Architect: The Louis Kahn Opera
One of the watercolors by Michiko Theurer evoking Kahn.
The Center for Architecture is known for programming variety, but last Thursday night’s premier of Architect: a chamber opera was a first. Granted, the film premier benefiting the CFA Foundation wasn’t live opera, but it was the first time the public got to hear the piece by Lewis Spratlan. The Pulitzer Prize winning composer’s music was paired with electroacoustical music by John Downey and Jenny Kallick, whose process involved “sound sampling” spaces designed by Kahn, such as the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. Spratlan’s music was then electronically “placed” within the various spaces.
On View> 194X–9/11: American Architects and the City
Mies van der Rohe's Museum for a Small City Project, 1942 (Courtesy MoMA)
194X–9/11: American Architects and the City
The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St.
Through January 2
Prompted by the United States’ entrance into World War II in 1942, Architectural Forum magazine commissioned pioneering architects to imagine and plan a postwar American city. At the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, 194X-9/11: American Architects and the City features the plans, renderings, and sculpture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Paul Rudolph, and Rem Koolhaas and their ideas for cities of the future. Rarely displayed works, such as Mies van der Rohe’s collage Museum for a Small City Project (1942), above, reveal plans for cultural centers and urban life in uncertain times.
Highlight> Louis I. Kahn: Building A View
(Courtesy Lori Bookstein Fine Art)
Lori Bookstein Fine Art
138 Tenth Ave., New York
Through June 25
The architect Louis Kahn drew inspiration from his travels, both in foreign lands and closer to home. A new exhibition brings together drawings, watercolors, pastels, and oil paintings Kahn made between the late 1920s and the early 1950s during trips around the United States, Canada, Europe, and Egypt. From New England churches to Egyptian rock quarries, the collected works offer Kahn’s interpretation of diverse landscapes and cityscapes, like Coastal Village, No. 2, Isle Madame, Nova Scotia (1936), above. In the exhibition, Kahn’s artwork is contextualized with his postcards and other travel ephemera.
Bathing Beauty
(courtesy kahntrentonbathhouse.org)
Since My Architect, interest in Louis Kahn’s work has grown exponentially, and many of his lesser-known buildings have received greater care. Among the most endangered was the Trenton Bath House in Ewing, New Jersey. Though it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, it’s future was uncertain until 2007 when the Township of Ewing and Mercer County, NJ acquired the property and agreed to restore it, a process you can now follow on a new website.
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