宾夕法尼亚州费城交通研究项目

"What spaces, what activities, what buildings form the creative center of human communication?" This probing philosophical question, posed in 1955 by the American architect Louis I. Kahn, underlies the extraordinarily powerful buildings and projects for which he is known, as well as these two studies of Philadelphia's city center. In the 1950s Kahn had relatively little real work. Philadelphia, where he lived nearly all his life, was launching a decade of immense redevelopment, and Kahn was at the forefront. His numerous studies, many of them made independently without a commission, focused on the historic center city. These visionary drawings are significant not as blueprints for Philadelphia's redevelopment but because they reveal forms and ideas fulfilled in Kahn's later masterpieces.