Submitted by Ian, Mar 16, 2007 11:26

Does the book make this error or is it Gardner's? It's not just a quibble. There would have been something oddly fitting about Kahn dying under the roof of one of the icons of the Beaux-Arts tradition which formed the foundation of his design sensibility.

To pass away instead in the underground shoddiness of the new Penn Station, designed by the business-titan-turned-architect Charles Luckman, represented a final struggle against the very type of superficial corporate slickness Kahn was working against.

Luckman and many other American architects of the period had so thoroughly lost contact with any sort of social aspiration that they were happy to churn out the chintz wallpaper of materialism and call it architecture. Kahn's work, by contrast, was centered around ennobling spaces and the humble materials (usually concrete) that defined them. Ironically for a man with so many personal faults, his work centered around the individual human spirit, making his infamously anonymous death in the basement of a building representing the triumph of corporate prerogatives over societal ones that much crueler. Happily, though, the rebirth of interest in Kahn's work coupled with the planned rebuilding of Penn Station suggests that it was not in vain.

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