You can listen to the track in full with a registered Spotify account, which comes for free.
Louis Kahn II
Louis Kahn, 1901-1974
Richard Saul Wurman: ‘Frustration and failure are really the things that make you. Maybe he was made by being short and ugly and Jewish and having a bad voice, because it made him go internal.’ (Nathaniel Kahn, My Architect, Tartan Video DVD, 2005)
Frank Ghery: ‘I think he had trouble because he was a mystic and couldn’t talk the lingo of the business world. My first works came out of my reverence for him’. (Nathaniel Kahn, My Architect, Tartan Video DVD, 2005)
Louis Kahn, architectural drawing
Louis Kahn, Kimbell Art Museum (Fort Worth, Texas; 1972)
Construction supervisors of Louis Kahn’s building, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas: ‘You’d ask Lou a question and you’d get a lecture, you never would get an answer, you’d get a dissertation on the philosophy behind the thought. He was just an artist, you know, and most artists don’t have any discipline.’ (Nathaniel Kahn, My Architect, Tartan Video DVD, 2005)
Architect Philip Johnson outside his glass house in Connecticut, talking with Kahn’s son, Nathaniel. Johnson: ‘When he did get a client—how he ever got any client is a mystery, because artists don’t get jobs—he did it by being an artist. He’d sit and work—on art. He was his own artist. He was free, compared to me.’ (Nathaniel Kahn, My Architect, Tartan Video DVD, 2005)
Philip Johnson, Glass House (New Canaan, Connecticut; 1949)
Louis Kahn, Salk Institute (San Diego, 1966)
I.M. Pei on Louis Kahn’s building, the Salk Institute: ‘That building will stand the test of time. No question about it.’ (Nathaniel Kahn, My Architect, Tartan Video DVD, 2005)
I.M. Pei: ‘His three of four masterpieces are more important than my fifty or sixty buildings’. (Nathaniel Kahn, My Architect, Tartan Video DVD, 2005)
Louis Kahn, Salk Institute (San Diego, 1966)
David Bowie, 1990 | photo: Clive Arrowsmith
THROUGH THESE ARCHITECT’S EYES
David Bowie
Stomping along on this big Philip Johnson
Is delay just wasting my time?
Looking across at Richard Rogers
Scheming dreams to blow both their minds
It’s difficult you see
To give up baby
To leave a job
When you know the money’s from day to day
All the majesty of a city landscape
All the soaring days of our lives
All the concrete dreams in my mind’s eye
All the joy I see through these architect’s eyes
Cold winter bleeds on the girders of Babel
This stone boy watching the crawling land
Rings of flesh and the towers of iron
The steaming caves and the rocks and the sand
Stomping along on this big Philip Johnson
Is delay just wasting my time?
It’s difficult you see
To give up baby
These summer scum-holes
This goddamned starving life
All the majesty of a city landscape
All the soaring days of our lives
All the concrete dreams in my mind’s eye
All the joy I see through these architect’s eyes
It’s difficult you see, it’s difficult you see
All the majesty of a city landscape
All the soaring days in our lives
All the concrete dreams in my mind’s eye
All the joy I see through these architect’s eyes
Nathaniel Kahn, My Architect (Tartan, 2005)