http://www.myarchitectfilm.com
Questions and Notes for Discussion
Take note of Kahn’s drawings – some of them are very rough, and not all that “draughtsman-like” yet they capture the basic structure of buildings, light and space.
Motif - (pronounced mo-teef) - A French term which refers to: the subject matter or content of a work of art (e.g., a landscape motif); also refers to a visual element used in a work of art, as in a recurring motif (i.e., Warhol used the motif of soup cans in his early works; or Mondrian used rectangles as a visual motif). Much of Kahn’s architecture uses recurring motifs of simple geometric shapes: circles, squares, and triangles. Why do you think this is?
Kahn believed in “the truth of materials.” There is a passage in the film where he describes the beginnings of his working process by talking to a brick, and asking the brick what it wants to be. What do you think this means, and how does it help us understand his thought process?
Louis Kahn built very few buildings in his career, yet he was considered a great architect and a true artist. I. M. Pei, another great architect who was commercial success, felt that he was not an artistic success. What is artistic success, and are these 2 kinds of success incompatible?
Artists are often stereotyped as temperamental, difficult to work with, and (if they are male) womanizers. This seems to have been the case with Kahn, as well as artists like Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, and even Michelangelo. Does an artist’s social behavior affect the way you view their work? Is biography important?
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