You Say to Brick

by Wendy Lesser

  The organ was installed over a Sunday (the one day the movie house was closed, in observance of Philadelphia’s strict blue laws) and Lou watched the process, including the testing of the new organ by an expert player. After the installation was complete, Lou asked the organist if he would teach him to play it well enough so that he could perform the following evening. The man generously agreed, and they sat down for the next five or six hours, finishing the lesson at nine or ten that night. At that point Lou still hadn’t mastered the foot pedals, but the organist told him, “If you can’t use your feet, it’ll be all right. It’ll stand for the two hours you’re playing, we can forget about the feet.” Still, Lou resolved that he would try to use his feet as well, if he could figure out how to do it.

  “Come Monday I was scared stiff,” he recalled. “I got at the organ, and I was surprised—the thing was very responsive. It was electrical and no pain at all.”

  While they were changing the reels, the movie-house proprietor came to talk to him. “Lou, I didn’t know you played so well, but you play too loudly,” he said.

  Lou realized it was the footwork that was causing the problem—he didn’t know how to control it. “Suppose I lay off the feet,” he suggested.

  “That’s a good idea,” his employer agreed.

  Lou managed to hold on to that job for years, all the way through high school and well into college. For a while he even played at two movie theaters, sprinting the eight blocks between them so as to cover both main features.

  The boy may have been shy at school, but everywhere else he seemed willing to push the limits. The streets of the Northern Liberties, poor and rough as they were, became his playground. He was always out and about, listening to the sounds of the crowds and the traffic and the market hawkers, smelling the sharp odors of the tannery and brewery businesses, and taking in all the various kinds of buildings that lined the streets, from Victorian-era brick factories to the “Sawtooth Houses,” a row of diagonally sited dwellings on St. John Neuman Way. In fact, that particular street of angular structures could have been one of the sources behind Kahn’s eventual idea for the similarly angled Salk study towers. As Kahn said when he grew up, “A city should be a place where a little boy walking through its streets can sense what he would someday like to be.” The Northern Liberties neighborhood was exactly that for him.

  And if Bertha was overprotective in some ways (she would reportedly go to Lou’s classroom and announce, “My son is a genius!” if she felt the teacher wasn’t paying enough attention to him), she nevertheless allowed her son that necessary freedom of the streets. At times, unbeknownst to her, his adventurousness verged on the physically dangerous. “I was always trying to test my physical prowess,” Lou observed, recalling a time when he had been sent to fetch some groceries. “There was a little street I had to pass, and I always tried to make it in one jump.” This time, though, “I fell backwards and hit my head on the pavement. Somebody helped me to pick up the groceries.” The crack on the head had somehow interfered with his vision: “I couldn’t see anything around me. I knew where I was and I walked home thinking of what I would be if I lost my eyesight. I was ready to adjust to the whole thing right there and then. I walked up the three flights to where we lived, and I let on that everything was all right. I sat down in the corner, and my eyes cleared up.”

  During his brief period of blindness, he had decided that “the best thing was to try to become a musician, because it wasn’t necessary to see everything. My mother always wanted me to be a musician, but my father thought I should be an artist because I used to draw all the time. That was my delight. In school days I never really studied, I just made drawings.”

  When Lou was eleven years old, in addition to attending the Wyoming Grammar School on Fairmount Avenue—where, by his own report, he earned consistently poor grades—he began going to the Public Industrial Art School to take drawing classes with J. Liberty Tadd. Tadd was a graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he had studied with Thomas Eakins, who emphasized drawing from nature and who recommended using photography, anatomy, and other new methods of discovery that could help further art’s truthfulness and vitality. To these principles Tadd added his own version of Emersonian Transcendentalism, arguing that his techniques enabled young students not only to understand the wonders of nature, but also to bring out the divine light inherent in each one of them. He gave his students stuffed birds, fish, and animals to draw, as well as photographs and casts of these things, and he called his method “natural education.” Tadd’s teaching, which was firmly allied with the Progressive tradition in education, grew to be so highly regarded in Philadelphia that by the early years of the twentieth century any child in the public school system who demonstrated artistic talent was allowed to attend classes at the Public Industrial Art School for half a day each week.

  Lou was recommended to J. Liberty Tadd’s school by his fourth-grade teacher, and he took to the training as if it had been designed with him in mind. Fifty years later, Kahn was still putting into practice the things he had learned during his few years at the school. For example, Tadd repeatedly used ambidextrous exercises in his class: among other things, he would conduct double-handed blackboard drills during which his students had to draw oversized ornaments to scale, thus developing both their physical dexterity and their sense of proportion. Kahn, as an adult, would repeatedly demonstrate exactly this kind of ability, simultaneously drawing identical circles on a blackboard with his right hand and his left (often in front of a camera, so that several instances were captured on film). His lover and collaborator Anne Tyng felt that this talent of Kahn’s illustrated a special connection between the right, “creative” side of his brain and the left, “rational” side. “Some people have better links in their brains between the two halves,” she observed, and “the more you use it, the better it works.” However he came by it, the ability had certainly been reinforced in Kahn by Tadd’s training.

  Tadd also stressed the relationship between three-dimensional sculpture and two-dimensional drawing. He frequently had his students make clay and wood models of a particular thing—working first in a soft material, then in a hard one—so that they would learn what he called “speaking through the finger tips.” After this experience of creating something in three dimensions, he explained, “it is a very easy matter to draw it on paper or on the blackboard with the hand as firm and with a line as clean as though it were being made by a steel bar.” This, too, became apparent in the adult Louis Kahn’s drawings, which had not only vitality but “conviction,” as Tyng put it. And Tyng was not the only one of Kahn’s associates who noticed his special ability to think in three dimensions; in fact, it was to become one of the qualities that defined him as an architect. In a notebook entry from the 1940s, Kahn himself emphasized the importance of getting beyond the two-dimensional view. Observing that the standard architectural design was merely a “box with spaces in it,” he concluded that this drafting-room attitude toward spaces “comes from viewing the space from above at small scale on a piece of paper or a board.” The results, he wrote, were “drafting room visions ‘sans situ.’”

  Beyond the specific practical training, what the young Louis Kahn absorbed from Tadd was a semi-mystical and yet utterly concrete notion about the relationship between the natural and the man-made, the perceived and the created, the outer world and the inner one. “Drawing and manual training, properly taught,” wrote Tadd in his 1899 book New Methods of Education, “… are modes of thought expression, just as speech and writing are modes of thought expression.” And learning this “universal tongue” entailed not just copying, but also thinking. “I like my pupils and teachers to understand the distinction there is between sketching from nature and designing,” Tadd noted. “In the one case we put down facts, and in the other, ideas. There is a tendency for many students to sketch only from nature. We get our ideas by thinking as well. More time should be given, then, to dwelling on our impressions
… and to giving expression to these ideas constantly by designing and creative work.” Something very much like these principles was to inform Kahn’s distinction between Order (or its handmaiden, Form), which derived from nature, and Design, which was the specific human response. “Form encompasses a harmony of systems, a sense of Order…,” Kahn observed in a talk delivered more than sixty years after Tadd wrote his seminal book. “Form is ‘what.’ Design is ‘how.’ Form is impersonal. Design belongs to the designer.” In both Tadd’s and Kahn’s cases, the link between the given world and the created one was necessarily organic and spontaneous, even as it was thoughtful and considered. The eye, the hand, and the mind were all engaged at once, bringing unconscious forms of knowledge—bodily sensation, dream thoughts, ancestral awareness—into conjunction with the rational brain. “One who accurately draws a bird, or a skeleton, or a flower, or a mathematical problem, has a more complete mastery of that special topic than could be gained in almost any other way,” Tadd said.

  It was a mode of thought that at any rate suited Lou. By the time he graduated from grammar school in 1916, he was noticeably better at drawing than at writing or studying. He was to embark on his four years at Central High School in Philadelphia with no firm idea of how to use the skills he had acquired from J. Liberty Tadd, and with all his academic difficulties still intact.

  In the meantime, though, Lou had become officially American—and, for that matter, officially a Kahn. The onset of the war in Europe in August 1914 had triggered Leopold Kahn’s delicate awareness of danger: he had left Livonia in 1904 in part to avoid being drafted into Russia’s conflict with Japan, and he was not about to risk being clawed back now that a new war was starting. Within months he had resolved to join his fate permanently with that of his new country, thus severing the connection with the old. On January 29, 1915, a person described in the relevant documents as Leopold Schmulowsky—a tall, thin, light-complexioned white man, with brown hair and gray eyes, who had been born in 1875 in Wolmar, Russia, and now resided at 820 N. Marshall Street in Philadelphia—filed a petition for naturalization on behalf of all the members of his immediate family. At the same time he made an official request to change their last name from Schmulowsky to Kahn. This request was granted on May 4, 1915, the date on which Leopold Kahn swore his oath of allegiance before the clerk of the court, promising to “renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity … to Nicholas II, Emperor of All the Russias,” and incidentally affirming that he was neither an anarchist nor a polygamist. By this means, Bertha, Louis, Sarah, and Oscar were all instantly converted into American citizens as well.

  Lou continued to be a mediocre student throughout his first three years at the academically rigorous Central High. “Studying was something that never got through to me,” he later remarked, and elsewhere he commented that he did “very poorly academically” in high school. “I’m not sure why,” he said. “It was a wonderful school. I had an intense interest in art, drawing, piano … I could not remember formulae-experienced things like chemistry.” By his own account, he rarely spoke up in class and spent a lot of his time daydreaming about things like knights on white chargers. “Fairy tales—I have read them all through my life,” he noted, adding that his reading as an adolescent included “Horatio Alger, dime novels, Alexander Dumas.” None of this helped him at school. As Lou’s high-school classmate Norman Rice put it, “He was always on the verge of being flunked.”

  It wasn’t until his final year, when he took a course in architecture offered by William F. Gray, the head of Central High School’s excellent art department, that Lou’s eyes were finally opened. “I was to be a painter, but he touched the very core of my expressive desires. How circumstantial, but how wonderful is the light thrown upon the threshold when the door is opened,” Kahn recalled as an adult. “I wouldn’t have been an architect if I hadn’t gone to Central High School.” When he was asked, on another occasion, whether any older person had influenced him in his high-school years, he answered, “My art teacher—an architect. He gave me direction and was very understanding.” What Lou realized almost instantly, when he took Gray’s class, was that “Architecture combined my love and desire for artistic creation, painting, and being able to express and stand out,” and as a result “I was intensely dedicated.”

  Gray, like Tadd, had studied at the Pennysylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and his training too was guided by the principles of Thomas Eakins, though in his case the transmission took place through an intermediary, Thomas Anshutz, who had been one of Eakins’ students. William Gray’s own theories were a combination of the Progressivism he had acquired at the Academy and an updated version of Romanticism he had gleaned through reading Ruskin. Resisting the neo-Baroque aesthetic that had recently been making its way into American architecture, Gray instead championed both the City Beautiful movement in Philadelphia and the Chicago-based development of “the skyscraper or cloudscratcher,” as he termed the tall new buildings. What he borrowed from Ruskin was less an explicit affection for Gothic and other historic forms than a wider sense that architecture should above all be honest. Simplicity and clarity, in both design and materials, were key to his notion of architectural truth. “Any architectural feature which is not self-explanatory is wrong,” he flatly stated.

  Kahn evidently absorbed this principle at a very deep level, for it was to manifest itself repeatedly in his mature work. Yet what he remembered of Gray’s teaching was not so much the underlying theories as the specifics of classroom work—and, in particular, the kindness shown by William Gray to him personally. The coursework, Lou recalled, “was a matter of listening to lectures and then making five plates of the various important styles: Renaissance, Roman, Greek, Egyptian, and Gothic. I helped half the class make those drawings and tried to disguise them in such a way that one wouldn’t know I did them. But there was some evidence always that I did those drawings. When the teacher pointed it out to me and said, Did you have a hand in this? I said, Yes, I did. He said, Well, I think that’s all right. He was a very nice guy.”

  His drawing skills had remained a lifeline for Lou all the way through high school, even before he discovered their practical use in Gray’s class. Though he was no longer young enough to participate in Tadd’s classes, art lessons remained a regular part of his week. On Saturdays he would walk from his home at 7th and Poplar Streets to the Graphic Sketch Club at 8th and Catharine, a distance of about twenty blocks. “I was given an easel, paper and charcoal in life class,” he remembered. “All I could hear was the swishing of the strokes and the soft and privately directed voice of the critic.” One Saturday morning he arrived early, when no one else was there. “The room to the right of the entrance was open. I walked in to see the work of the masters of the school on the walls. Someday, I hoped I would be selected too”—as in fact he was, more than a decade later.

  Meanwhile, Lou was consistently receiving major art awards from other Philadelphia institutions. Just about every year, for instance, he would win the Wanamaker Prize, given annually by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to the best watercolor by a Philadelphia high-school student. In May of 1919 the Academy awarded him first prize for the best original freehand drawing. And toward the end of high school he received the offer of a full scholarship to study art at the Pennsylvania Academy. (At around the same time, according to an oft-told family story which may or may not have been true, the young Louis Kahn was also awarded a composing scholarship by Samuel Fleisher, the Graphic Sketch Club’s primary donor, who had heard him play an approximation of the Second Hungarian Rhapsody, by ear, at one of the Club’s Sunday concerts. Lou said he had kept up his music by practicing on an old piano at home—an object which, once it was brought into the Kahn household, allegedly left so little room for other furniture that he had to sleep on top of it.)

  The four-year art scholarship would have made Lou’s entire course of higher education free, leaving his movie-house earnings to go straight into the family coffers and meanw
hile satisfying his father’s ambitions for him as an artist. But Lou had decided he wanted to be an architect. He had applied and been admitted to the architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania, considered at that point to be the best architecture school in America. But no scholarship money came with his admission, so he would have to pay his own way through college with a combination of his organ-playing at the cinema, summer jobs at architects’ offices, and loans. “Every year for four years I borrowed the same amount of money. I paid it off and then I borrowed it again. My credit was very good,” Kahn later remarked wryly, as if acknowledging the unlikelihood of such financial equilibrium in his life.

  What this meant for the rest of the family, though, was that Lou could no longer be counted on as a source of household income. “The family could do nothing to dissuade him, not even his father, who was a very strict man,” Esther Kahn recalled, basing her account on what her husband had told her. “Lou always used to listen to him but Lou kept affirming that he was going to be an architect and they had to give in because Lou was determined. But the situation was not easy because they were still very poor and Lou, though working like a dog, could never afford the tuition to go to college and support them too. One solution was that Lou’s sister left school (this is the reason she couldn’t finish her degree), and apprenticed herself to a milliner.”

  Sarah, Lou’s younger sister, had shown many of the same talents he had as a child. “She could do anything with her hands,” Esther Kahn noted, from painting, drawing, and sculpture to the fine sewing required of a milliner. Lou himself commented that “my sister had talent in the dance and craft things,” and he also remarked on her early musical ability: after only a single piano lesson, he said, she had been able to fill in for him one day at his movie-house job. They had always been close, Lou and Sarah, and they remained close in the years to come. “She had all my mother’s traits—was fine, unselfish,” he said when he was in his late fifties. Yet at the age of nineteen he did not find it unreasonable that Sarah should give up her prospects in favor of his. And if he did have qualms, he learned to ignore them, lest they stand in the way of what he so desperately wanted.