History and Theory

"Archetype and Order in Recent American Architecture" (1954) was one of the first to see Kahn as a crucial figure in the reinvigoration of modernism, although he had scarcely anything at the time to show for himself other than the Yale Art Gallery. Nonetheless, Scully perceived "a desire for intrinsic order in which Kahn is transposing the researches of engineers like Samuely, Le Ricolais, and Buckminster Fuller into the terms of human experience which makes architecture" (70). This is a wonderfully succinct formulation of the central theme in Kahn's career, although the belief in "intrinsic order" would not be fully consummated until Kahn shed his belief in what Scully termed the "reproductive principle inherent in the structural unit." Only occasionally does Scully slip up, as in one example of pardonable wishful thinking. A poignant Kahn drawing of 1951 is identified as Mussolini's Foro Italico in Rome, as reconfigured by the architect who added "a building to the right to cast an ominous shadow" (302). In fact, that building was "added" not by Kahn but by Gianlorenzo Bernini, for it is nothing less than the piazza of St. Peter's, as Eugene J. Johnson has shown (Drawn from the Source: The Travel Drawings of Louis I. Kahn [Cambridge, Mass., 1996], 70-71). In the end, it is fitting that Modern Architecture and Other Essays stresses Scully the critic rather than the historian, for it seems certain that his most enduring accomplishment has been to inculcate in several generations of architects an awareness of the humanist dimension of their discipline, and to do so when the humanist component of architecture had been virtually extinguished. For relighting this flame, Scully deserves our gratitude, as does Levine for his role in assembling this volume. The undertaking of such a project, commemorating the work of a colleague, is an act of considerable selflessness, and a rare one at that.