JP: The Modern Architectural Revolution, Louis Kahn. Lou Kahn was one of the most admired second-generation modern architects. Teaching for years at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and the Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, he was a late bloomer. Lou packed a remarkable architectural career in years before his sudden death in 1974. It is said he spent decades preparing himself and then did in a few years what many architects wish they could do in a lifetime. With tousled hair and a bow tie in disarray and animated gestures, his ideas tumbled forth like a man in a charette, hurrying to accomplish his work against a deadline. On one occasion in 1961, when we recorded Lou in his architectural office, his staff clustered about like students, every bit as eager to hear him as we were. Kahn was part poet, with observations like "let the building be what it wants to be". You do not have to listen long to this tape to appreciate why he was such an inspired teacher. He was also an inspired architect. It is the distinctive creativity and the bold design of his buildings on which his reputation rests. People admired his work, and all of us loved him.

LK: Now, there was a young architect who chose this thesis to do this story on me, because nobody has written about it. I have been also very reluctant about anything personal, because I felt what I really wanted to help that person do is to write something like a Leo and a Duke, you see, not a personal history, and all that time, and look, and all that stuff, you see, which is a human interest story, all of which is really relatively different, different from the work story. They're really quite different, though it has much to do with it. It's so terribly circumstantial, you see, compared to the work story, which is not so circumstantial. What presents you in the way of how you express things, you see what I mean, has to do circumstantially, of course, with what jobs you get, you see, the people you meet, where you are at the moment and all this, but your security, the sense that you know what to do, comes from cutting through this entirely, you see, and coming to a kind of realisation which is really you. Because if you allow the circumstances to play on what is really you, and spoils you, you haven't got you. See, the circumstances are going to be secondary, almost, and they are just a kind of medium, you see, within which you can find yourself.