Suspending Modernity: France Albini & Louis Kahn

Comparisons between the work of contemporaries Franco Albini and Louis Kahn allow us to place the Italian architect in an international milieu for his role in redefining modernism beyond nationalist boundaries. The two architects shared a vision of the room as the unit element of modern architecture. The uncanny similarity between coincident projects positions Albini along with Kahn among the key figures in post-war modern architecture.Both architects elected as mid-career themes alternatives to persistent problems of expression and function worn out by mediocre interpretations of the International style. Both found motifs and principles that transcended style when consulting tradition to give syntax to their idiosyncratic languages. Kahn preferred materials of compression, while Albini’s tensile steel contrasted with the materiality of the existing historic city to confront new with old, yet both understood and exploited technology to express the Zeitgeist. Kahn’s poetics and Albini’s ‘magical abstraction’ emerge as parallel responses to the larger questions of a post-ideological modernism.

Volume Editors
Marilys R. Nepomechie & Robert Gonzalez

ISBN
0-935502-54-8