![]() ![]() The insight highlights Diamond’s polymathic sensibility, and his ability to communicate architectural ideas to the public. Diamond likens the foundational interplay of laboratories and supporting functions-or ‘served’ and ‘servant’ spaces-to the polarities of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s music, or “the power and sweep of Beethoven, compared to the minimalism of Philip Glass.” It’s a culturally and historically attuned reading of design, translating the complexities of architecture into accessible language. While Diamond was a student, Kahn’s seminal Richards Medical Building was under construction on campus. ![]() Upon graduating from the University of Cape Town and enjoying an outstanding rugby career at the University of Oxford, Diamond, who was looking to escape apartheid-era South Africa, enrolled as a Master of Architecture student at the University of Pennsylvania, where Kahn was a faculty member. Still, Diamond’s lucid and succinct narrative offers insight for the architectural reader-and his reflections on working with Louis Kahn are an early case in point. For better and worse, it is a memoir first and an architectural book second, with Diamond’s design career folded into the more fundamental stuff of life. Told in elegantly simple prose, the intimate narrative touches on formative memories, Jewish faith, the Holocaust, race relations and more, situating Diamond’s life and work within an impressively broad context. In the newly published Context and Content: The Memoir of a Fortunate Architect, Abel Joseph “Jack” Diamond reflects on 60-odd years of architectural prac tice, as well as a personal journey spanning from a childhood in South Africa to a rugby career in the United Kingdom, and culminating in a leading place in Canada’s contemporary architectural canon.īorn in 1932 in the South African town of Piet Retief, Diamond traces a rustic childhood and a long family history. It’s a fleeting anecdote, but one that illustrates the breadth of an uncommonly varied and eventful architectural career. ![]()
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