Brought to Light

The Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania announces the exhibition Brought to Light: The Houses of Louis Kahn, opening on his birthday, Thursday, February 20. This exhibition, the first to focus on the architect’s domestic designs, celebrates the publication of The Houses of Louis Kahn (Yale University Press), written by George H. Marcus, Adjunct Assistant Professor of the History of Art, and William Whitaker, Curator of the Louis I. Kahn Collection at the Architectural Archives, who have also organized the exhibition.

The internationally renowned architect Louis I. Kahn (1901-1974) completed nine houses, all in the Philadelphia area. Although this is a small number, the design of houses spanned his entire career and was every bit as compelling for him, and as pivotal for his work, as the design of his other buildings. Over a period of more than forty years he developed his ideas about domestic spaces into one of the most remarkable and varied expressions of the American private house.

This exhibition examines Kahn’s design of houses from his earliest works as an architect to the three culminating houses of his career, the Margaret Esherick house in Chestnut Hill (1959-62), Norman and Doris Fisher House in Hatboro (1960-67), and Steven and Toby Korman house in Whitemarsh Township (1971-73), where his singular approach to the creation of houses was fully resolved.