The Design Museum commissioned Dowse to create a collection of jewelry and art prints to accompany their exhibition on the great American architect Louis Kahn.
The collection by Dowse for the Design Museum centers around two of the stand out aspects of Louis Kahn‘s work. In terms of metal, they captured the harmony he created with simple geometric shapes. Then, for the prints, they aimed to express his uncompromising vision for his monumental buildings and the light of the environments these structures absorb and reflect. Choosing a palette of metallic ink and pastel color for the background pattern to capture this light and also some of the more personal elements gathered for the exhibition, such as his watercolor and pastel sketches.
About Louis Kahn: One of the most influential architects of the mid-20th century, Louis Kahn (1901-1974) realised relatively few buildings, yet the formal restraint and emotional expressiveness of his Jonas Salk Institute, Kimbell Art Museum and the Capital Complex in Dhaka are regarded as an inspired progression from the International Style. The few buildings that Louis Kahn did realise were so remarkable that they established him as one of the most important figures in 20th century architecture, whose influence is compared to that of Le Corbusier and Mies Van Der Rohe, yet whose work offered new intellectual possibilities to the younger generation of architects searching for alternatives to their hegemonic International Style. Convinced that contemporary architects could – and should – produce buildings which were as monumental and as spiritually inspiring as the ancient ruins of Greece and Egypt, Kahn devoted his career to the uncompromising pursuit of formal perfection and emotional expression.
