Last night Becca Kantor gave a presentation at the Kelly Writers House about her grandfather - the architect Louis I. Kahn. With a grant from us (KWH and CPCW) she traveled to Estonia, where Kahn was born and where he briefly returned as an adult, and imagined his beginnings personally and architecturally. Soon we'll have links to the audio and video recordings of the event. I was pleased to see a full house: Becca's former high school teachers, many Kahn scholars and admirers, several members of the Kahn family who have, like Becca, been tracking and thinking about Kahn's unusual, partly elusive, life. An article in today's Daily Pennsylvanian describes the scene. Becca is writing a novel about all this (having worked with Max Apple during her Penn days).
Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Louis Kahn's grand-daughter
Last night Becca Kantor gave a presentation at the Kelly Writers House about her grandfather - the architect Louis I. Kahn. With a grant from us (KWH and CPCW) she traveled to Estonia, where Kahn was born and where he briefly returned as an adult, and imagined his beginnings personally and architecturally. Soon we'll have links to the audio and video recordings of the event. I was pleased to see a full house: Becca's former high school teachers, many Kahn scholars and admirers, several members of the Kahn family who have, like Becca, been tracking and thinking about Kahn's unusual, partly elusive, life. An article in today's Daily Pennsylvanian describes the scene. Becca is writing a novel about all this (having worked with Max Apple during her Penn days).
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
