Dec 17, 2018
Louis Kahn was one of the most brilliant and enigmatic architects of the 20th century. He died in 1974. There’s an stirring and brilliant documentary about his life, filmed by his son, called My Architect. Kahn taught at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania most of his career. He didn’t do a lot of buildings, but he was famous for almost all of them plus many fascinating unbuilt projects. One of those was the Four Freedoms memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt on Roosevelt Island in New York City. It was on the drawing boards when Kahn died. The project languished for decades and wasn’t finished until 2012. The architecture firm Mitchell Giurgola in New York ultimately took Kahn’s design and faithfully executed it to much international acclaim. Host George Smart does a West Wing walk n talk with Paul Broches, the Mitchell Giurgola partner in charge of Four Freedoms. They met at the tram station on the East side, right near the Queensboro Bridge. After a while exploring the memorial, they met one of the show's favorite guests.