by Wendy Lesser
At the conclusion to his tour, Tim Ball insists on taking you down to the lowest level of the maintenance wing, where all the central mechanical, electrical, and system-monitoring functions are housed. (Even down here, surprisingly, there is a light-well that brings in natural light.) Here in the basement, on one of the concrete walls, he shows you a couple of penciled notations in Louis Kahn’s own hand. They were still trying out the concrete when they poured this part, Ball says, still experimenting with what it should look like in terms of texture, color, joins, and form markings. So right here, as the building was beginning to take shape, is where Kahn indicated the spots that had come out exactly the way he wanted them to, and his legible, hastily scrawled handwriting, accompanied by two rapid sketches of joints and forms, preserves his ghostly presence in those two places.
* * *
Like the facilities director, many of the scientists and administrators who work at the Salk Institute have a visceral sense of gratitude for both the beauty and the practicality of the space. A youthful immunologist who is lecturing to a crowd of visitors in front of the building mentions the fun of leaning back in her chair and waving down the full length of the lab to her colleague at the other end. A seasoned administrator crossing the plaza tells you that her favorite time to be there is in the rain, when the wet concrete walls turn a darker, slatier gray, and the drenched travertine gives off a sheen. When asked what associations she has with the plaza, she answers, “Salk. Jonas Salk.” Then she pats the concrete post next to her and says, “This is known as ‘Salkcrete.’” She is alluding to the fact that Salk and Kahn both stood by watching as the early, experimental concrete came out of its forms; together, they chose the final color and texture.
There are, of course, occasional naysayers among the site’s regular users. A young neuroscientist, caught on his brief break, describes himself as “jaded.” He no longer sees the pretty view, and he is tired of working in an open lab, where it can be difficult to collect one’s own thoughts. When you gesture toward the studies in which the Nobel Prize winners and other eminences have their private offices, he nods in envious acknowledgment: that is the kind of space he could be happy in.
One such happy occupant is Greg Lemke, a prominent research scientist who has been at the Salk for about fifteen years. He invites you to take a look inside his study, which is perched on the second floor of one of the easternmost bays in the north wing. There are no bad views from any of these studies, but his is particularly good because he gets the ocean view framed, in classic Kahnian fashion, by the buildings to the west of his. He also prefers the way the light falls on the north wing, so he has kept his study here even though his lab is now located in the southern half of the complex. He comments on the fact that the light changes dramatically with the seasons, while also noting wryly that “Kahn didn’t know about the fogs or the winter; he was designing for a tropical climate.” In the summer, Lemke’s study can be sheltered from the direct sun and cooled entirely by breezes—he demonstrates how this works by pulling the glass window sideways until it is entirely open, and then sliding a teakwood slatted blind into its place.
Mostly, Greg Lemke uses this luminous, spare, beautiful room when he wants to read papers or write grant proposals, though he has also been known to hold meetings here with up to a dozen people. Each occupant gets to arrange the room exactly as he wishes, and Lemke has his desk facing away from the largest concrete wall and toward the Pacific view; an L-shaped extension that holds his laptop faces out the other window toward the plaza. On one wall hangs a Picassoesque lithograph of a woman’s head, done by one of the painter’s longtime lovers, Françoise Gilot. (Gilot later became Mrs. Jonas Salk, and Lemke is the current holder of the Françoise Gilot-Salk Chair in Molecular Neurobiology and Immunology.) Otherwise the room is almost empty. Asked if he finds the concrete wall cold or impersonal, Lemke shakes his head. “If you look at the concrete, it has a lot going on. I like it a lot,” he says.
* * *
Leaving the study towers, you find yourself back out on the plaza in the mid-afternoon light. You take a seat on one of the seven travertine benches lining three sides of the rectangle and try to figure out the source of this space’s enormous appeal. While you are thinking, you notice that the jagged lines of mirror-image buildings edging toward the infinite view offer a transparently simple lesson in perspective: the sawtoothed pattern, which appears loose from close up, tightens as it extends away from you. In this sky-ceilinged, open-ended “room,” the serrated walls are what give shape to the vastness, enclosing you in something recognizably man-made. And yet the exactness and symmetry of the construction are such that the place almost seems to partake of a mathematical, inherent order, something larger and more ancient than familiar architecture. What comes to mind are the Greek temples at Paestum, those grand, ruined buildings which Kahn loved, and which still strike awe into the heart of any visitor. But those monuments clearly belong to old, dead gods, whereas this one feels like a tribute to something living—science, perhaps, or human brains at work, or any kind of strenuous collaboration.
You are aware, in this plaza, of your own size and placement in the world. The rectangular space seems gigantic when it is empty, but as other people stroll across it, they look normal-sized, human-sized; the space does not diminish them. A feeling of calmness and repose prevails throughout, echoed in the constant plashing of the water. It is as if the sound of the water and the sight of the soothingly symmetrical buildings are two aspects of a single synaesthetic experience. Incorporated with these are an imagined sense of touch (the smoothness of the concrete, the intriguing texture of the pitted travertine, the gentle roughness of the weathered teak) and a potential or even actual sense of motion. The plaza invites you to move around it—in particular, to move toward the view—and in accepting the invitation, you become ever more firmly lodged in this particular place, at the western edge of the Western Hemisphere, overlooking the Pacific Ocean on a particular summer day.
If you are allowed to remain until sunset, you will witness all this warm beauty transformed into an eerie magic. The sun, which in August sets slightly to the north of the runnel, casts its early evening light on the southern row of studies, making their external faces stand out in gold, their receding faces hide in shadow. As the plaza dims, the shining strip of water at its center looks like a silver path laid down in a travertine plain. It leads you forward toward the sunset, and toward the western end of the building, where even the walls that are merely facing a sunlit wall seem to glow with reflected light. If you retreat to one of the benches and lift your face to the sky, you can see the clouds gently moving in your direction, emphasizing the archaic stillness of the dark buildings silhouetted beneath them. You may find yourself trying to capture each changing moment with your camera, but no camera is supple or delicate enough to catch all the elements at once—the sky and sea and framing concrete wedges, the paler travertine with its shiny ribbon of water. Only the human eye can perceive it in all its subtlety.
Now the sun, as it starts to sink rapidly through the clouds and toward the sea, turns immense, demonstrative, spectacular. It changes its shape second by second, visibly shifting from a cloud-sliced circle to a perfect half-circle to a flattened curve. And just before it disappears completely into the waves, it spreads itself along the horizon in a thin, lumpy layer of glowing orange-redness, like the last embers of a dying fire.
PREPARING
“I remember having come over with my mother and sister and brother on the boat from Estonia. I was five years old. Because I could draw, I made drawings of whatever happened … It was pointed out to me that the smoke from one boat was going the other way. It was a very slow boat and the smoke was faster than the movement of the boat, or the boat was arrested at that time. The captain called my attention to it. And because he liked the drawing so much, my mother thought we would give it to him. As a result we had oranges every day. And that was really something—oranges were a rare th
ing, and I was very proud.”
That was how the little boy saw it, and later remembered it. But what would the captain himself have observed as his ship, the S.S. Merion, left Liverpool on June 13, 1906, bound for Philadelphia? If Lou’s story is correct, the captain noticed and even spoke to the fatherless family who were up on deck as the ship wended its way along the River Mersey, heading toward the Irish Sea. The mother, in her early thirties, was not a conventionally pretty woman, but there was something in her face and carriage that radiated dignity, warmth, and calmness under difficult circumstances. It was a face that drew one to it, signaling a character that could be relied upon. The two younger children, the girl and especially the boy, were sweetly attractive in a manner typical of their age. But the oldest child, the one who was so good at drawing, clearly had something wrong with him. The entire lower half of his face and the backs of both hands were covered with red scar tissue that still looked raw—the result of a severe burning, perhaps, or some equally horrific accident. The poor little fellow didn’t seem to mind it, himself. He was by far the most animated member of his little family, with his mop of auburn hair, his bright blue eyes taking everything in, and his pencil always at work on the page. The captain may have admired his talent, but he probably also felt sorry for him, and sorry for the mother who, in addition to all her other burdens, had to care for such a child. How could life ever be anything but difficult for a boy with a face like that?
According to the manifest of the “alien passengers” traveling on that voyage of the Merion, the woman was named Bertha Kahan; her three children were listed as Isidor, Jenie, and Oscher. They were Russian nationals, apparently, and passage for all four had been paid by their husband and father, Leopold, who was scheduled to meet them at the wharf in Philadelphia when the boat docked on June 25, 1906. That much, at least, proved to be true, and if just about everything else in the manifest entry was inaccurate or at any rate debatable, that did not differentiate it significantly from the many other lists of immigrants who in those decades were pouring into the United States.
It had been almost exactly two years since Bertha’s husband had followed the same route from Liverpool to America. He too had started out in Estonia (or rather Livonia, the Russian province which at the time included Latvia and southern Estonia), though his trip had originated in the mainland city of Pernau, rather than the island town of Arensburg, where Bertha’s family all lived, and from which she and the children departed. Listed on the manifest as “Leib Schmulowsky” of the “Hebrew” race or nation, Lou’s father had gotten off his ship in Wilmington, Delaware, where he was met by a cousin. From there he soon made his way to Philadelphia, and when he wrote to his wife, Beila-Rebeckah, back in Arensburg, he told her that since he was now called Leopold Kahn, she and the children should Americanize their names accordingly when it came time to join him. So their eldest, Leiser-Itze, became Louis Isadore. Schorre, who was just turning four, became Sarah—not Jenie, as the manifest inexplicably had it—and Oscher, the two-year-old baby of the family, became Oscar.
When he met their boat at the wharf, Leopold got his first real look at his younger son, who had been born just as he was preparing to leave for America. He had last seen his older son a few months after the accident, when many had feared (and Leib had almost hoped) that the badly damaged boy would not survive. But if Leopold was shocked at how scarred Lou’s face still looked, he did not show it. Instead he gathered his family and took them home to 50 North 2nd Street in the Northern Liberties section of Philadelphia. This was the first of twelve residences, some of them lasting less than a year, that they were to occupy in that neighborhood over the subsequent quarter of a century.
They moved, for the most part, because they could not afford to stay where they were. This was not because rents were high—the Northern Liberties ward consisted mostly of poor immigrants, and much of the time the Kahns shared their dwellings with other renters—but because Leopold’s income was low to nonexistent. Though he was described in his immigration papers as a shirtwaist maker, and though his children and grandchildren remembered him primarily as an artist in stained glass (as well as a talented linguist who knew five or six languages), he had apparently been employed as a laborer sometime during his first two years in America. An injury received at that time prevented him from working regularly, or so he always claimed. This meant that Bertha’s small earnings, at first from her work in the garment industry and later from a family-run candy store, had to support all of them.
“We lived in poverty,” Louis Kahn told an interviewer some fifty years later. “Very poor apartment—tenement type.” Yet the family somehow rose above its surroundings, in part because they “had humor” and “were at ease about dire necessity.” According to Lou, his parents “had no envy about money.” They were different from the other poor immigrants around them, he felt: “They were happier, more intellectual. They were admired by the neighborhood, had wider horizons.”
His father had a few relatives who had been in America longer and were noticeably better off—one was in real estate, another a wholesaler in the grocery business. Lou remembered, in particular, two uncles, one of whom “was really an s.o.b. He was enterprising. He married outside his religion, had handsome children. The other was a tailor. He was cheerful, did Russian dances, was entertaining.” There were also relatives from Europe who came and stayed with them for short periods, making the cramped quarters even tighter. Lou always had to share a room with his brother, Oscar, and they squabbled a lot, sometimes even getting into physical fights, but in the end “we had no serious disputes. They were all settled casually.” Throughout his childhood he felt that his parents and siblings “all were rooting for me. The family looked up to me. They sacrificed for me to some extent.”
Whether that special attention was due to his prodigious talent or his poor health was impossible to say. Certainly he was a sickly child, and not just because of the accident. Soon after the family arrived in Philadelphia, Lou contracted scarlet fever so severely he had to go to the hospital, and his entry into primary school was delayed by a year as a result. When he did finally start school in the fall of 1907, he was teased by the other kids, who called him “scarface” and laughed at him. Art, he soon learned, offered the only available escape route. When his fellow students saw how well he could draw, they stopped mocking him and cultivated his friendship, and even the teachers who had previously criticized his poor academic performance began to praise him for his artistic skills.
“I was born into the consideration of art as a part of life, not something that’s attached to life in a peripheral way,” Kahn said as an adult. “My parents were in the middle of it. My mother had been a harpist and my father a stained glass worker, and we knew that art was in everyone’s life.”
Yet though he credited his parents for his immersion in art, Lou could also be resentful of their interference, especially if the instruction came from his father. “One day, I was copying a portrait of Napoleon,” he recalled. “His left eye was giving me trouble. Already I had erased the drawing several times. My father lovingly corrected my work. I threw pencil and paper across the room, saying, Now it’s your drawing, not mine.”
Such tantrums were rare, however, and for the most part the child was eager to learn the skills that others could teach him. When he was a little older, the woman in the apartment below theirs acquired a piano and hired a teacher to give her daughter lessons for twenty-five cents a session. Bertha Kahn offered to give the woman a nickel for every lesson that Lou could sit in on, but since the piano teacher certainly wouldn’t have agreed to teach two children for the price of one, Lou was obliged to hide behind a large wingchair for the whole of each lesson, taking in everything by ear rather than by eye. After the teacher and the little girl had left the room, he would come out and practice at the piano, playing by heart what he had just heard. He never learned to read music, but he could reproduce almost any tune after hearing it once, and he could al
so improvise delightfully.
That skill was to prove financially useful a few years later, when Lou got a job playing the piano accompaniment to the silent films at the Poplar Cinema, just down the street from his family’s home. The money he brought in was a substantial addition to Bertha’s earnings, and it soon became essential to the family economy. At one point, though, he almost lost the job when the movie-house proprietor upgraded his instrument.
“Louis, I’m afraid your job is over because we’re installing an organ,” said his employer, according to Lou’s account. “I guess you can’t play the organ.”
“Yes, I can,” Lou insisted, though he had never seen one.
“That’s great, that’s wonderful,” the man responded. “I was worried about it because I couldn’t find a relief organist. They’re pretty rare. No one knows how to play the thing.”
