Louis Kahn Lecture Room

UPDATE: In 2022, the Philadelphia Museum of Art acquired the Louis Kahn Lecture Room, which was commissioned by the Association for Public Art (formerly Fairmount Park Art Association) and originally installed at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial in South Philadelphia. The work has been disassembled and will be reconstructed at the museum.

For his contribution to the Form and Function program of the Association for Public Art (then known as Fairmount Park Art Association) in the early 1980s, Siah Armajani wanted to create a work for a school. The result was a room dedicated to architect Louis Kahn that serves as a lecture room and meeting place as well as a gallery for displaying reproductions of Kahn’s architectural drawings.

Armajani, an Iranian who emigrated to the United States in 1960, was a principal theorist of contemporary public art. His work has been described as democratic because it brings art into the service of daily life. Armajani’s bridges, rooms, and garden structures are deceptively simple, meticulously crafted, and often inscribed with passages from his favorite writers, including Emerson, Melville, and Whitman.

The Louis Kahn Lecture Room is designed to accommodate about 35 people. Wooden pew-like benches extend at an angle from the walls. In the middle of the room, Armajani left enough open space to allow a “meditative quality.” The durable hardwoods are painted in grayish rose, bright yellow, and Pennsylvania Dutch blue. At the entrance a glass transom has one of Kahn’s designs etched in it, and display surfaces on the walls offer changing examples of his work. Mounted on the cornice are quotations from Kahn, one of which reads: “Schools began with a man under a tree who did not know he was a teacher, sharing his realization with a few others who did not know they were students.” An inlaid wooden rectangle in the floor bears a verse by Whitman that begins: “When the materials are prepared and ready, the architects shall appear.” The room’s simple elegance suggests a Quaker meetinghouse or a country church. In fact, Armajani intended to evoke the feeling of the adjacent Sanctuary, which was originally built as a church.

The Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial is the nation’s first tuition-free art school. Fleisher, with support from the city’s Office of Housing and Community Development, funded the building renovation and lighting; the Association for Public Art sponsored the room’s design and installation.

Content on this page was adapted from Public Art in Philadelphia by Penny Balkin Bach (Temple University Press, 1992). Bach was the longtime Executive Director of the Association for Public Art, working with the organization from 1980 to 2022.