You Say to Brick

by Wendy Lesser

  Nathaniel didn’t go to the cemetery to see his father buried. He watched as the coffin was lifted into the hearse, and then he and Harriet left town immediately, going straight from the funeral home to stay with relatives in Boston. “My mother had decided that she didn’t want to go to the graveside,” he said. “I remember several years later wishing that I had.”

  He was not the only one left with a feeling of incompletion. Sue Ann had chosen not to look at her father’s body in its coffin, though her mother had offered to open the casket so she could do so. “I wish I had,” she said many years later. “Then I would have known he was dead in a way that took me months to realize. Normally I wouldn’t see him for months, and it just seemed like that at first.”

  * * *

  It was not just the suddenness of his death that made it hard to realize Louis Kahn was gone. Something about the way he disappeared from the world—irregularly, mysteriously, with that strange two-day gap when nobody he knew could find him—left many people unable to take in the facts of his death.

  For the California relatives, who learned about Lou’s death through a series of relayed phone calls, there was a persistent confusion about where and how he had died. Decades later, Kahn’s niece, nephew, grandnephew, and two grandnieces all thought he had suffered a heart attack on the way back from Bangladesh; their memories, that is, selected his much-celebrated Dhaka project over the rarely discussed Ahmedabad campus. They knew he had died in a train station, but at least two of them remembered it as Grand Central—again, a more appropriately monumental choice. (These erroneous details proved to be so persuasive that they even entered the historical record, for in a 1993 Toledo Blade article listing the highlights of Louis Kahn’s life, the Ohio newspaper included the line: “1974 – Dies of heart attack in Grand Central Station, New York City, en route from Bangladesh to Philadelphia.”) The West Coast Kahns believed, moreover, that Lou’s body, with its characteristically messy hair and rumpled clothing, had been taken for that of a transient for two days, until somebody finally realized who it was. Part of their distress had to do with this idea of unrecognizability: they could hardly credit that someone as famous as Louis I. Kahn could go unidentified for two days.

  Among at least some of the East Coast relatives, a different story prevailed. According to this view, the New York police had included the wrong address in their initial cable because Kahn, for reasons unknown, had obliterated his home address in his passport. Harriet Pattison, a firm believer in this version, was convinced that he was finally intending to leave his wife and come live with her and their son. Nathaniel Kahn, who incorporated this story into his movie about his father, called his mother’s interpretation “a nice myth,” though he believed that the address had indeed been crossed out. Anne Tyng felt that Lou would never have changed his domestic arrangements, but she too credited the altered-passport idea, as did her daughter. “There is no doubt in my mind that the home address was crossed off,” Alex Tyng said, “but why, or what he intended to do, I don’t know. Maybe he had chest pains on the plane and wanted to make some kind of gesture or statement that would be found if he died before he got home. We’ll never know.”

  But American passports, then as now, did not have the bearer’s home address printed on them. There was a space at the front where one could, if one wished, write in a home address, but the passport Louis Kahn was carrying on that last trip—the one with the March 16 exit stamp from Bombay’s Santacruz Airport—had nothing written in the home address space. The only address in the passport was on the vaccination certificate attached at the back, and it was completely uncrossed out. “I heard the passport in question has disappeared,” said Alex, but all the while it was in her older sister’s possession. Yet even Sue Ann had not bothered to dig out the document until she was pressed to do so many decades after her father’s death. Some mysteries apparently beg not to be solved.

  The myth of the crossed-out passport persisted over the years, surfacing anew with each discussion of Kahn’s death. For outsiders, it was merely a curious feature of an incompletely resolved case. But for the women and children who had been officially excluded from the obituaries and posthumous commemorations, the story seemed to offer the consolation of a private, secret affirmation of their role in Lou’s life. And this is understandable. Whenever people die unexpectedly, away from those who knew and loved them, the survivors will long for a final message from their dead, and when it is not forthcoming, they may have trouble believing it was never sent. With someone like Louis Kahn, who meant so many different things to so many different people, the usual sense of loss and uncertainty would have been compounded by the mysterious circumstances of his death. Lou’s habit of secretly slipping off from one place to another, of being routinely unlocatable for an indeterminate period of time, had gone from temporary to permanent. It was as if he had simply slid through a hole in reality, moved from existence to nonexistence when no one was noticing. Yet if his absence was hard to grasp, it was nonetheless the only fact that could be agreed upon. He was no longer around, bodily, to hold everything together. He was no longer physically present to persuade each friend or loved one, each client or employee, that he was exactly the person they knew and wanted him to be.

  This had practical consequences as well as emotional ones. When the funeral was over and the accountants finally had a chance to examine the books, it was determined that his architectural firm, Louis I. Kahn Architect, owed $464,423.83 to its creditors—mostly to engineers and staff, but some of it to outside suppliers and institutions as well. No one had ever considered Lou a good businessman; on the other hand, no one had realized that his financial balancing act was this precarious. Esther had no way of paying off the debt on her own, but after nearly two years of effort by David Zoob and a few other devoted friends, the Pennsylvania legislature passed a bill authorizing the state to purchase the Louis I. Kahn Collection for exactly the sum needed to pay the creditors. The Kahn Collection, including not only his personal and professional records but also 6,363 drawings he had made over the course of his career, was placed at the University of Pennsylvania, which had agreed to house it in the same building where Kahn had taught.

  There still remained the question of his unfinished building projects. Several of Louis Kahn’s trusted associates, led by David Wisdom and Henry Wilcots, kept working on the massive Bangladesh capital project for nine more years, until it was at long last brought to completion in 1983 (the same year, incidentally, that Dacca became Dhaka). Marshall Meyers and his firm, Pellecchia & Meyers, supervised the final design and construction phases of the Yale Center for British Art, which was finished in 1977. Eventually, other architects would do the actual drawings for the Graduate Theological Union’s library in Berkeley, California, the Bishop Field Estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, and a second version of the music barge for the American Wind Symphony Orchestra, all based on initial plans sketched out by Kahn. And nearly four decades after his death, in the wake of numerous arguments, negotiations, and revisions, the FDR Four Freedoms Park would open on Roosevelt Island, in a form very much like the design Lou had unveiled in 1973. But all the other ambitious projects he had undertaken—including the Palazzo dei Congressi in Venice and the Hurva Synagogue in Jerusalem—came to an abrupt end. There was no one who could complete them as Kahn would have done. There was not even enough of a design, in most cases, for others to attempt to carry on his work. Those grand pieces of architecture, to the extent they existed, existed only in the mind of Louis Kahn, and they died with him.

  Still, enough magnificent work remained to justify the storm of acclaim that arrived after his death. It had taken him a long time and a great deal of effort to create his few masterpieces, but their importance to the world—not only the world of architecture, but the world of ordinary people who occupy and use architecture—was never in doubt. Jonas Salk, whom Lou always described as his favorite client because of their fruitful work together on the Salk Institute, gave expressio
n to this general feeling in a poem he wrote shortly after Kahn’s death and read aloud at a memorial event on April 2, 1974. “Out of the mind of a tiny whimsical man,” Salk’s poem began,

  who happened by chance,

  great forms have come,

  great structures, great spaces that function.

  Salk praised his lost friend for possessing the words of a poet and the cadences of a musician, as well as “the vision of an artist, / the understanding of a philosopher, / the knowledge of a metaphysician, / the reason of a logician.” Yet even as it commended Louis Kahn’s natural talents, the poem also pointed out how lengthy the road was that led up to his final achievements:

  For five decades he prepared himself

  and did in two

  what others wish they could do in five.

  IN SITU: SALK INSTITUTE FOR BIOLOGICAL STUDIES

  Plaza of Salk Institute at sunset

  (Anonymous photograph from the author’s collection)

  A few miles north of San Diego, off a winding tree-lined road called North Torrey Pines, lies the structure that Louis Kahn designed for Jonas Salk in the early 1960s. You arrive by car, as one so often does in Southern California, but you can really only see the complex as a pedestrian, so you park in the eastern lot and walk in through the high front gates that remain open from six a.m. to six p.m. This is the first noticeable oddity: a major research center that is open to the public all day long. Some people are obviously coming for science-related reasons, but many, it seems, are here just to admire and relax in and take heart from Kahn’s buildings—a symmetrical set of study towers and lab buildings mirroring each other across a remarkable central plaza.

  To get to this plaza, you have to pass between two newer buildings built in imitation Kahn style to house the more recent labs and offices. In Kahn’s own time, the approach would have been through a grove of eucalyptus trees, only a few of which remain standing as emblems of what was lost. You do not pay much attention to this diminished approach, though, because you are drawn forward by the promise of something magical lurking beyond the rust-colored oxidized steel fence that marks the beginning of the original site. And that promise is soon fulfilled.

  Reaching the near side of the ninety-yard-long, pale-travertine-paved plaza, you see in the distance a band of blue, the Pacific Ocean, glinting at you from beyond the open end of the rectangular space. The long stone bench set perpendicularly in your path forces you to pause. Nearly as wide as the plaza itself, the bench asks you to stop and take in the view from this position, where sea and sky have been placed within a frame created by the tall, saw-toothed edges of the surrounding buildings. A foot-wide shallow stream, encased in a travertine channel, runs in a straight line from a small, square fountain directly in front of you and guides your eye westward, almost to the horizon. Twice a year, at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, the sun sets directly over that shining runnel of water: not so much an allusion to Stonehenge and its ancient cousins as a confirmation that this building, too, marks its history on an astronomical scale of time. Now, however, it is high summer, and the whole plaza is bathed in bright August daylight, so that the shadows—the gaps between the buildings that line the north and south sides of the plaza, the open entrances at the ground level, the recesses under the travertine benches, the slight spaces where one block of matter meets another—show up as almost black. It’s a bit like being in an architectural rendering or a black-and-white photo come to life, except that your sense of your own presence in this three-dimensional space is so powerful.

  In order to move forward, which the view compels you to do, you must first move to the side to get around the bench. Whichever way you choose to go, whether north or south, to the right or to the left, you end up facing the jagged buildings that form the front line of the structures on either side of the plaza. Focusing on them now for the first time, you realize that these four-story concrete towers—in which the second and fourth floors hold scientists’ studies, with a covered steel-railed terrace sandwiched between them on the third floor—must provide all their occupants with marvelous views. Every one of the studies has a large, protruding window on the western, Pacific-facing side of its acutely angled wedge, as well as another window, set within narrow, vertical teak boards, that overlooks the mirror-image studies on the opposite side.

  That transverse view is what you see now: a composition in concrete, metal, glass, and teak, all put together in a way that complements the rigorous geometric design of the plaza while softening it with something more human. Is the human element provided by the hand-milled teak, which has weathered to a soft, variegated grayish brown, giving a sense of time’s passage to this otherwise timeless place? Or does it stem from the concrete itself, which is warmer, smoother, and more personable—more person-sized, even—than anything you have previously associated with this material? Despite the feeling of weight and mass that inflects the structure as a whole, there is a tangible delicacy to the construction, with its numerous separate panels of concrete each the size and shape of a large door. These panels are doubly scored at their meeting points, as if to frame each pale gray rectangle individually. They are also pocked at regular intervals with round, symmetrically arranged holes. The holes, visibly plugged with a darker gray lead, are like the belly buttons of the concrete: they emphasize its origins, marking the places at which it was originally tied into its plywood forms. And because they puncture the concrete panels in such an orderly, balanced fashion, they reinforce the eye’s sense of pleasure, and hence the brain’s repose. Nothing is random here, they imply, and what is done for practical reasons can also be supremely beautiful. This applies to the science practiced within these walls, one presumes, as well as to the walls themselves.

  On a very hot day, or a very rainy one, you might seek protection under the concrete, passing through the heavily shadowed, obliquely sunlit arcades that run at ground level along the full length of the study structures. But on a normally sunny day you will want to remain out in the plaza, hewing close to the central channel of water even as you follow its course toward the ocean. As you approach the stream’s western endpoint, you discover a previously invisible rectangular pool (a ha-ha, in farmer’s or landscape architect’s terms) into which the runnel empties. Like the long bench at the eastern end, this pool initially halts your progress until you move around to its northern or southern side. From here you can see what lies beyond the plaza—the ground level of the Salk complex, accessible by a stairway—and now it becomes apparent that the true horizon is far away, past a series of low hills that continue to block your view of all but the thinnest strip of ocean. What you saw when you first entered the plaza was merely an illusion of infinity, created by the framing device of the building itself; having now reached that infinite point, you find it has disappeared, and what you are left with is a much more prosaic if still pretty view of the ocean.

  * * *

  Behind the rows of studies lie two matching lab buildings, the north wing and the south wing. Each is six stories high, but they appear to be the same height as the study buildings because two of the stories are sunk belowground, though even these are naturally lit by courtyards functioning as light-wells. It turns out there are actually only three floors of labs, alternating with three “interstitial” floors where all the maintenance, storage, electrical, ventilation, and structural functions of the building reside. If you are with an official guide, you may be allowed to peek into one of these dark, cluttered, in-between floors, where you can spot the famous Vierendeel trusses that Kahn’s brilliant engineer, August Komendant, used to solve one of the project’s key technical problems. These catenary-curved, steel-reinforced concrete beams, each nine feet by sixty-five feet, are strong enough and yet flexible enough to allow the lab floors to remain open from end to end, without supporting walls or columns interrupting the lab space.

  If you are lucky, your guide will also take you into the open labs themselves, which are lit for the most part with
daylight pouring in through the huge glass curtain walls on either side, though there are also fluorescent lights hanging from the eleven-foot ceilings. As you look up at those ceilings, you notice rectangular incisions every five feet or so—covered-over access points through which all maintenance functions can be performed from the interstitial floors. These precut openings serve the same function as the cinder blocks that form one whole wall of the largely underground eastern maintenance wing: they allow ceilings or walls to be opened panel by panel, stone by stone, so that no major structure ever has to be taken down or compromised. You had decided, out in the plaza, that Louis Kahn was a highly imaginative visionary; now you see that he also had the practical soul of a maintenance man.

  “This is the cat’s meow of a facility manager’s deal,” says Tim Ball, the current Salk maintenance director, as he takes you on his own personal tour of Kahn’s ingenious design. “This gives us the capacity to maintain, repair, clean, without interrupting the occupant. It’s expensive to build this way in the first place, with full-height interstitials, but the Institute has probably paid for itself six times over since it was built.” Ball tells you he recently spent fourteen months replacing all the outmoded infrastructure that heated, cooled, cleaned, and powered the labs, but without altering the architecture or disturbing the scientists in any way. “I don’t know of another scientific building in the country where that could be done,” he says.

  Everything about the design that you thought was done for aesthetic reasons turns out, according to Ball, to have its practical side. Positioning the plaza directly in line with the equinoctial sun creates maximum access to natural light—“daylight harvesting,” Ball calls it. Angling the western-facing windows toward the Pacific, with a setback between each pair in the double bays, doesn’t just enable every scientist to have a beautiful view; it also allows each study to be cooled by the prevailing ocean breezes. The lovely travertine-enclosed central stream may recall the Spanish Alhambra or a Persian palace, but it too has a function, for all the water in it (along with any rainwater in the plaza) gets channeled via the rectangular pool into an underground cistern, from which it is eventually recycled back into the fountain. And even the “shadow joints” that are everywhere in Kahn’s design—those one-inch gaps that separate concrete from wood or wood from metal—are not just a pleasing way for the eye to mark a change in material. They also, Ball tells you, help to preserve the wood, by protecting it from the condensation, expansion, and contraction caused by the variable heating and cooling of these three different substances.