H EADLINES
a request that Kahn granted.

Working with experimental
printer Eugene Feldman,
Wurman collected Kahn’s
travel sketches from Greece,
Egypt, Italy and France,
alongside early drawings
of his completed projects,
like the Richards Medical
Research Laboratories at
Penn. Th ere are also renderings
of Kahn’s ideas for Center
City, never realized. Wurman
interspersed the drawings
with text — adaptations
Louis Kahn’s 1951 crayon
drawing of Delphi, included in
“The Notebooks and Drawings
of Louis I. Kahn”
Photos courtesy of Designers & Books
career, Kahn, who was based
in Philadelphia for much of
his life, distinguished himself
among architects as a singular
thinker and builder, sought
aft er across the world, according
to Wurman. He designed
everything from Philadelphia
Housing Authority projects
to the National Assembly
Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

He designed
museums, homes, churches, schools and
synagogues; Kahn built JCCs,
research centers, factories and
libraries. He
frequently took
Philadelphia as his subject,
even if his grander ideas for
a redesigned, carless Center
City (or Congregation Mikveh
Israel) never came to fruition.

He died in 1974, leaving
behind a trove of drawings,
writings, speeches and other
papers collected today in the
Louis I. Kahn Collection at the
Architectural Archives of the
University of Pennsylvania.

Wurman, a Philadelphia
native who studied architecture
at Penn, learned and worked
under Kahn for years, and
became a devotee of his work.

When he was just 25, Wurman
asked Kahn if he might allow
Wurman to collect some of his
sketches and texts into a book,
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM of Kahn’s speeches that he’d
recorded and transcribed
himself. Th e book’s 2021 edition
will be a reproduction of the
1973 second edition, produced
by MIT Press, which added a
letter from Kahn to Wurman
and Feldman refl ecting on the
original. “Lou Kahn was and is my
mentor,” Wurman said.

Since Kahn’s
death, Wurman has enjoyed success
and multiple honors — a
Guggenheim Fellowship,
grants from the National
Endowment for the Arts — and
founded the TED conference in
1984. But Kahn’s work speaks
to him through the decades,
communicating ideas and a
passion for craft .

“It changes your life, when
you listen, and are one of those
people who is interested in
absorbing what he had to say,
actually listening to what he
had to say,” he said. ●
jbernstein@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0740
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...to be continued
JEWISH EXPONENT
APRIL 8, 2021
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