MOCA Builds Its Reputation With Tour of Kahn Exhibit : Architecture: The show, now in France, moves next to Japan, then opens in March, 1993, in Los Angeles. MOCA director calls Paris opening ‘a historic moment.’

It will be another year before the impressive retrospective on the life and work of American architect Louis I. Kahn reaches the site of its inspiration and organization: the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

In an unusual move, MOCA decided to send the first major retrospective on Kahn (1901-1974)--whose most famous designs in the United States include the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla--on the road before displaying it at home, where the idea for the exhibition was conceived 10 years ago by museum director Richard Koshalek.

“Louis Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture” opened first to very favorable reviewsat the Philadelphia Museum of Art last October. It recently began a two-month stint at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, where it is expected to be seen by as many as 350,000 visitors.

In September, it will be featured at the Museum of Modern Art in Gumma, Japan. Not until March, 1993, will the large tribute to one of this century’s greatest American architects make it back to Los Angeles. (The exhibition will conclude with appearances at the Kimbell Museum and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio.)

For the irrepressible Koshalek, who is working to build MOCA’s international image as an architecture showcase, there is a kind of logic to the round-the-world tour before heading home.

Philadelphia was, after all, Kahn’s longtime base and the site for much of his early work. Paris, meanwhile, was the model for Kahn’s classical architectural education at the University of Pennsylvania in the “Ecole des Beaux Arts” tradition. His mentor at Penn was a Frenchman, architect Paul Cret. Japan is the home of architect Arata Isozaki, whose Kahn-inspired displaydesign for the exhibition is one of the stars of the show.

The French and Japanese venues also help prove another point about the “international reach” important to Koshalek and his young museum.

“This is something very, very important for MOCA--a historic moment, really,” Koshalek said. “Here we have a major, major international institution such as the Pompidou working with a younger, striving museum in Los Angeles.”

For his part, Pompidou Center President Dominique Bozo also seemed delighted about the Kahn exhibition. At a recent reception for the show’s organizers hosted by U.S. Ambassador Walter J. P. Curley, Bozo spoke of Kahn as the most influential modern American architect.

“He was the bridge between classicism and modern architecture,” said Bozo, who ran the Picasso Museum before taking the top job at the Pompidou. “When I think of American architecture, I think first of Kahn.”

Both MOCA and the Pompidou see themselves as museums with an eye turned toward architecture. Both are housed in dramatic modern buildings, MOCA in the Arata Isozaki structure in the Bunker Hill development of downtown Los Angeles, the Pompidou in the “inside-out” Place Beaubourg building designed by Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers and Gianfranco Franchini, which has earned the local nickname “the oil refinery” because of its colored air ducts, pipes, wiring cables and other building guts boldly exposed on the exterior.

(“I can’t imagine Louis Kahn liking this building,” confided Koshalek at the Pompidou. “There’s not enough weight, not enough mass to please him here.”)

During the last four years, MOCA has organized retrospectives around the works of Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry and Japanese architect Isozaki as well as shows centered on the 1945-1966 Los Angeles Case Study house program and the Independent Group of British architects, artists and critics who flourished in London during the 1950s.

The French museum has featured exhibitions of European architects including Mies Van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Alberto Rossi. Both institutions are struggling for a way to intelligibly present buildings inside the museum building, conveying the physical aspect of architecture.

“Architecture,” said Bozo, “is very difficult to display. It is very difficult to translate the physicality of architecture to the visual. We museum people need to find something in the new technology to help us with this.”

The Kahn exhibit owes much of its success to the layout of Isozaki, a Kahn disciple who took an unrealized design by Kahn in 1965 for the Mikveh Israel Synagogue in Philadelphia and transformed elements of it into clusters of semi-circular display walls that the Japanese architect hoped would suggest classical ruins.

The other star of the show is Paris. In Philadelphia, the exhibition was somewhat constricted inside the 19th-Century Philadelphia Museum of Art. Here, the Kahn retrospective of 140 drawings, 48 models and 130 photographs is in a large, airy space on the top floor of the Pompidou Center, with huge glass windows opening over the city of Paris.

According to his biographers, David B. Brownlee and David G. DeLong of the University of Pennsylvania, Kahn loved Paris, relishing its city planning, “pure form” and the vibrant energy he called its “will to live.”

* “Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture” at Centre Georges Pompidou, through May 4. closed Tuesdays.