Louis Kahn, photographed at Cornell University with the model of the City Tower Project, stands before one of his most theoretical yet influential unbuilt works. Designed in collaboration with Anne Tyng between 1952–57, the City Tower was a radical proposal for a high-rise in Philadelphia. Its design departed from the International Style’s flat planes and embraced a structural clarity rooted in tetrahedral geometry. Kahn and Tyng used a space frame system to articulate the load-bearing logic as architectural language, proposing a tower that revealed its structure as form.
The project never materialized, but its impact reverberated through academic circles and architectural pedagogy. Kahn’s emphasis on “what the building wants to be” finds early form here—prioritizing order, hierarchy, and structure over surface and appearance. Exhibiting the model at Cornell in this period placed the work in dialogue with postwar architectural education, which was shifting toward deeper formal inquiry and philosophical grounding.
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