FPE Architects Visits the FDR Four Freedoms Park

It was a wonderful fall day…

Fifield Piaker Elman Architects visited the recently completed Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island.

This is the last work of reonowned American architect Louis I. Kahn. Louis I. Kahn is widely considered one of the masters in the pantheon of 20th century architects. Kahn died unexpectedly in 1975, and it took 38 years to fully realize the project.

It was a great fall day to experience first hand Kahn’s master plan and impeccable detailing in a monument to FDR.

“I had this thought that a memorial should be a room and a garden. That’s all I had. Why did I want a room and a garden? I just chose it to be the point of departure. The garden is somehow a personal nature, a personal kind of control of nature, a gathering of nature. And the room was the beginning of architecture. I had this sense, you see, and the room wasn’t just architecture, but was an extension of self.” — Louis Kahn, Excerpt from a lecture given at Pratt Institute.

Images, via Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park and FDR4Freedoms.org
Photographers : Iwan Baan and Paul Warchol

A Walk In The Park

Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park is the first memorial dedicated to the former President in his home state of New York. Located on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island in New York City, it is the last work of the late Louis I. Kahn, an iconic architect of the 20th century. Photographs by Iwan Baan and Paul Warchol