Louis I. Kahn: Light, Pastel, Eternity

Lecture by Michael J. Lewis, Faison-Pierson-Stoddard Professor of Art History at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts

Louis I. Kahn is architecture's greatest late bloomer. The classical architecture that he studied as a young man was made irrelevant by the Depression and World War II, forcing him to reinvent himself as a modernist. But in late life he rediscovered his architectural roots, which led him to forge the imaginative synthesis of classicism and modernism that is the central achievement of his career. Lewis will show how Kahn's travel sketches were crucial to this development and how they kept alive the memory of the great buildings of the past at a time when modernism had forgotten history.