by Wendy Lesser
But there were other benefits besides financial ones to working in a real office, and one of them was camaraderie. Peter Blake, one of the early employees of Stonorov & Kahn, recalled a particular Sunday in the summer of 1941 when he, Lou, and two of the other men from the firm drove out to New Jersey in an open convertible to inspect a construction site. Returning to the overly warm streets of Philadelphia at about six p.m., they decided they needed a few cold beers. “Well, in those days Philadelphia was closed down tight on Sundays,” Blake reported, “and so, as we pulled up to a stop at a traffic light, I asked a guy in a car next to ours where you could get a drink in Philadelphia on a Sunday. ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘Go to the 6th Ward Republican Club and tell them I sent you.’”
The address the man directed them to turned out to be a one-story house on Locust near Broad. “Who are you?” asked the manager of the club, and Lou loftily assured him, “We’re all Harvard men.” Temporarily abandoning their staunch Democratic principles, the four colleagues paid a dollar each to join the Republican Party. They then made their way into a long, dingy room and ordered a round of beers. An old upright piano was standing on a platform at one end, and according to Blake, “Lou went over to the piano, sat down on the stool, and started playing Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ with enormous energy, enthusiasm and passion. The whole place began to shake—Lou had very large, very strong hands. He could crush your fingers in a handshake, and he could turn a piano into sawdust if he really tried. That night he was in great form.” A few minutes later, though, the hotel across the street called to say they had a guest who was dying and could the pianist please tone it down. Lou complied instantly, but he continued to play the same tune softly and gently, as if to himself. When an ambulance eventually arrived, Lou called the hotel to see how the patient was. Receiving his answer, he returned to the piano and, to the delight of the other guys, played one last round of “Rhapsody in Blue” at full, rafter-shaking blast.
For Kahn, such moments of conviviality were an extension of the feeling he got from architecture work in general—the sense that it was a group effort, a pleasurable back-and-forth, with everyone putting in his two cents’ worth. But there was another side to the work that was more solitary, more self-contained, and this too developed during his years with Stonorov & Kahn. For it was in this period, the early 1940s, that Lou established himself as a published writer, an architect who thought in terms of words on the page as well as buildings in space.
Kahn’s first two publications, issued jointly with Oscar Stonorov, were pamphlets that the two men produced under the sponsorship of the Revere Copper and Brass company. The earlier one, Why City Planning Is Your Responsibility, was a slim fourteen-page booklet that came out in 1943. Prefaced by a forward-looking wartime note from the president of Revere (“All of us are now working for Uncle Sam. No copper is available except for war. But in Revere’s laboratories, research is hard at work in a dozen different directions so that we can bring better living to millions more after the war is won”), the pamphlet had a friendly yet insistent tone. “If city planning, of which everyone speaks, is ever going to become a reality and bring results, it must become the thing in which YOU—reader of this pamphlet—are vitally interested,” it began. “Because city planning concerns YOU and YOUR neighborhood—and also the fellow that lives a little bit further away from your immediate vicinity … YOU, Mr. John Q. Public, should make yourself heard.”
The booklet contained a number of anodyne if true generalizations (stressing, for instance, “the human values that are the most important of all in any city planning project”), but it also took issue with certain pieties of the time. It did not advocate annihilating all slums; on the contrary, it suggested that certain “not-quite blighted neighborhoods,” though visibly in decline, should be protected and strengthened as “conservation areas” rather than destroyed wholesale. The authors had specific ideas for the ways in which life could be improved for city dwellers, which included converting unnecessary streets to playgrounds for children and adding real shopping areas in place of “inferior corner stores.” They urged their imagined readers to “Take Action!” by forming their own neighborhood planning groups, and promised that if these methods succeeded, “You won’t have to pull up stakes and seek for so-called better pastures in the suburbs.”
At the end of the pamphlet, under the joint signatures of Oscar Stonorov and Louis Kahn, there was a photo of the two authors, identically dressed in white shirtsleeves and dark ties. Standing next to each other, they both looked out a nearby window, the bald one taller by at least a head, his hand on the shoulder of the smaller man, who was smiling gently and smoking thoughtfully on a pipe. Like figures in a Social Realist painting—though dressed in modern capitalist garb—Kahn and Stonorov appeared to be looking toward an enlightened future.
You and Your Neighborhood, which came out a year later, was a more sophisticated effort, though still worded “in terms that we hope make sense to average people,” as Stonorov and Kahn put it in their brief introduction. Subtitled “A Primer for neighborhood planning,” this larger pamphlet contained over eighty unnumbered pages, filled with various kinds of illustrations—from photos and cartoons to street diagrams and architectural plans—as well as punchy lists of common problems and their likely solutions. Under bold-faced headings like “Your house and your block,” “Organize a neighborhood planning council,” and “Alone you are powerless,” the authors offered a series of very specific recommendations for how to organize a neighborhood, set up headquarters, and contact those with the power to do something. Their list of “neighborhood needs” included safe streets, playgrounds, a modern school, a place for teenagers to gather, and a shopping center. The underlying impulse was still an exhortation to communal action, but unlike the previous Revere booklet, this one rarely descended to abstract platitudes. Instead, it relied on a sequentially executable outline of plans and activities. It continued, though, to emphasize the core connection between the individual and the larger urban unit, between the family and the neighborhood. “The plan of a city should be as orderly as the plan of a house,” the booklet concluded, noting in an almost poetic envoi:
Cities have too few corridors
Cities have beds in their kitchens
Cities have their kitchens in all parts of the house
Cities have crammed living rooms or none at all
These are conditions you can help to change in your own city. From neighborhood, to community, to city—it’s a big job, a long job, but by no means impossible if you will help to start it, and stay to finish it.
This was recognizably the same “you” that Stonorov and Kahn had been addressing all along, but the shrill enthusiasms of their first pamphlet had by now been toned down into somewhat more measured phrases.
More measured still, while also much more idiosyncratic and in many ways more impenetrable, was the sole piece of individual writing that Kahn produced during this time. Titled “Monumentality,” this essay originally appeared in a 1944 collection called New Architecture and City Planning: A Symposium, edited by Paul Zucker. What was striking about it, in retrospect, was how many of Lou’s mature architectural ideas appeared in embryonic form in this, his first major piece of writing.
“Monumentality in architecture may be defined as a quality, a spiritual quality inherent in a structure which conveys the feeling of its eternity, that it cannot be added to or changed,” the essay began. While Kahn was explicitly referring to the Parthenon and other monumental works of the past, such notions also seem evocative of the monuments he himself would eventually produce, from the Salk Institute to the Kimbell Art Museum to the Bangladesh National Assembly. Even his specific comments about structure and materials at times appear to refer to these as-yet-unimagined buildings, as when he said, “Structural problems center about the roof. The permanence and beauty of its surfaces is a major problem confronting science,” or observed, “The giant major skeleton of a structure
can assert its rights to be seen. It need no longer be clothed for eye appeal,” or singled out reinforced concrete as a material that was “emerging from infancy” and moving toward “its ultimate refinement.” Yet even as he championed modern construction materials like concrete, steel, glass, and plastic along with the new engineering techniques available for shaping them, he insisted that ancient monuments still had value for twentieth-century architects. While arguing that old forms such as Gothic cathedrals and Greek temples should not merely be duplicated—that the past, in that sense, could not be appropriated or made to live again—Kahn still felt that “we dare not discard the lessons these buildings teach for they have the common characteristic of greatness upon which the buildings of our future must, in one sense or another, rely.”
But the way to arrive at that greatness would by no means be obvious. Unlike the exhorting pamphlets he wrote with Oscar Stonorov, this essay of Kahn’s had few if any specific recommendations, in part because the thing he was advocating in the Revere booklets—overt and conscious action—would not necessarily succeed in this other arena. “Monumentality is enigmatic,” Kahn observed. “It cannot be intentionally created.” What he seemed to be suggesting, even at this early stage, was that the architect could not simply impose his own egotistically ambitious, monument-seeking will on the material and the design. Instead, the modern designer or engineer needed to remain receptive to the kind of power that could only emerge organically from his chosen materials as he shaped them toward their specific functions. Such passive receptivity was the very opposite of the virile assertiveness that characterized contemporary architects in the popular imagination—in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, for instance, which had just come out the previous year. What Lou seemed to be advocating in his obscure little essay seemed, by contrast, positively feminine.
* * *
Busy as he was in these partnership years, Lou still had time for his daughter. Family photos from the 1940s show him standing on the porch or the sidewalk with the baby in his arms; sitting on the stoop in a casual T-shirt as he explained something to the attentive, pigtailed toddler; squatting down in swim trunks at the beach, a wide, closed-mouth grin on his face, as the dark-haired, serious-eyed little girl stood behind him and twined her arms around his neck. Though he was forty or more at the time, he still looked young and, despite the visible scars on his face, almost raffishly handsome, with a full head of tousled hair and a constant twinkle in his eyes.
“Whenever he came home, I was happy,” said Sue Ann. “He was a lot of fun. He would draw me things. We played ‘Chopsticks’ on the piano together: I would play the simple left hand while he improvised. We used to read the funnies on Sunday morning, and then I would sit and watch him paint.”
They shared a life in the neighborhood, too, beyond the confines of the old gabled house, which was filled with all the dark, heavy furniture purchased long ago by Esther’s parents. “We would go on walks up 53rd Street to see if we could see the Northern Lights from the top of the slope. Then we’d get an ice cream,” she recalled. “He took me to see my first movie, which was Mickey Mouse or something.” And in the winter he took her sledding in Clark’s Park, at the corner of 43rd and Chester. Lou would pull her in the sled all the way to the park and all the way up its hill, and then together they would swoop down the hill—“which petrified me,” added Sue Ann.
Everyone in her family sometimes shortened her name to Sue or Susie, but her father had a lot of other nicknames for her: “Suessel, Picklepuss, whatever came to mind.” And he had a wonderful way of holding her in his arms. He cared a lot about physical fitness, physical activity of any kind, and he was very strong and comfortable in his own body. “He would hold you and you knew you were completely safe,” Sue remembered. This differentiated him not only from her stern-faced, gray-haired grandmother—who seemed to the little girl to be neither warm nor cold, just “solid” and reliable—but also from her mother, who was “more awkward as a hugger.”
It was Esther, though, who maintained the family ties, not only with her own family but also with Lou’s. She was the one who sent the Christmas presents out to California and then thanked Lou’s parents for the Chanukah presents sent in return; it was she who wrote regularly with all the family news, despite the elder Kahns’ repeated pleas to hear from Lou personally. In a letter addressed to Lou, Esther, and Sue Ann in early January of 1942, Leopold actually interjected a few lines aimed specifically at getting Lou to write. Having detailed Bertha’s recent ill health and her “longingness for you children,” he pleaded, “Dear Son, you can fix it up a lot by writing more often, we are very much satisfied with Esther’s attention in writing to us in which we are very thankful, but you dear Son, leave it be a few lines, but for Mothers sake please do it.” Leopold also wanted Lou to promise that he would “try to come out with your little family for a visit, I’m telling you she is worried sick and she worries me too, like last night she said to me. ‘You know, Leopold: I’m going on my seventyeth year and I don’t know if I’ll live very much longer. I was never longing for my children back east so much as I’m longing for them now…’” And then, after signing off on behalf of the entire West Coast branch (“The best regards from Sara Joe & Geraldine, from Oscar, Rosella, Alan, and Rhoda”) and concluding with the usual “Lots of love and best wishes, Mother & Dad,” Leopold couldn’t help adding: “P.S. Please write soon.”
Two weeks later, he—or Bertha, or both of them speaking in chorus—sent another letter in a less beseeching mode. “Your letter was so sweet and amusing,” this one began, “we enjoyed every word of it. Especially the part telling us all about little darling Sue Ann. She must be adorable, we can just see Sue Ann at Christmas, with all her pretty toys and gifts. We would give anything to have been there—and believe us, we were there in spirit. You write that she sings so beautifully and want to know if Alan sang at her age.” (Alan, the most obviously musical of the grandchildren, was already a skilled pianist.) “Well dear Esther, you dont have to go so far. Her Daddy was the one that sang. At her age he sang complete German songs and soldier marches. He could carry a tune and remember every note. So your dearest Sue Ann takes after her Daddy.”
Like the previous letter, this one referred to wartime anxieties and expressed the hope that the war would end soon. Unlike the other, it also alluded to the financial relations between the elder and younger Kahns: it brought up the fact that Leopold and Bertha’s regular government check was being reduced as of February, and warmly thanked Lou and Esther for pledging to send them an additional $15 a month to help make up the difference. The tone, on the whole, was cheerier than in the earlier letter—the Los Angeles weather was gorgeous, they were both feeling reasonably well—and though both missives were composed in Leopold’s elegant script, it is tempting to imagine Bertha’s calmer voice dominating the later one. In any event, the letter is signed as usual by both parents, and contains the usual fruitless request: “Tell Lou to drop us a few lines when he can. It seems ages since we heard from him.”
Part of this was standard adult-son behavior—or at any rate standard doted-upon-Jewish-adult-son behavior, the result of an understandable desire to cut the notoriously binding maternal apron strings—but part of it was just Lou. He had always been and would always be a terrible correspondent. Years later, when one of his lovers complained about how infrequently he wrote to her, he was to answer, “I have never written as much to anyone as to you. I haven’t written to my parents for over a year now but there is no excuse for that nor is there an excuse for not trying to write more often to you.” He knew it was one of his shortcomings, and yet he couldn’t do anything about it, or at least he felt he couldn’t. Other things were more important to him. Other things took up his attention, and his time. Loving and intimate as he could be with those close by, he was not good at maintaining ties over a distance, especially if any substantial effort was involved. And perhaps he was particularly remiss in keeping up with the family into which
he had been born—precisely those people whose unconditional love he took for granted, without feeling a need to earn it or respond to it.
Certainly his brother thought this was the case, and told him so in a remarkable letter Lou received in April of 1945. Written on Oscar’s business stationery (headed “Advertising Ideas by Oscar Kahn,” with a return address at the Bank of America Building in Stockton, California), the handwritten letter sprawled across four full pages, each sentence filled with the dashes and dots that characterized Oscar’s flowing, expressive, if not always grammatical style. As a keen psychological view into Lou’s character and his relation to his family, it is unmatched. Here it is in full:
Dear Lou,
I know that even though I haven’t had word from you in many years that sometime or other you must think of me—and wonder how I am—what I’m doing and so many, many more other “question thoughts” that might associate our natural relationship with the past and present. Certainly I do—and when I hear indirectly a smattering of your activities I listen with keen interest. It just occurred to me—how distant (the fact that you are a brother of mine) is imbedded in the memory cells of my brain. I can only remember vaguely what you look like—and your swagger-walk—and although the smaller details that I associate with you and our youth are more vivid, still—it seems to flash by too rapidly for me to hold onto it. However they are identifications—beyond doubt. If you were to ask—what brought me to writing to you now—I couldn’t answer it with a feeling of certainty—chalk it up to the likelyhood of the animal deserting to it’s natural instincts after a strange environment—whatever it is—it is an inner unexplainable urge to rub closer to you—even in this short span—The period in which I know—I write this—+ travel time—+ your receiving this—reading it and I am sure feeling just as I do at this moment, precisely back about 20 years. Twenty years is a heck of a long time.
