8 Revelations From Louis Kahn’s Last Sketchbook

The architect who designed some of the 20th century’s great buildings kept a notebook with intimate glimpses into his creative vision. Now it’s his daughter’s final goodbye.

When the architect Louis Kahn, who designed some of the 20th century’s most notable buildings, appeared in public, he could generally be seen carrying a dark red, hardcover Winsor & Newton sketchbook. In a time well before digital supremacy, the designer of soaring modern icons, including the Salk Institute in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego and the National Parliament building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, etched drawings, doodles, thoughts, and the miscellanea of life.

Kahn died in 1974, at age 73, and his daughter Sue Ann, a noted flutist and teacher, inherited more than a dozen of her father’s notebooks from her mother, Esther, when she passed away in 1996. Each book fascinated Sue Ann, but it was the final one, from her father’s last year of life, that drew her closest attention.

In it, Kahn had sketched, from beginning to end, his plans for what was then called the Roosevelt Memorial — now the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms State Park, on Roosevelt Island in New York City, completed in 2012, long after his death. He also worked out plans for Abbasabad, a sprawling and undulating new civic center in Tehran, for the Shah of Iran (never built), and for the Yale Center for British Art (completed in 1977), among other notes.

More personally, the notebook, which captured “the private process of what mattered to him,” Sue Ann said in an interview, connected her to the final moments of her father’s life. He had been traveling around the world, chasing commissions and carrying out work. She barely got to see him that year, and she never got to say goodbye. (Kahn, based in Philadelphia, was found dead of a heart attack in a bathroom in New York’s Penn Station.)