Monday Morning Musings

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In the early 2000s, Allan Kehrt, a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and a founding partner of the architecture firm KSS Architects, began writing down ideas about architecture. These were short notes, quick studies on a single idea, the literary equivalent of an architect’s sketch. In the days before email was common, each week he would put a note on a new topic in his employees’ physical inboxes or mention that week’s idea at Monday morning meetings. The notes, each formatted in a small square of text, with just a single-word title, quickly became known around the office as his Monday Morning Musings.
Over time, the notes sometimes strayed from architecture to other ideas—language, leadership, even the life of dogs. But ultimately, each entry connects back to design and to the extraordinary reach and responsibility an architect has in shaping— quite literally—the world around us.
This book is a collection of those Monday Morning Musings, which Kehrt continued to write every week for nearly a decade. Taken together, they are a view into the philosophy behind a practice, and a moving meditation on what it means and why it matters to push for design that makes the world a more beautiful, more equitable, and more human place. In the early 2000s, Allan Kehrt, a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and a founding partner of the architecture firm KSS Architects, began writing down ideas about architecture. These were short notes, quick studies on a single idea, the literary equivalent of an architect’s sketch. In the days before email was common, each week he would put a note on a new topic in his employees’ physical inboxes or mention that week’s idea at Monday morning meetings. The notes, each formatted in a small square of text, with just a single-word title, quickly became known around the office as his Monday Morning Musings. This book, a collection of those notes, is a view into the philosophy behind an architecture practice. It is a moving meditation on what it means and why it matters to push for design that makes the world a more beautiful, more equitable, and more human place. Allan Kehrt, FAIA, is a founding partner of the architecture firm KSS Architects, with offices in New York City, Philadelphia, and Princeton, New Jersey. He graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University with a BA in Economics and served for five years as a Naval Aviator and A-4 Skyhawk pilot until his release from the Navy in 1971. He earned his Masters of Architecture from Virginia Tech in 1978 and joined the firm Geddes Brecher Qualls Cunningham before founding KSS Architects in 1983. In 2001, he was elevated to Fellowship by the American Institute of Architects in the category of Design.

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