Giovanni Battista Piranesi Plan of Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli published by Francesco Piranesi 1781
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Antiquity so came alive for those members of the Academy who had the wit to see it, and for Kahn it must have been as if a rather baggy mistress, abandoned in the bread lines, had walked youthful into the room. His sketches around the Mediterranean show the great masses of Egypt looming, the columns of Karnak, the quarries at Aswan. The buttressed wall of the Athenian Acropolis rises, and the tholos at Marmaria lies before Apollo's throne. Most of all, though no adequate drawing remains, the columns still stood at Paestum, and Kahn saw them once again. Arcuated Praeneste, the foliating Palatine, and, especially, the miraculous spaces of Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli were all seen anew with an intensity of vision the Beaux-Arts had never been able to summon up.
Vincent Scully, Jr., Louis I. Kahn (New York: George Brazilier. 1962), p. 18.
At Yale Kahn was also in close contact with Philip Johnson and with that architect's then very fresh principles of classicizing order. More broadly, the debilitating hostility between architect and historian which had characterized some of the pedagogy of the Modern Movement was on the wane at Yale, despite periodic attempts to revive it, and Kahn was exposed there to free, as against what might be called court (late Beaux-Arts or Bauhaus) Art History in general. He often dropped in on lectures; San Gimignano, Hadrian's Villa, and the work of Brunelleschi were rather obsessive favorites at the time.
Vincent Scully, Jr., Louis I. Kahn (New York: George Brazilier. 1962), p. 19.
Early shapes used were pure derivations from the fanning pattern of the lower peristyle of Domitian's palace on the Palatine or from the "Teatro Marittimo" of Hadrian's Villa. It will be recalled that Wright had long before adapted the plan of the Villa as a whole for his Florida Southern College of 1939...
Vincent Scully, Jr., Louis I. Kahn (New York: George Brazilier. 1962), p. 37.
Frank Lloyd Wright Florida Southern College 1939
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