by Wendy Lesser
The intrusion of Marie Kuo into the equation, painful as it must have been to Anne on a personal level, became even more disturbing because of the way it affected her collaboration with Lou. This became apparent soon after her 1955 return to the office, when she was assigned to work on the Trenton Bath House, a building that was a key part (and, in the end, one of the few constructed elements) of a site plan for the Jewish Community Center in Ewing Township, New Jersey. According to Tyng, Kahn had been working with Tim Vreeland, one of their colleagues, on a roofless rectangular design, but it was she who came up with the final plan: four symmetrically arranged squares around a central courtyard, with each square roofed by an open pyramid that rested on four hollow columns. Some of these empty, partially walled-in corners could function as “servant spaces” that held things like water pipes, electrical equipment, and pool supplies. Others would form the matching entrances on either side of the boys’ and girls’ changing rooms. These “baffled entrances,” as Anne thought of them, were something she remembered from her Chinese childhood, and at Trenton they lent both a simplicity and a mystery to the separation between public and private space.
“Lou and I were working together at a drawing board for the first time in over a year,” Anne noted, and it pleased her that he went with her proposed scheme. But when it came time to paint the mural Lou had designed for the bath-house entrance, it was Marie that he took along on the weekend painting expedition. Only five years earlier, Anne had been his chosen assistant on the Weiss house mural. The change in her role could not have been starker.
Whether or not Kahn was consciously attempting to push Tyng to the margins of his work, he was effectively doing so. An entry in one of his notebooks—uncharacteristically dated, in this case with the notation “June 7, ’55”—showed how this new alignment might have played out in the office. Kahn wrote:
The last edition of the Sunday Times showed picture of Corbu’s chapel at Ronchamp. Reactions differed wildly. I fell madly in love with it. Marie feels the same as I do. Dave thinks it arbitrary. Tim is not commital. Pen just repeats my words of praise, adding nothing. Beer, always superior, says it looks like hundreds of pictures in Switzerland. To me it is undenyably the work of an artist. An artist able to retranslate a dream into the concrete materials of architecture. A dream full of the known unrestrained forms symbolic of religion to the dreamer …
It is striking that Lou knew so immediately that this recently completed building of Le Corbusier’s, seen only in a single photo, would be of such importance to his own work—not only in terms of its materials (poured concrete, local stone), but also with respect to its strangely affecting form, which was at once whimsical and serious, curved and straight, massively weighty and illuminatingly light. And one can almost hear the office conversation emerging from the page, as Dave Wisdom—the solid paterfamilias of the firm, the only voice routinely able to counter Lou’s—chimes in with his opinion, while Tim Vreeland, the handsome former Yale student, resists committing himself at all. Penrose Spohn comes through as the inevitable yes-man (though how do his comments really differ from Marie Kuo’s wholehearted agreement?), and then Abraham Beer, the visiting Frenchman, takes on the role of the snooty foreigner.
But where is Anne Tyng in all this? Literally on the margins, it turns out, segregated off on the other side of the page—for to the left of this notation, across the vertical dividing line that separates each notebook page into a narrower left-hand column and a wider right-hand one, Kahn has written, “Anne is not satisfied with the power expressed only by form making not derived from an order of construction which is in all architecture inherent in form. Ann claims that if Corbusier had a growth concept of structure as I and she understands it he himself would not be satisfied with his work.”
She was, it seems, the truer Kahnian of the two, always reminding him of the ideas he himself had espoused, the notions of order they had together explored in architecture and in form itself. Anne’s special kind of intelligence—which included her passion for the purity of geometry—made her want everything to work out logically, neatly, so as to remain consistent with the underlying principles she saw at work in the universe. Lou had been immensely drawn to this quality in her and had responded to it, both in his words and in his work. Yet something in him also wanted to rebel against it, with an impulsive reaction of pure instinct: “I fell madly in love with it.”
Despite their differences during this period, though, Kahn and Tyng remained a couple in many ways: as colleagues at work, as parents to little Alex, and even as lovers. Without permanently giving up Marie, as Anne must have repeatedly pressed him to do, Lou continued to be an important presence in the Tyng household. He would take Alex places or come visit her at Anne’s, occasionally staying for dinner and sometimes spending the night. And Anne, too, was granted a flexibility at work that allowed her, despite everyone else’s long hours, to have her “Alex time” at home with the child. As the little girl got older, she often asked her mother why her father didn’t live with them, but Anne’s answers, though intended to protect her, only succeeded in confusing her further. “She would say, ‘We weren’t married like other people were,’ and I thought that meant they were married in a courthouse or something,” the adult Alex remembered. So Alex grew up seeing her father no more than once or twice a month—about as often as a busy architect-father could manage it, she presumed.
One thing that made Lou slightly less busy, if not a great deal more available, was the change in his teaching location. George Howe had retired from his position as chair of the Yale architecture department in 1954, and in fact he was to die less than a year later, to Lou’s great distress. (“He really adored him, and when George Howe died Lou disappeared; he just went to Atlantic City all by himself, and just walked down the beach all day and then came back home; but he did not want to talk to anybody,” Esther Kahn later recalled.) Lou got along much less well with Paul Rudolph, the up-and-coming modernist architect who eventually took over the chairmanship of the department. The commute, too, was beginning to wear on him, and he wanted to be closer to his growing practice. So when G. Holmes Perkins, the new dean of Penn’s architecture program, offered him a regular academic post starting in the fall of 1955, Kahn took him up on it. He had already taught occasional classes at Penn, starting earlier in the 1950s, and had become a familiar face to the architecture students. Now, however, he emerged full-blown as Professor Kahn. He was to take up visiting posts elsewhere—in 1956, for instance, he put in a term at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, and he continued to do some teaching at Yale until 1957, as well as occasional stints at Princeton—but from the mid-1950s onward he remained permanently associated with Penn, as the figure around whom the influential “Philadelphia School of Architecture” cohered.
Richard Saul Wurman, who studied architecture at Penn from 1953 to 1958 and then went to work in Lou’s firm, powerfully recalled Kahn’s first appearance in one of his classrooms. It was one of the “crits”—those occasions when the master architect criticized (or, less frequently, praised) the drawings and designs of the students—and it probably took place around the time Kahn was abandoning Yale for Penn. In any case, Wurman already knew who he was, this teacher with the scarred face, the high-pitched “squeaky” voice, and the incredibly charismatic manner.
“I heard him give a crit in the beginning of my second year and I remember this distinctly,” said Wurman. “It was an epiphany. I came home and said to my parents: I have just listened to a person who is going to be famous.” Wurman didn’t care to what extent his parents, a kosher butcher and a housewife, could understand what he was talking about. He just felt compelled to make the statement. “He’s an astonishing person,” he said to them about Kahn, “and the first person I’ve met who spoke the truth. He’s different from we are—different from I am—and he’s going to be famous.”
* * *
Around the time Lou was beginning his professorship at Penn, or perha
ps a few months later, the teenaged Sue Ann was riding the streetcar that took her from her home in West Philadelphia to her private high school, Friends Select, on the other side of town. As the familiar vehicle carried her along, she happened to glance out the right-hand window; then she turned her head and looked more steadily. There on the sidewalk stood Anne Tyng, whom she knew well, holding hands with a little girl she had never seen before. “And it came to me in this kind of otherworldly way: This is my sister,” recalled Sue Ann.
Her first impulse (though “impulse” made it sound conscious, and it never even reached that stage) was to ignore the realization entirely. “I thought, I don’t want to think about it, and I just blocked it out,” she said many years later. “Never talked to anyone about it. I don’t know how I knew. Maybe I overheard something and wasn’t aware of it. It was just like a flash of insight. Just information. I didn’t feel distress. That’s my sister, that’s my father’s child: I never articulated it to myself, but I’m sure it happened.”
Up to that point, Sue Ann had no memory of hearing a single word about her father’s infidelity. If her parents had ever argued about it, their discussion took place behind closed doors, well away from her presence. “They weren’t display-type people,” she pointed out. “Whatever they fought about was in private.” But she must have heard something, or at any rate sensed something, that allowed her to recognize Alex Tyng the second she saw her. And if the recognition was instantaneous, so was the forgetting: the shock of the insight was evidently so great that her only alternative was to block it out until she was ready to retrieve and consider it.
What she did not discover until many years later was that her mother, too, was involved in a long-term love affair at the time. Lou’s indiscretions were to become widely known, in part because of the children they produced, but Esther’s remained completely hidden. In the end she told only her daughter and two other young relatives. The motive behind these eventual revelations was a kind of generosity, Sue felt. “It was ‘This is how people manage their lives.’ I think she was trying to sort of gently tell me that things are not black and white, that life takes paths that are not so, uh, ‘normal.’”
Though Esther’s straying from the marriage may have helped her cope with Lou’s affairs, it did not seem to be a matter of quid pro quo. She had first met the man in question when they were both graduate students at Penn. Early on in their acquaintance, this colleague and his wife came to a party at Esther’s house—a party at which, typically, Lou played the piano—and the wife was already conscious of feeling jealous about Esther. Her husband clearly thought this young psychology graduate student was exotic and brilliant and attractive. (“And I don’t know that my father thought of her like that,” Sue Ann pointed out. “She was his rock, but…”) The man himself, who was tall and blond and not Jewish, was everything that Lou was not. He soon joined the Penn faculty as a full-fledged research scientist—something else that Esther, not to mention her parents, would have found admirably different from Lou’s slow, often thwarted career path. By the 1950s at the latest, but probably starting much earlier, he and Esther were meeting for serious romantic trysts. They were discreet, but they were not always in hiding: in 1953 or 1954, for instance, he went so far as to drive Esther up to Sue Ann’s summer camp. “I think Dad is seeing another woman,” the man’s daughter remembered hearing from one of her brothers, and they soon became aware that their mother, too, knew about the relationship. But the wife didn’t, or couldn’t, prevent it, and the affair persisted well into the late 1960s, when Esther’s lover became too ill to continue with it. When he died she stayed home from the funeral, feeling it would not be appropriate for her to go, since his wife clearly knew about them by then.
Lou was actually acquainted with this man. As fellow Penn faculty members, they had lunch together occasionally, and Lou even attended the daughter’s wedding. But the general consensus was that he knew nothing about the affair, was indeed “so engrossed in his own world that he probably never even thought about it,” as Sue Ann put it. So Esther’s affair was not revenge, it would seem, but self-assertion. “She had a very strong sense of herself,” her daughter observed, “despite how she circumscribed her life. My mother treasured and supported Lou, but she had her own thing.” And she was careful—unlike Lou—never to risk another pregnancy. Sue Ann’s had been a difficult birth, a breech birth, and Esther also got the sense that Lou was not keen to have more children. The fact that she had a lover simply gave her an additional reason to take precautions.
All this, though, lay under the surface of family life, unspoken and in some cases unperceived. Lou apparently never knew about Esther’s hidden love life, and while Esther knew about Anne Tyng—perhaps even knew about Marie Kuo—she did not discuss her knowledge or make it public in any way. So it was not out of character for their daughter, Sue Ann, to push away the sudden insight about her little sister. A certain willed obliviousness had become an ingrained habit in the Kahn family. It may even have been what allowed them to move forward.
Still, there were occasional moments when true suffering managed to pierce the emotional armor. In August of 1958, Lou got word from California that his mother was dying. Bertha Kahn was eighty-six at the time, and had been afflicted with type 2 diabetes for at least ten or fifteen years. Toward the end, she was confined to bed with a gangrenous toe. “I saw the toe,” said Ona Russell, one of Bertha’s great-granddaughters, recalling the too-vivid memory with a shudder, “because my dad and my uncle, who were doctors, had no awareness of how that would affect me. I remember her suffering, but still with a smile when she saw me.”
Ona’s uncle, Alan Kahn, had been watching over Bertha assiduously for the last few weeks of her life. When she finally died, in the middle of the night on August 20, he was sitting by her bedside. Leopold was downstairs in the living room, still awake, and Alan went down to tell him. “I came down and I looked at him, and he said in German, ‘Mama ist gestörben,’” Alan recalled. Leopold’s English was completely fluent by then, but when he needed to acknowledge this terrible fact—Mother is dead—it was the old language he had spoken with Bertha throughout their lives together that came unbidden to his mouth.
The family had already notified Lou that the end was near, and he had caught the first available flight out of Philadelphia, but he arrived too late. He reached the house after Bertha died, but not long after. “He came in, and he came upstairs where she was lying,” said Alan. “And I remember it because it was the only time I ever saw him cry.”
Bertha Kahn was buried at the Home of Peace Cemetery in East Los Angeles, the same Jewish cemetery in which her son Oscar already lay. Lou attended the funeral and then he flew home, where he didn’t say much about the death. But a few months later, in December of 1958, he remarked in response to an interviewer’s question about his mother, “She was a compelling woman, a forgiving and adapting person but not gushy. She was idealistic, kind, understanding, humorous.” Readily confessing that he identified more with his mother than with his father, he mentioned that his relationship with her had been “wonderful, inspiring, but not directly and/or continually close. It was warm but not with great personal intensity.” During his childhood, if she had to correct him, she did it gently and reasonably: “Father whipped. Mother was understanding, with verbal teaching.” And toward his father, too, she showed great forbearance and love. “He was volatile,” Lou pointed out, and “felt the pressure of being a poor provider,” but “he could be very jolly and happy, especially with mother.” In reaction to one of the interviewer’s rote questions—Was your mother well satisfied with your father’s earning power and position in life?—Lou answered, “No, but she did not denigrate my father. She was noble.” (“Subject looks back to her with awe and idealization,” the interviewer noted parenthetically.)
Lou was answering these questions as part of a large-scale psychological investigation into creativity, conducted by the Institute of Personality Assessment an
d Research at the University of California at Berkeley. The man behind the study was a research psychologist named Donald W. MacKinnon, who had settled on architects (along with writers, mathematicians, and scientists) as a particularly fruitful creative species. To obtain his pool of respondents, he asked five architects associated with UC Berkeley—William Wurster, Vernon DeMars, Joe Esherick, Don Olson, and Philip Thiel—to nominate forty-five or fifty architects each. Though Louis Kahn had thus far built little of note beyond the Yale Art Gallery, the Trenton Bath House, and a few private houses, he was nominated by all five architects on the panel. Others in this prestigious category included Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Eero Saarinen, Frank Lloyd Wright—all of whom declined to participate in the study—and Philip Johnson and Richard Neutra, who, like Lou, accepted.
MacKinnon worked his way down the list, starting with the fives and then progressing in order to the fours (Paul Rudolph was in this category), the threes (who included I. M. Pei, José Luis Sert, and Charles Eames), the twos (Buckminster Fuller), and finally the ones (Oscar Stonorov, G. Holmes Perkins). In the end the psychologist arrived at forty participants—all, by the way, men—who were subdivided into four groups for purposes of testing and conversation. Kahn’s group, which also included Pietro Belluschi, I. M. Pei, and Richard Neutra, was brought to Berkeley on December 12–14, 1958.
By the time Donald MacKinnon got around to publishing his results, the whole process had become so diffuse, not to mention so unscientific by modern research standards, that there was little he could really say about creativity. Some interest, however, still attaches to his composite biography of the creative individual, which has striking affinities with Lou’s own life story. This generic creative person was apparently an introvert who, early in life, had developed a sensitive awareness of his own thoughts, symbolic processes, and imaginative experiences. This inward-turning development would have been caused by childhood unhappiness or loneliness, possibly due to sickness or else to natural shyness; and this child would also have had special skills of a creative nature, which were encouraged by at least one parent or some other adult. MacKinnon also posited a child who would have been free to make his own decisions and thrive independently, largely because of a healthy absence of smothering closeness to his parents. Finally, and perhaps most remarkably, the researcher deduced that this person would have moved frequently as a child, “often from abroad to this country,” and that he was, moreover, someone who felt unusually able to postpone the steps in his professional development until he was ready, without regard to outside pressures. One might almost call this a textbook version of Louis Kahn.
