The recovery of the ideas and experiences of William Manning is a major event in the history of the American Revolutionary era. A farmer, foot soldier, and political philosopher, Manning was a powerful democratic voice of the common American in a turbulent age. The public crises of the infant republic - beginning with the Battle of Concord - shaped his thinking, and his writings reveal a mind grappling with some of the weightiest issues of the nation's founding. His most notable contribution was the first-known plan for a national political association of labouring men. That plan, and...

It was not by chance that Louis Kahn's move into his profession's spotlight coincided with the crisis of modern architecture: representing, as his work increasingly did,

those aspects of space which modernism had so ambitiously removed from its program. Kahn's rethinking of modern architecture's paradigm of space belongs to his most important contributions to the metier. In tracing the genesis of the unbuilt project for the Dominican Motherhouse we are given a close-up view of Kahn at work on a few fundamental questions of architectural space: seeking the sources of its meaning in its...

Like few others, Louis Kahn cultivated the craft of drawing as a means to architecture. His personal design drawings - seen either as a method of discovery or for themselves - are unique in the twentieth century. Over two hundred - mostly unpublished - drawings by Kahn and his associates are woven together with a lively and informed commentary into an intimate biography of an architectural idea. Unfolding around the iconic project for the Dominican Motherhouse (1965 - 69) the drawings form a narrative which not only reveals the richness and hidden dimensions of this unbuilt masterpiece, but...