Cemal Emden's Photographs - Drawings and Paintings

Pera Museum presents "A Fresh Look at Louis Kahn: Photographs, Drawings and Paintings by Cemal Emden," an exhibition focusing on the works and artistic endeavors of Louis Kahn, an American architect, thinker and artist who was one of the important figures in 20th-century world architecture. Held between 7 December 2017 and 4 March 2018 under the curatorship of N. Müge Cengizkan, the exhibition presents Louis Kahn's multifaceted personality in Turkey for the first time, accompanied by photographs by architect and photographer Cemal Emden. The exhibition "A Fresh Look at Louis Kahn: Photographs, Drawings and Paintings by Cemal Emden," organized by Pera Museum under the sponsorship of Seranit Group and with the support of Arçelik, is curated by architect N. Müge Cengizkan, with design by Bülent Erkmen. The exhibition, centered on photographs documented by architect and photographer Cemal Emden that offer a fresh perspective on Kahn's works, opens to visitors on Thursday, 7 December. The exhibition brings together drawings and photographs of Kahn's architectural works in Pennsylvania, where he spent his entire life, worked and taught, as well as in Dhaka and Ahmedabad, along with sketches created in pencil, pastel and watercolor during his European travels. Structured around the themes "Tectonics with Light," "Establishing Place" and "Molding the Program," the exhibition also presents short films in which architects and educators from the Middle East Technical University who were once his students in America share their experiences and thoughts, as well as a selection of books written by or about Kahn. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition "A Fresh Look at Louis Kahn: Photographs, Drawings and Paintings by Cemal Emden," edited by N. Müge Cengizkan and designed by Bülent Erkmen, includes articles by N. Müge Cengizkan, Jale Erzen, Ahmet Gülgönen, Gönül Aslanoğlu Evyapan, Neslihan Dostoğlu, Cengiz Yetken, Yıldırım Yavuz and Orhan Özgüner, as well as texts by Kahn translated into Turkish for the first time: "Silence and Light," "Room, Street and Human Agreement" and "Law and Rule in Architecture." Curator Cengizkan, who characterizes the exhibition and catalogue as products of efforts to capture and reflect the essence of the artist, states: "Throughout his life, in the architectural works and paintings he created, Kahn relentlessly pursues the traces of beginnings, eternal truths, measurable and immeasurable values, light and silence.

His drawings, paintings and sketches rendered primarily in pencil, pastel and watercolor constitute a remarkable whole as significant as his architectural works."

Turning Points in His Architectural Career and Biographical Sketches

Louis Isadore Kahn was born in 1901 in Pärnu, Russia (today Estonia). During the period when he emigrated to Philadelphia with his family in 1906, he began receiving his first awards for his paintings. He was admitted with a full scholarship to the School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania in 1920. He graduated in 1924 with a degree in architecture and the Arthur Spayd Brooke Memorial Award, given to those demonstrating exceptional achievement.             Following various partnerships established in Philadelphia, his architectural career, which he pursued between the 1950s and 1970s, left behind intense and influential marks. In 1947 he began serving on thesis juries at Princeton University, and in 1949 he entered the architecture studios at Yale University. In 1955 he moved to the School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, where in his "Master's Studio" he left a legendary legacy completed by approximately 425 students from 40 countries. His first solo exhibition containing his architectural works opens at the White Art Museum in New York (today Johnson Art Museum). The exhibition he opened at MoMA in 1966, consisting of 186 original drawings, 22 models and 69 large-format photographs, is retrospective in nature. Kahn participated in the Venice Architecture Biennale in 1968 with an installation titled Ambiente, and a year later again in Venice he opened a single-structure exhibition for the Congress Palace, his only project in Europe. Concurrent with his growing world recognition, exhibitions he opened increased in content and frequency. In his final years, he worked on landmark structures such as the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, Kimbell Art Museum, Phillips Exeter Academy Library and Indian Institute of Management. He designed the Bangladesh National Parliament (Sher-e-Bangla Nagar), Yale Center for British Art and the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial. Kahn died on 17 March 1974 as a result of a heart attack he suffered at New York's Pennsylvania Station.

The Kahn Archive, Documentation and Publications

Following his death, his archive consisting of 6,363 drawings, models, photographs and letters was purchased by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and permanently transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in 1977. The works catalogued and classified there are published under the title The Louis I. Kahn Archive: Personal Drawings in Seven Volumes. His son Nathaniel Kahn prepared a biographical documentary in 2003 titled My Architect: A Son's Journey, which was nominated for an Academy Award. Alongside this film focused on Kahn, dozens of subsequent books and exhibitions, along with works that have entered world modern architecture literature, constitute evidence of Kahn's profound, influential and lasting legacy. "A Fresh Look at Louis Kahn: Photographs, Drawings and Paintings by Cemal Emden" exhibition can be visited until 4 March 2018.