You Say to Brick is easily the most complete narrative of Kahn’s life and career, magnificently researched and gracefully written. As the founder of The Threepenny Review and a nonfiction author, Lesser has a background that’s literary, yet her account is packed with insights, of both the architectural and psychological kind ... For Kahn, there was never a line between love and work, and Lesser effectively shows how each of his long-term relationships was crucial to his development as an architect ... Lesser does readers a service by interspersing her narrative with 'In Situ' chapters that serve as guides to his designs and vividly conjure the experience of walking through his buildings ... Kahn died far from the light. With Lesser’s biography, the illumination is restored.
...[a] fascinating new biography ... This remarkable, readable and humane book pairs painstaking research with poetic interpretations. No detail is too small, as long as it sheds light on one of the 20th century’s most admired, influential architects. Lesser cites income tax returns, ferryboat tickets, dental visits, police reports obtained via Freedom of Information requests. Terrific short 'In Situ' chapters tour Kahn’s best buildings, describing the experience of moving through complex spaces lit by ingenious and meticulously planned placement of windows, cutouts, skylights and atriums.
Her biography is not the first we have of Kahn, but it is notable for its warm, engaged, literate tone and its psychological acuity. Lesser’s prologue is almost too tasty, an intellectual fanfare ... Lesser enjoys unspooling the threads of Kahn’s unconventional personality ... Lesser has done a great deal of traveling for this book, and she has an innate feel for Kahn’s architecture ... Lesser’s biography has a flaw, and it’s not insignificant. She races through the eight years Kahn spent in high school and college in eight pages. There’s little exact detail. These are the years most biographers linger on, extracting all the juices, because they’re when an unusual life begins to diverge from the mundane ones that surround it. They’re when a personality is forged.
She builds her narrative not just on existing accounts and archival research, but on extensive interviews with Kahn’s family, friends and professional colleagues, and while she doesn’t let Kahn off the hook, she doesn’t indict him either. The results are refreshing ... Lesser is more interested in fleshing out the interpersonal and emotional milieu in which Kahn operated than she is in a conventional account of his development and career ... The writing tends to the lyrical rather than the analytical, and her descriptions of buildings are stronger on phenomenology than the details of construction and engineering ... What Lesser adds to the Kahn narrative isn’t simply a pragmatic understanding of his personal life. She allows the women in his life to emerge as far more than mere satellites to a great male ego ... The success of this biography lies in the author’s fundamental acceptance of the messiness of human life.
...an often moving and occasionally surprising book but one that fails to pierce the essential remoteness of its deceptively gregarious subject and, more important, that fails to take the full measure of his accomplishment ... Ms. Lesser paints a portrait of an unlikely but uncommonly successful seducer, charming in a rumpled suit liberally dusted with cigar ash, bow tie askew ... For all her copious interviews, Ms. Lesser does not give the buildings themselves sufficient chance to speak. And when she does analyze a building, the results are not always convincing ... Ms. Lesser offers some clues to his remarkable, and oddly delayed, artistic blossoming. But there is a great deal more to be said about this enigmatic perfectionist whose will to give order, harmony and resolution to his designs could not be less fashionable, or more desperately needed.
By 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.
Biographers of architects inevitably have to calculate how much weight to give to the architect’s life and how much to his work. This choice is especially acute with Louis I. Kahn... Lesser begins the book with Kahn’s tragic death perhaps to capture our attention but her research, which involved massive archival work, innumerable interviews with family members and former colleagues, and trips to building sites all over the United States as well as India, Bangladesh, Israel, Estonia, and Italy, approaches the monumentality of Kahn’s best buildings ... By all the accounts from Lesser’s many interview subjects Kahn possessed a brilliance that radiated through piercing blue eyes and was communicated by way of a riveting attentiveness and a uniquely mystical form of speech such as that reflected in the title of the book, You Say To Brick.
Extensively researched, the book is full of quotes from letters and interviews, providing an intimate portrait of his personality and genius. A splendid biography that penetrates the inner lives of Kahn’s buildings as well as the inner life of their creator.
Lesser doesn’t merely chronicle the life of Louis Kahn...She also manages to let the reader vicariously experience Kahn’s architecture, interspersing this biography with elegant vignettes in which she walks through his most iconic structures. Her enthusiasm for Kahn’s architecture is infectious ... Exhaustively researched and poetically written, Lesser’s book offers a fitting and eminently accessible tribute to an architect who so ardently sought to bring beauty to the public square.
