at home: Book Discussion | “The Notebooks and Drawings of Louis I. Kahn” with Richard Saul Wurman

Conversation
August 5, 2022

Richard Saul Wurman, architect, author, and founder of the TED conference, in conversation with Dan Klyn, information architect

at home: Book Discussion

Join us for lively and inspiring conversations with some of today’s most notable scholars. Our at home: Book Discussion talks bring together authors, editors, and collaborators to discuss their latest publications.

About "The Notebooks and Drawings of Louis I. Kahn"

Originally published in 1962 and long out of print, The Notebooks and Drawings of Louis I. Kahn was the first book to feature Kahn’s own images and words—and it was Kahn’s favorite book on his work. There are full-size reproductions of Kahn’s early sketches from his European travels in the 1950s, renderings of designs for several of his notable buildings, unpublished speeches, and excerpts from lectures, radio broadcasts, and other sources.

The two-volume set includes a facsimile of the original publication and an illustrated Reader’s Guide that features essays and commentary by writers such as scholar William Whitaker and Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Paul Goldberger, family members, and fellow architects such as Frank Gehry, Tadao Ando, and Denise Scott Brown that contextualize the enormous impact and continuing legacy of one of the twentieth century’s most influential architects.

About Richard Saul Wurman

Born in 1935, Wurman is an American architect, author, and graphic designer. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. He has written, designed, and published ninety books on topics ranging from city guides to health manuals to volumes on financial planning and the Olympics. Wurman first met Kahn at the University of Pennsylvania, where Kahn was a professor of architecture from 1956 until his death. Wurman began working for Kahn in 1960 and they developed a deep professional relationship.

Wurman created and chaired the TED conference (1984–2002), the TEDMED conference (1995–2010), and the WWW conference and EG, an annual gathering of innovators. He is the recipient of the Penn Alumni’s 2014 Spirit Award and the Arthur Spayed Brooks Gold Medal, among many others. He holds several honorary doctorates, Graham Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. He was the Distinguished Professor of the Practice at Northeastern University, Boston. Wurman is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and winner of the Best Guide Book Award (1987) from London Tourist Board and Convention Bureau for London Access: Richard Saul Wurman’s Ultimate Guide.

Wurman is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and is in the Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame. He contributed to Genius: 100 Visions of the Future, a project sponsored by the Einstein Legacy Project and was awarded the 2019 Star Award from the Commercial Interior Design Association. Recent projects include Urban Observatory, an interactive and comparative exhibit of maps of cities around the world, all possible from one location; UnderstandingUnderstanding (2017), a journey through the myriad ways that he and his muses created idiosyncratic manners of understanding; and his latest book, Mortality (2019). Wurman lives in Golden Beach, Florida, with his wife, novelist Gloria Nagy.

About Dan Klyn

Klyn teaches information architecture at the University of Michigan School of Information, Ann Arbor. He is co-founder of World Information Architecture Day, past president of the Information Architecture Institute, and a founding member of the teaching faculty at Building Beauty. He co-founded The Understanding Group with Bob Royce, an information architecture consultancy which helps organize and manage complex information. He has worked as an information architect for twenty-three years.

An inveterate speaker at digital design conferences, Klyn shares his deep curiosity about the architecture of information and the role it plays in supporting human well-being in keynote presentations, workshops, and architecture walks. Klyn’s writings have appeared in the Journal of Information Architecture, the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, and in the edited volumes Reframing Information Architecture (2014) and Advances in Information Architecture (2021). He is writing Wurman’s biography.

This program is presented through the generosity of the Terry F. Green 1969 Fund for British Art and Culture.