Claudio Veliz Architect PLLC

Yesterday (260629) I dropped all, and simply did it: I drove over to Phillips Exeter Academy Library, near the New Hampshire coast, one of architect Louis Kahn’s finest designs.

You see, in 1974, one of my dear architecture professors tearfully implored me to visit this site if I ever had an opportunity to see *any* of Kahn’s works. Kahn, my professor’s close mentor, had just died of a heart attack in the men’s room at Penn Station and, insult-to-injury, was unidentified for days.

Over the years this intended visit fell into the grungy bin, which we all possess, of “Sometime. Real soon…”. Well, after 52 years, and then, some recent days of intense work on one of my residential designs, I felt I needed an architecture break – not from, but more of: I have a thing for visiting and absorbing analogs. Added to that, the loss of one of the dearest friends in my life earlier this year – a fellow architect – had been much on my mind these past months. All this, like light coming to focus at the far end of a lens, I said “To hell with it. …let’s go.”

Oh my, what a work, indeed. This is the stuff that provides hope after all for the messy, flawed, vague, complex human condition – even at fast-darkening times such as these. Some images, here…including my quick sketch, which I do less to make a “perdee pikchure”, than to get me to see the architecture in more detail; more passionately, if you want.

Another of my pilgrimages to Florida Southern College, Lakeland, Florida. Each time the experience is vastly different, depending on time of day (thus, lighting), weather, season; whether classes are in session, and so on. But photographs only indicate form and lighting. To actually roam this campus - the largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture in the world, little known by many - brings a non-believer close to experiencing an architectural religious experience.