions. And what it means…to me is availability’.3 For reasons linked to his Jewish descent Kahn obviously could not cloak his vision of national monumentality in the highly-charged rhetoric of soil, but neither did he entirely evade the issue by resorting to the technocratic neutrality of the international style. Kahn’s strong empathy with others, captured in the aphorism ‘you must be everybody, not only yourself’, was a measure of his commitment to the things that tie people together.4 Far from anthropocentric, this empathy even extended to the less-animate treasury of national resources: ‘the order of material’ wrote Kahn ‘is like knowing concrete immediately, as though you talked to every grain of it’.5 As
early as 1944 he stated that ‘monumentality is enigmatic’, before adding ‘the most advanced technology need [not] enter a work of monumental character for the same reason that the nest ink was not required to draw up the Magna Carta’.6 This statement clearly indicates an approach to national architectural representation transcending explicit content and gallant technology. With this in mind, and readopting Benedict Anderson’s analysis, how then did he propose to re-imagine the inspirations of the nation?7 Three intertwined strands can be identied: his continuity of revolutionary French architecture, an interest in the metaphysics of institutional beginnings, and a fascination with folklore and fairy tales.
