Stanford Anderson

Public Institutions: Louis I. Kahn's Reading of Volume Zero

In the work of architects like Louis I. Kahn or Frank Lloyd Wright, we discover imagination and profound understanding not only of architecture, but also of the societal forces that enable and employ architecture. Such imagination and understanding require critical, reflective, and imaginative minds—fueled by criticism of our present condition and hypotheses of what is best and most sustaining in our experience. Difficult as such an enterprise is, we have a right to expect this ambition in architects, particularly when they are entrusted to shape our civic and public realm.

The "New Empiricism-Bay Region Axis": Kay Fisker and Postwar Debates on Functionalism, Regionalism, and Monumentality

Danish architect Kay Fislcer is presented as a representative figure in the post–World War II architectural debates on functionalism, regionalism, and monumentality. Fisker participated in a transatlantic exchange on these matters that linked Scandinavia, the English conception of “new empiricism,” and the teaching and architectural practice associated with two noted American schools at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley. Prominent Americans in this program for a modern architecture that confronted the more dominant ideology of the International Style included Lewis Mumford, William Wilson Wurster, Pietro Belluschi, and Lawrence B. Anderson.