Kahn’s reputation is unshakable, and yet three recently published books illuminate lingering questions about his life and work. What transformed a standard-issue modernist into a creative force of indomitable originality in his mid-50s? And how should we understand Kahn’s vastly complicated personal life? 

Furthermore, what about Kahn’s gnomic utterances, of which the best known is “ ‘What do you want, Brick?’ And Brick says to you, ‘I like an Arch.’ ” Was Kahn a true sage, as John Lobell argues in “Louis Kahn: Architecture as Philosophy” (Monacelli, 195 pages, $50), or just a bushwa artist conning the eggheads at Yale and Penn, where he taught? 

Carter Wiseman’s compact “Louis Kahn: A Life in Architecture” (Virginia, 126 pages, $26.95) addresses the unexpected blossoming of the architect’s talent. Almost by accident, the “relatively obscure forty-six-year old” landed a gig as visiting critic at Yale’s department of architecture in 1947. Yale had wanted to hire the Brazilian superstar Oscar Niemeyer, but he was denied entry to the United States for political reasons; instead they settled for what was then merely one of the more competent architects in Philadelphia. Kahn flourished at Yale, where the School of Fine Arts and the department of architecture cross-fertilized each other. Giants such as Josef Albers, Paul Hindemith and Willem de Kooning roamed the streets of dowdy New Haven.

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Kahn made another fateful connection at Yale. In the neon-lit Waldorf Cafeteria on Chapel Street, the already-married Kahn first met the vivacious young drama student Harriet Pattison. Kahn, whose face had been badly scarred by a childhood fireplace accident, nonetheless easily charmed both men and women (“He is the one man I could put my arms around,” Jackie Kennedy observed). He made a lasting impression on Ms. Pattison, as she relates in her affecting and informative memoir “Our Days Are Like Full Years” (Yale, 448 pages, $48). On this snowy day, “his blue eyes sparkled like the snowflakes he brushed off” his coat, she remembers. Trying to reconstruct the meeting later that day, Ms. Pattison wrote: “I met an amazing man.” 

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