Coming to Light

Coming to Light: The Louis I. Kahn Monument to Franklin D. Roosevelt for New York City
Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, 2005

Paperback | 12 x 8 inches | 48 pages | 44 illustrations | English | $20.00

PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:

Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name co-sponsored by The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture and the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute at The Cooper Union from January 10 – February 18, 2005, this catalogue examines the evolution of Louis I. Kahn’s design for the Roosevelt Memorial, his only completed late work that remains unbuilt.

Designed between 1972 and Kahn’s death in March 1974, the memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt was to be constructed at Southpoint Park on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island. Reproduced within the book’s pages are illustrations of Kahn’s model and drawings for the memorial including previously unpublished sketches from a pocket notebook that Kahn carried with him during his travels. These are accompanied by the construction documents for the project, which were completed with the support of the office of Mitchell/Giurgola Architects and David Wisdom Architect after Kahn's death in March 1974.

The catalogue contains several major texts on both the Roosevelt Memorial and its context within the body of Kahn’s work. These include Kahn and the Civic Realm by Robert Geddes, Kahn and the Belated Monument by Michael J. Lewis, and Monument, Memory and Modernism by Anthony Vidler, Dean of The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture.

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dDAB COMMENTARY:

After reviewing Harriet Pattison's great memoir of her fifteen years with Louis I. Kahn, Our Days Are Like Full Years, I couldn't resist grabbing off the shelf my copy of the catalog to the Cooper Union exhibition devoted to FDR Four Freedoms State Park, which Kahn and Pattison designed together. The catalog was very helpful when I created a walking tour including Roosevelt Island as part of my 2019 book NYC Walks: Guide to New Architecture. The tour — a ferry tour that starts in Manhattan, goes to Queens, and ends on Roosevelt Island — is the last one in my book, and the FDR memorial, located at the southern tip of the island, ends up being the very last project in the whole book. While this is somewhat ironic, given the guidebook's "new architecture" subtitle and the fact the project was designed in 1973 but not completed until 2012, the memorial's tapered symmetry and rows of lindens work as a good summation of New York City in its entirety: "a city of islands and waterways, a natural place that has been tamed through order and geometry over its 400-year existence."

I do mention Kahn collaborating with Pattison in NYC Walks, but for the most part I speak of the project as Kahn's. The same diminishment of her role is found in the catalog to Coming to Light, with Michael J. Lewis giving Pattison her only mention among the essays, and just a parenthetical one at that: "(This element [the wedge-shaped grove] was the contribution of Harriet Pattison, who provided the landscaping for many projects during these years.)" But in my review of Pattison's memoir I point out that Kahn "made it clear" to her that they "would do this one together from the beginning." So it is clearly a collaboration and perhaps deserves the same co-credit that the Barcelona Pavilion, long accredited to just Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, has received in recent years, including Lilly Reich as co-author in all official descriptions of the design. If I were writing NYC Walks now, post-Pattison memoir, I certainly would have changed some of the description and credited the project differently.

[I wrote the below paragraph a couple years ago on my defunct Unpacking My Library blog. I'm migrating it here, as it still summarizes my position on the book, now amended by the information in the above paragraphs.]

This book documents an exhibition of the same name that was held at The Cooper Union in early 2005. The subject was Louis Kahn's then-unbuilt memorial to FDR and his Four Freedoms speech, to be situated at the southern tip of Roosevelt Island in the East River. Depending on whom you believe, the exhibition was integral in getting the memorial built seven years later. I didn't see the exhibition in person, though I'd come across its online companion and read many of the essays before coming across this book in a used bookstore. Why buy the print catalog, if the online one is basically the same? Short answer: the drawings. While the drawings are on the Cooper Union website, they are tiny, hardly revealing much information beyond form. In print, the sketches and working drawings are as big as they can be without filling the page. Furthermore, the linen cover and page layout, combined with the drawings and other images, make for a handsome companion to an exhibition that is long gone — but not forgotten.

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