Kahn was a convinced ‘universalist’ and his work contains resonances for architects pursuing other agendas in places and times far from the points of origin. In the years immediately after Kahn’s death in 1974, there were any number of architects wandering around mumbling about ‘what a brick wants to be’ and imitating the bold circles and textured materials of Kahn’s buildings. As usual one has to distinguish between the letter and the spirit, the outer features of style and the guiding principles.
Those to learn most from so-called masters do not imitate their works directly. In Europe, echoes of Kahn’s ideas about types can be sensed in the nostalgic theorising of Aldo Rossi and La Tendenza in the 1960s and in the work of architects of the Ticino in Switzerland (Botta, Galfetti et al) in the 1970s. Tadao Ando probably could not have been Ando without the example of Kahn, but here it was a matter of geometrical order, space and light, as well as resonances with tradition. Ando’s typical concrete surfaces were surely inspired by the planes dissolved in light at Salk, but these in turn drew a great deal from Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard, right down to the handling of grooves and joints. Such is the vitality of a modern tradition in which chains of solutions follow one after another in fresh inventions.