Author Description

After maintaining a professional and personal relationship with Louis Kahn for seven years, Anne Griswold Tyng departed in the autumn of 1953 for Rome. During her year in Italy, where their daughter was born, Kahn wrote weekly to Tyng, and his correspondence to her is published here for the first time. The fifty-three letters document not only their intense private relationship, but also give a vibrant account of the experience of a brilliant young architect on the cusp of achieving international renown. Kahn's letters, together with Anne Tyng's intimate essays, vividly capture the professional politics of the modern architecture scene - such prominent figures as Philip Johnson, Eero and Aline Saarinen, Vincent Scully, George Howe, Pier Luigi Nervi, and Robert Venturi make appearances - and illuminate the creative processes at work in the early stages of Kahn's emergence as one of the most influential architects of the twentieth century.