NEW HAVEN, CONN.- This spring, the Yale Center for British Art, in association with Yale University Press, and in collaboration with the publisher Designers & Books, will release a facsimile edition of The Notebooks and Drawings of Louis I. Kahn. Created by Richard Saul Wurman, along with printer Eugene Feldman, and first issued by Falcon Press in 1962, the book is one of the earliest published acknowledgements of the genius of modern architect Louis I. Kahn (1901–1974).

With the original edition long out of print, the 2022 facsimile is accompanied by an all new Reader’s Guide that provides rich context for understanding Kahn’s art and his thinking. The Reader’s Guide includes writings by a variety of critics and colleagues as well as Kahn’s personal recollections and unpublished speeches. It also features sketches from Kahn’s travels and drawings related to selected projects, many of them previously unpublished.

Wurman, a former student of Kahn who was employed in his Philadelphia o5ce, personally selected the drawings for the book. “I didn’t choose what were considered his best, most finished drawings,” Wurman shared. “I chose those that spoke to me much in the same way that Lou would say you had a conversation with a building...the drawings that told me what they were trying to be.”

The Notebooks and Drawings of Louis I. Kahn contains a section of travel sketches from the 1950s depicting sites in Greece, Egypt, Italy, and France that reflect Kahn’s abiding interest in interpreting monumental forms. Another section features early drawings and renderings for well-known projects, including: the Sculpture Garden at the Yale University Art Gallery; the A. N. Richards Medical Research Building (Laboratories) at the University of Pennsylvania; the General Motors Exhibition Building for the 1964 New York World’s Fair; and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California; as well as visionary studies for the Philadelphia city center.

The 2022 edition of The Notebooks and Drawings of Louis I. Kahn includes a handwritten note by Kahn to Wurman and Feldman about his perspective on The Notebooks. The facsimile edition and Reader’s Guide are produced with the approval and cooperation of Wurman, Nathaniel Kahn, Sue Ann Kahn, Alexandra Tyng, and the Louis I. Kahn Collection at the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania.