You Say to Brick

by Wendy Lesser

  “She spoke very distinctly, like an aristocrat,” mentioned Alan.

  “Esther was not a very warm, demonstrative person. My uncle was,” Rhoda stressed, and perhaps some of the special allegiance she detected in Sue Ann was also a projection of her own loyalty, her own fondness. But there never seemed enough of Lou to go around. At the end of the weeklong visit, “I remember telling him, ‘I miss you, when will I see you?’” Rhoda recalled. “And he said, ‘Well, you know, I have to work.’”

  It was to be his constant refrain, and everyone around him learned to live with it, including his immediate family. Sometimes his absence could be a prolonged one, as when he flew to Israel in the spring of 1949 to work for a month on housing plans for the new nation. “Dearest Esther,” he wrote three days after landing there, “Hy ye, my love!—We arrived Monday late and from the next morning on have been riding around in the government car inspecting questioning seeing etc etc the most amazing country and people.” He excused himself in advance for his bad correspondence habits—“You mustn’t mind if I don’t write often to you. Our time is so solidly filled up working in committee that I can’t pull away for long enough to make sense of a letter”—and then gave a detailed description of the remarkable things he had seen on the flight over. His handwritten note even included a bird’s-eye drawing of the Mediterranean, with Naples and Vesuvius marked “N” and “V,” as well as a sketch of the Acropolis viewed from its Aegean approach. For Lou, who had previously traveled to Europe only by ship, the trip offered a startling chance to observe from above how “the real flavor of ancient Europe unfolded itself,” and his letter to Esther fully conveyed that sense of discovery and excitement.

  This special trip was obviously justified by the employment it provided (though the housing scheme Kahn developed in Israel was, like so much else, never to be built). But there were other times when Esther took Lou’s physical and emotional absence more personally, interpreting his habitually remiss behavior as outright neglect. In the summer of 1949, for instance, Sue Ann and Esther were vacationing with friends up at Lake Placid—the first of four summers that they were to spend there, leaving Annie Israeli to keep house for her son-in-law back in the sweltering city. The plan was for Lou to come up and join them on vacation for a week in August, and in most years he did manage to accomplish this. But when they were out of sight they were also completely out of mind, and in 1949 he was evidently so preoccupied that he forgot about Esther’s August 9 birthday. (“She always made a very big deal of it,” Sue Ann remarked about her mother’s birthday. “We never made a big deal about Lou’s.”) Esther’s reaction, on this occasion, was to write a complaining letter about Lou to her mother. Annie’s reply, sent on August 14, 1949, gives a sense of the underlying family dynamic.

  “Louis is in New Haven this week-end,” his mother-in-law reported, “he really is very tired. I do feel sorry for him. He works like a slave and what does he have? It is of no use telling him anything, he only gets mad. Since I see how hard he works and how tired he is I would really advise you not to tell him about your birthday I would ignore it. I am sure he too would like to give you things, but he can’t do it, he simply does not know how to make money.”

  Esther’s irritation may have had other sources than Lou’s chronic inability to earn a living or even his immediate crime of forgetfulness. By the late 1940s and certainly by the early 1950s, Anne Tyng had become something of a fixture in the Kahn household. She provided Lou’s daughter with regular art lessons, gave the little girl one of the earliest copies of the Tyng Toy, and even involved her in putting together the architectural model of an elementary school. At one point she also surprised Sue Ann with the gift of a parakeet, a treasured pet to which the child later insisted on giving a first birthday party celebrated by the whole family at breakfast. This friendship between her daughter and the beautiful young woman from Lou’s office could not have been entirely easy for Esther, especially if she had her suspicions—eventually to harden into certain knowledge—that something was going on between Lou and Anne.

  But Anne too had to put up with Lou’s absences, not only when he was with his family, but also when he was on his architectural travels. There were some compensations for this in terms of her role at the office: his 1949 trip to Israel, for instance, left her in sole charge of the Weiss house project for a month, and she was proud of the elegant roof-and-gutter solution she worked out during that time. But when Kahn was away, at least on the shorter trips, he tended to write to his office crew as a group, which left little room for intimate communication between him and Tyng. Nor did he seem to suffer at the idea of being apart from either Anne or his family, as long as his travels were sufficiently novel and interesting.

  What was to prove the most significant trip of the new decade, and possibly of his whole life, began in the late fall of 1950. Thanks to the influence of his friend George Howe, who had recently vacated the post himself, Kahn received an invitation to become the architect-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome. He had earlier applied for a fellowship there, but with no success. (Howe was apparently enraged that he had been turned down.) Now, however, came an offer of full-time accommodation in Rome for up to a year—though Lou felt he could only afford to take three months away from his practice, and the Rome Academy finally agreed to that term. All his expenses would be paid once he was there, the Academy informed him, but getting to Rome was up to him.

  In the end, it was his sister-in-law Olivia and her husband, Mickey, who paid for Lou’s travel to Italy. He had remained close to Esther’s two sisters ever since they had all lived together at 5243 Chester Avenue in the 1930s, and Regina, the youngest, had even moved back in with the Kahns for a few years after her divorce in the early 1940s. Meanwhile, Olivia and Milton Abelson, who were both trained as economists, had gone to Washington to work on the Social Security Act under FDR. But after Roosevelt’s death and Mickey’s subsequent blacklisting in the early years of the McCarthy era, the Abelsons lost their federal jobs. They had moved with their children (one of whom had Down syndrome) from Arlington, Virginia, to New York City, where they were living when Lou received the Academy’s invitation.

  “He got the prize but he didn’t have the money to go over there,” Sue Ann said of her father’s Rome opportunity. “He and Esther approached various friends, people they were close to, and they all turned them down. They said, ‘You shouldn’t go—you should stay with your practice!’” These were relatively well-off friends, Sue pointed out: doctors, academics, people like that. But when the Abelsons, who had a very modest income, heard of Lou’s plight, they stepped in and offered part of their savings. “They just gave him the money, no question,” said Sue. She didn’t know exactly how much it came to, but “whatever it was, it was a lot then.”

  By the beginning of December 1950, Kahn was settled in the Beaux-Arts-style American Academy building on the hillside above Trastevere in Rome. There he was to spend a substantial part of the next few months in the company of the archaeologist Frank E. Brown, who took him around to all the local ancient sites, including Trajan’s Market, the Pantheon, the Forum, and the ruins of Ostia Antica. Lou did a great deal of sketching in pastels and watercolors at this time: he produced some ninety pictures in the course of his three months abroad, documenting what he saw in Greece and Egypt (to which he took a three-week side trip) as well as in other parts of Italy, but mainly focusing on the massive old buildings he visited in Rome itself. He wrote to Tyng about the “overwhelmingly strong jolts that hit you when Rome appears again in all its power,” though he also told her, from Egypt, “The Pyramids are the most wonderful things I have seen so far. No picture can show you their monumental impact.”

  Mass and weight became especially important to him during this period; so did the materials that possessed and embodied these qualities, like brick and concrete. Back in Philadelphia, he had designed his most recent building, the Psychiatric Hospital’s Pincus Pavilion, in the lightweight s
teel so beloved of the modernists, but from this point onward he would abandon steel structures in favor of heavy masonry and reinforced concrete, materials that not only emphasized their relation to gravity, but also displayed on their surface the process of their own making. Inspired by Frank Brown, who spoke about anonymous Roman architects of the Hellenic and High Empire periods as if they were still alive, Kahn began to envision a way in which his deep-seated affection for the old and his admiration for the new could come together. As he said to Tyng about the city of Rome and his experience of being there: “as I see it again, I want to build all the more and better.”

  Part of what Kahn imbibed from Frank Brown was a respect for the weighty old materials and designs the Romans had discovered two thousand years earlier. “Roman architects were moved to seize on the arch as the formal substitute for post and lintel, and on the vault as a means of closing the shell of space in a continuous curve,” Brown noted in his book Roman Architecture, published a few years after his conversations with Kahn. “In the heat of building, under the spur of their new incentives, they perfected old materials and invented new methods. From rubblework came concrete, laid between masonry forms, which yielded its permanent faces.” In such passages, it almost seemed that Brown was recording the recipes from which Kahn would create his future monuments.

  The influence Frank Brown had upon Lou went far beyond these technical descriptions, extending to the moments when he would talk, for instance, about “the choreography of space. In it the architect, like a ballet master, marked with inflexible symmetry the figures, the steps, and the tempo,” Brown wrote. “His measures were the flow of vaults,—ramping, annular, coupled—the punctuation of arches, and the ripple of columns.” That a building was something experienced in time, precisely through one’s movement within and around it, was a great part of the lesson he gave Kahn. Or as Brown said in another passage: “The ample nave was to be grasped as a single whole, clearly scanned by the intervals of its framing. It placed men at its center or drew them to move lengthwise or crosswise of it. The ambulatory unfolded progressively with movement along it or subdivided itself in the stationary units of its bays. Within it special spaces of arrest might be signaled by tribunes, or alcoves or windows.” Though he was speaking about the Roman basilica here, he was also uncannily foreshadowing such Kahn buildings as the Exeter library, the Rochester church, and the Dhaka parliament, each of which would similarly locate the human body, in movement and at rest, within a vast, inspiring space.

  While he was still in Rome, in February of 1951, Kahn learned that he had been awarded the commission for the Yale University Art Gallery. Once again, this timely gift was at least partly due to George Howe, who had recently become the chair of Yale’s architecture department. The project—to add a modern extension onto one of Yale’s traditional Gothic-style buildings, thus creating room for both an art museum and classroom/studio space—would have been a major milestone in any career, and it represented a huge leap in Lou’s. Yet he did not rush back immediately to America. Instead he made his way home in a comparatively leisurely fashion. Having flown to Rome on the way out, he chose to return via train through Venice to Paris, and from there by ship to New York. As he departed from Rome in late February, he sent a postcard to 5243 Chester Avenue addressed to “Dearest Esther Sue and Mother.” In it he explained, “I might send a card from Venice but this might be my last note before leaving on the boat … I am really anxious to be back and see you all again and unravel the many tales & talk about far places and new impressions.” He signed it “Lots of love to all, Lou.”

  * * *

  Kahn returned to America on March 4, 1951, and by June he had moved his practice to new offices at 138 20th Street, at the intersection of 20th and Walnut. There he and his staff, which had increased to eight or ten by this time, occupied the second floor of a rather undistinguished two-story building. Adorned with an oddly fanciful arched ornament on the otherwise flat roof, this corner building was graced with large second-story windows on both of its outer sides, so the whole office was filled with light—though it could also get unpleasantly hot in warm weather (something that Lou, with his immense ability to focus on the project at hand, often failed to notice until long after everyone else was sweltering).

  Besides housing the firm of Louis I. Kahn Architect, 138 20th Street was also the official address of a new entity called Architects Associated, a joint venture consisting of the partners Louis I. Kahn, Kenneth Day, Louis E. McAllister, Douglas G. Braik, and Anne G. Tyng. Braik left in 1952, but the other four continued to work together on various projects through the mid-1950s. Among the designs they did during this time were several neighborhood redevelopment plans and a set of row house studies for the Philadelphia City Planning Commission; a series of traffic studies for the Philadelphia AIA, never implemented but later published by Kahn and Tyng, along with beautifully colored illustrations, in an issue of the Yale magazine Perspecta; and the Mill Creek Project, another Planning Commission job that included closed-off streets yielding “greenways” around the housing. On most of these commissions, Kahn’s group was collaborating in one way or another with Ed Bacon, the man who was to remain the dominant force in Philadelphia planning for more than two decades.

  Kahn and Bacon had known each other since 1939, and they had joined together as housing activists in the early 1940s. Their families had also become friendly: Bacon, who had a daughter about Sue Ann’s age, would invite the Kahns over for Sunday barbecues, and this friendship continued into the early 1950s. But the two men turned out to be very different types, with very different agendas and career paths. Bacon, a Quaker, fit neatly into the social conventions of old Philadelphia, whereas Kahn, an immigrant Jew, did not. Perhaps more importantly, Bacon was an extremely practical man with a clear-eyed, not to say self-serving, sense of politics. Kahn, on the other hand, focused his energies on questions of architecture and design—often involving highly visionary or inventive ideas and practices—and tended to imagine (or hope, or wish) that the politics of any given situation would just sort themselves out. Since they rarely did, this gave Bacon the upper hand, and he was able to take charge of the city’s planning process and leave Kahn on the sidelines, eventually excluding him from most of the key decisions in Philadelphia’s redesign.

  Whether the falling-out between them stemmed more from Bacon’s competitiveness and hunger for power, or from Kahn’s woolly-headedness and impracticality, was a question that depended on whose side you took in their disagreement. At any rate, by the time Kahn left for the American Academy in late 1950, the two were no longer working directly together on specific plans, though Architects Associated continued to do projects for the Philadelphia Planning Commission and Ed Bacon continued to praise Louis Kahn as a “gifted designer” and the “greatest architect in the world.” Kahn generously returned the compliment when he wrote to Bacon about Penn Center—a project from which Lou in the end was completely excluded—that “you have earned the distinction of being the Architect Planner. Few of us can really claim that title.” But later the animosity between them became more pointed, as Bacon grew envious of Kahn’s growing fame and was consequently less willing to give him even the planning credit he deserved—for instance, for the very practical ideas embodied in the traffic studies and the Mill Creek greenways.

  Kahn may have resented Bacon’s cavalier theft of these ideas (certainly Anne Tyng resented it on his behalf), but it was not his way to show overt antagonism. Nick Gianopulos, a Philadelphia engineer who met Lou in the early 1950s, remarked, “I never once heard Lou, ever, curse. I never heard him denigrate anybody. And he taught me something: he says, ‘If you’re angry, really angry, and you have grounds for your anger, when you write to them, kill them with kindness.’” Gianopulos sensed that this principle applied directly to Kahn’s dealings with Ed Bacon; he also felt that Bacon deserved Lou’s anger. “Bacon was an autocrat,” Gianopulos said. “I got to know him in his later years, and I didn�
�t like him.”

  Though Nick Gianopulos and Louis Kahn had met briefly at lunch in 1951 or 1952, the project on which they really got to know each other was the Yale Art Gallery, a technically demanding commission that proved to be a turning point in Kahn’s career. The art gallery was not an Architects Associated project, but one carried out by Louis I. Kahn Architect, involving close collaboration between Lou and Anne, and it was probably Anne’s relentless inventiveness which intensified the need for engineering advice. According to Tyng, the unusual “triangulated geometry” that ended up distinguishing the final design—in both the tetrahedral indentations that made up the concrete ceiling and the triangular main staircase lodged within a concrete cylinder—emanated from her influence. “Since the Yale Art Gallery was Kahn’s first prestigious building, he was nervous,” she noted, “and his first schemes indicated a conventional structure. I asked Lou, ‘Why bother to build it if you don’t use an innovative structure?’” Yet those innovations were precisely what worried the New Haven planning department, which didn’t see how the tetrahedral ceiling could possibly be built to code.

  The remarkable ceiling was certainly not a part of the initial design approved by Yale in August of 1951. It didn’t enter the plans until March of the following year, when Kahn—in the kind of wholesale revision that was to drive clients and co-workers crazy over the years—first introduced the idea of the tetrahedral space-frame. Working in steel in one case and lumber in another, Tyng had already pioneered this kind of structure in two prior commissions, an elementary school and a private house for her parents. For the massive Yale project, though, a wood frame would never have been an option, and there wasn’t enough steel to do the job: the wartime economy that prevailed during the Korean War meant that the Defense Department had to approve each domestic use of steel, and Yale had already received its fixed allocation under the earlier design. So the art gallery’s three-dimensional space-frame had to be composed of reinforced concrete rather than either of those lighter, more flexible materials.