Four Freedoms Park: Louis Kahn's "Ancient Temple Precinct" in NYC

Four Freedoms Park: Louis Kahn's "Ancient Temple Precinct" in NYC

Built four decades after Louis Kahn's death, New York City's Four Freedoms Park - the architect's posthumous memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt and his policies - is becoming one of the architect's most popular urban spaces. In a recent article for the Guardian, Oliver Wainwright investigates what he describes as perhaps Kahn's "best project". Wainwright's spatial description of the monument is interweaved by fragments of Kahn's personal history, building up a picture of a space with "the feel of an ancient temple precinct" and "a finely nuanced landscape". Although Gina Pollara, who ultimately realised the plans in 2005, argues that Four Freedoms Park "stands as a memorial not only to FDR and the New Deal, but to Kahn himself", can a posthumous project ever be considered as an architect's best? Read the article in full here.

Louis Kahn: the Power of Architecture, a major retrospective of Kahn's work, will open next week at the Design Museum in London. Find out more here.

Kahn's Sketch of FFP. Image Courtesy of Louis I. Kahn Collection, University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
Courtesy of Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, LLC
About this author
Cite: James Taylor-Foster. "Four Freedoms Park: Louis Kahn's "Ancient Temple Precinct" in NYC" 04 Jul 2014. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/524049/four-freedoms-park-louis-kahn-s-ancient-temple-precinct-in-nyc> ISSN 0719-8884

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