Talk:Phillips Exeter Academy Library

Major expansion in the works
Just to let everyone know, I am planning a major expansion to this article in the next day or so. It will have several sections to discuss the library's history and architecture, and it will be fully referenced. Inevitably that involves rewording and relocating some of the existing text, so I hope no one feels like I stepped on their toes.Bilpen 02:10, 8 June 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bilpen (talk • contribs)
 * Nice work! --Elekhh (talk) 20:29, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

External links modified
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External links modified
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20130811020247/http://www.exeter.edu/documents/Exeter_Bulletin/An_Open_Book.pdf to http://www.exeter.edu/documents/Exeter_Bulletin/An_Open_Book.pdf

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Not a "Brutalist" building
I intend to revert the recent assignment of Louis Kahn's Phillips Exeter Academy Library to the category of "Brutalist architecture in the United States." I have consulted the major books on Kahn, and I find no support for categorizing this or any other of Kahn's buildings as "Brutalist".

Specifically, Robert McCarter's Louis I. Kahn does not have the word "brutalist" in its index, and, according to Google Books, does not contain that word anywhere else. Nor can I find anything in Brownlee and DeLong's Louis I. Kahn. The books on Kahn by Charles E. Dagit, John Lobell and Urs Buttiker do not have an entry for "brutalism" in their indexes. Carter Wiseman's book mentions brutalism but only in the context of saying that Rayner Banham, who popularized the term, was dismissive of Kahn's Richards Medical Research Center (pp 101–102). Sarah Williams Goldhagan's book mentions brutalism while discussion the Yale University Art Gallery but concludes that discussion by saying, "The best term to describes Kahn's aspirations in the New Haven gallery is 'authenticity'". (pp 59- 60).

The most recent book on Kahn is You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn by Wendy Lesser. She says, on page 341, "You could not put his work under any style, like Internationalist or Brutalist or Postmodern. His work was Kahn."

As the article on Brutalist architecture points out, we know from architectural historian William Jordy that Kahn himself did not want to be associated with the term "brutalist".

I think we need to be careful when using the term "brutalism" in articles on architecture. In the first place, it is a highly misleading term: you could not responsibly write an essay on it without pointing out that the term has nothing to do with the word "brutal". It is also a fairly obscure topic that is either not mentioned at all in books on architectural history or is quickly passed over. To verify that, try searching Google Books for books on "architectural history" and then see how hard it is to find any of them that even mention the term, let alone treat it as a major architectural category.

Placing this or any other Kahn building in the category "Brutalist architecture in the United States" would mislead readers into believing that this represents the opinion of experts in architectural history, and that just isn't so. Bilpen (talk) 17:28, 17 February 2022 (UTC)