The simple, flat facade treatment of Howe's Speiser House renovation within a downtown residential block of Philadelphia may well be the precedent for Kahn's similar facade treatment of Congregation Ahavath Israel (1935-37) which is also within a residential block of upper north Philadelphia. Congregation Ahavath Israel was Kahn's first independent project.
"Louis I. Kahn, in many ways a spiritual successor to George Howe, seems to understand better than any architect alive today, the Beaux-Arts theories of architecture. These he learned from Paul Cret and from his years of association with Howe."
Robert A. M. Stern, "PSFS: Beaux-Arts Theory and Rational Expresion" in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (May 1962), p. 95.
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George Howe, Maurice Speiser House (Philadelphia: 2005 Delancey Place, remodeled 1933), images: 1998.11.21.
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2015.06.19 10:33
Are diagrams in architecture bullshit and ditto for process?
"The Duck and the Decorated Shed" came within a year or two after the completed construction of Guild House (1961-66), coinciding with the marriage of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown--23 July 1967.
Before Guild House there is George Howe's Maurice Speiser House (1933) and Louis Kahn's Congregation Ahavath Israel (1935-37) (Venturi's immediate Philadelphia architecture legacy) and Moretti's Casa "Il Girasole (1947-50) (effect of Venturi's study in Rome 1954-56).
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