Louis Kahn FDR Memorial Rises in New York River After 40 Years

New York’s East River swirls around a roofless room, an unfinished shrine built of massive stones. It’s the first visible part of what will be a five-acre memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the southern tip of the island renamed for him.

The Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park was one of the final designs of architect Louis I. Kahn, who died in 1974, a year after beginning work on the project. For years, politics and economics conspired to halt work. Now it is finally being built almost exactly as Kahn designed it.