Cemal Emden

From my book newsletter featuring "Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Buildings": https://archidose.substack.com/p/architecture-books-week-292024

Before his book on Scarpa, photographer Cemal Emden released with Prestel two books on two even more famous architects: "Le Corbusier: The Complete Buildings" (2017) and "The Essential Louis Kahn" (2021). The first, like the Scarpa book, aims for completeness, via the documentation of 52 extant buildings by Le Corbusier, while the Kahn book focuses on his “essential” buildings, what Jale N. Ezran describes in the introductory essay as “the mature period of Kahn’s active career,” from 1951 to 1974. This postwar period comprises just over twenty works, less than half of the number in each of the Corbusier and Scarpa books, meaning Emden could explore the buildings in more depth. With large-scale projects such as the Indian Institute of Management and the National Assembly in Dhaka, as well as such masterpieces as the Salk, the Kimbell, Exeter Library, and the YCBA, numerous photographs are required to fully capture the spaces, materials, and character of Kahn’s buildings. That said, I’m surprised not to see Emden providing the “money shot” of the Salk’s plaza and fountain leading to the Pacific; instead, we see an off-center shot akin to the one in "Re/Framing Louis Kahn," the 2017 exhibition that presented Emden’s photos alongside Kahn’s drawings.

Like the Scarpa book, "The Essential Louis Kahn" features contributions beyond Emden’s photographs. There are Ezran’s essay mentioned above, project descriptions by Caroline Maniaque accompanying the photos, and, in the back matter, a short essay and career-spanning chronology, both by Ayşe Zekiye Abali. These are valuable additions to Emden’s photographs, but unfortunately readers are not given biographical information on these contributors — a slight omission that was remedied in Emden’s later books featuring photographs of buildings by famous architects.… (plus d'informations)