PositiveBookforumBy focusing her analysis of Kahn's architecture in separate sections, Lesser provides it with a welcome degree of autonomy, saving his works from being read merely as symptoms of the events in his personal life or as physical evidence from which to draw conclusions about its maker, and allowing her to delve into rich details that are more or less purely architectural and would have been difficult to weave into a strictly biographical narrative. Part of the pleasure of her account is her ability to convincingly capture the beauty of these features ... Despite its somewhat unorthodox bipartite structure, the book offers an impressively complete profile of Kahn, with Lesser drawing on interviews with family, existing scholarship, and Kahn's own writing ... But not all architecture can be judged in such black-and-white terms, and sometimes she seems almost too assured of the omnipotence of Kahn's buildings.
