Book Talk – Louis I. Kahn: The Last Notebook

Join us for the book launch and discussion of Louis I. Kahn: The Last Notebook (Lars Müller Publishers, 2024).

This intimate conversation will celebrate the publication of Louis I. Kahn: The Last Notebook and commemorate the 50th anniversary of Kahn’s death on March 17, 1974. The publication honors Kahn’s enduring legacy through the notebook in which the renowned American architect sketched and wrote during the last year of his life. Publisher Lars Müller has exquisitely reproduced a facsimile of Kahn’s notebook; a companion commentary volume, edited by Sue Ann Kahn with an essay by Michael Lewis, provides context for the facsimile material.

Anchored by a magnificent set of drawings illustrating the final design of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park in New York City (1973/74, posthumously completed in 2012), Louis I. Kahn: The Last Notebook provides an intimate glimpse into the architect’s mind and design process. The included private sketches and poetic reflections reveal Kahn’s spiritual understanding of architecture as inclusive of our total environment and shed new light on the architect’s influential philosophy for designing, building, and conceiving architecture.

Speakers:
Lars Müller, Founder, Lars Müller Publishers
Sue Ann Kahn, Editor, Louis I. Kahn: The Last Notebook
Michael J. Lewis, Architecture Critic, Wall Street Journal 

Moderated by:
Alexandra Polier, President, DNA

About the Speakers:
Lars Müller is a designer and publisher based in Zürich, Switzerland. In 1983, Müller published his first book and, as Lars Müller Publishers, has produced some 800 titles to date. Lars Müller Publishers is internationally active and has made a name for itself with carefully edited and designed publications. Lars Müller works closely with his editors and authors to produce significant publications of great independence, to the highest possible standards.

Sue Ann Kahn, daughter of Louis I. Kahn, has advocated for the preservation and restoration of her father’s architecture for over three decades. She has also been an active consultant and significant lender to the major exhibitions on his work. In 1996, she co-curated Louis I. Kahn Drawings: Travel Sketches and Synagogue Project for The Jewish Museum in New York; and in 2017, she collaborated on an exhibition of Kahn’s pastel works at his Kimbell Art Museum. She is the author of a number of recent articles about her father’s drawings: “The Color of Light, the Treasury of Shadows” in Louis Kahn: The Importance of a Drawing, edited by Michael Merrill (Lars Müller Publishers, 2021) and “My Father the Artist” in Reader’s Guide to The Notebooks and Drawings of Louis I. Kahn (Yale University Press, 2022). Sue Ann Kahn is a noted flute soloist, teacher, and chamber musician.

Michael J. Lewis is Faison-Pierson-Stoddard Professor of Art History at Williams College, Massachusetts, where he has taught American art and architecture since 1993. He received a B.A. from Haverford College, completed two years at the University of Hanover in Germany, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1989. He has taught at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania; McGill University, Quebec; and the University of Natal, South Africa. His books include Frank Furness: Architecture and the Violent Mind (W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), American Art and Architecture (Thames & Hudson USA, 2006), the prize-winning August Reichensperger: The Politics of the German Gothic Revival (The MIT Press, 1993), and Drawn from the Source: The Travel Drawings of Louis I. Kahn with Eugene J. Johnson (The MIT Press, 1996).  His research interests include architectural theory, utopian and communal societies, architectural education, and the nature of creativity. In a journalistic capacity, he writes for a wide variety of publications – since 2019, as the architecture critic for The Wall Street Journal.