by Wendy Lesser
But whereas textbooks, like creativity studies, aim to iron out the differences between individuals, the raw material often tells another story, and it is here, in the interviews and exercises, that Lou’s personality actually emerges. He dealt for the most part with an interviewer named Joseph Speisman, a man who went on to have a substantial career in research psychology himself, though he was only in his early thirties when he interviewed Kahn. From the “character sketch” he was obliged to compile, it would seem that Speisman was well-disposed toward his subject. “He was warm, serious and quite intense and absorbed in the task—he was not at all dependent on the examiner but was quite alert to subtleties and nuances of questioning procedure,” Speisman noted. The interviewer also expressed a certain degree of admiration for Kahn’s “great clarity and fluency,” as well as his ability to order his memories chronologically while at the same time making connective leaps across time. In a checklist he filled out after the interview, Speisman reported that Kahn “seemed to enjoy being interviewed,” “made considerable use of his hands in talking,” and had both a “quick tempo of movement” and “an alert, ‘open’ face.”
Overall, the character sketch seemed accurate in its main conclusion: that Louis Kahn’s outstanding quality was “an intense dedication to his work,” such that “sense of tradition and antecedents, historical perspective and even intellectual drive and curiosity are sublimated through and filtered through what he refers to as his ‘artistic creativity.’ This does not mean that he is in any sense withdrawn; on the contrary it appears to be an extreme in focussing and in utilizing his work as an integrating frame of reference—albeit a broad frame.” Speisman was also insightful in regard to how that work was accomplished. “He is extremely active; nonetheless, he likes to broadcast his ideas even when not fully thought through in order to get feedback,” the psychologist correctly observed. But he was taken in, or at least misled to a degree, by Lou’s self-effacing manner, for Speisman decided “he is not really personally secure enough to repudiate anything with directness or completely … despite his abilities and talents he is not a man of great confidence nor certainty about himself.” (Perhaps it is in the nature of such studies to contradict themselves, but this conclusion sits oddly with the one expressed in a separate “rating sheet,” where Speisman ranked Kahn average-to-high for most of the listed cognitive and intellectual traits, but practically off the charts—with a 9, the highest score—on “Sense of destiny: Has clear notion of life goals, and unquestioned confidence in his eventual attainment of them.”) Finally, Speisman theorized, “He leaves the impression that he does not live and experience directly enough but rather everything is filtered through his ‘art,’ his work, and even this is further covered by a ‘mysticism.’”
The so-called mysticism is perhaps traceable to Kahn’s answers in response to a series of routine questions about his practice of architecture. When did you feel you had arrived as an architect? “8 years ago,” Lou responded (which would make it December of 1950, when he was at the Rome Academy). “I felt secure,” he continued. “I realized a sense of order and design.” And then, three questions later: Do you feel that you have any exceptional or unusual talents in architecture? “Yes,” said Lou. “A sense of order from which design flows. I am unique in this!” Later still: How would you define creative achievement in architecture? “A sense of order and position, a relationship to existing life,” he repeats. And again: Do you consider yourself to be a creative architect? “Yes.” If yes, in what ways? “Order! out of which stems true design and structure.” One can sense a certain impatience in that exclamation point, a concern that he is not really being understood. The interviewer seems not to realize that Kahn means something quite specific by “order,” not just as a guiding principle in his own work but as a critique of how architecture is generally practiced by others. Kahn explicitly set out to capture the essential spirit (of a place, or a function, or a need, or a desire) and allowed that to dictate the design. Perhaps this was mystical, as Speisman insisted, but if so, it was also very practical.
And if Speisman inaccurately characterized Lou as insecure, or felt he was unable to live and experience things directly, Lou himself was partly to blame, for he omitted as much as he conveyed. He readily confessed to his own shyness, tracing it back to his childhood accident: “I suffered severe burning. My scarred face and hands contributed to my shyness.” He also presented himself as a dreamy, imaginative boy, full of daydreams about knights and other fairy-tale characters. He was forthcoming, when asked, about his early sexual experiences, saying that he had learned about sex at “13 or 14. I experienced an emission while alone,” and confessing to the interviewer that he didn’t have actual sex until after college, when that unnamed woman who owned the hotel in England seduced him during his 1928 tour. But he did not mention—perhaps because Speisman did not ask—anything about the role of sex in his later life.
In regard to Lou’s current family life, the record is apparently incomplete, because Speisman took only fragmentary notes when they were talking about the subject, so that he had to reconstruct Lou’s answers from memory much later. “As far as the questions about his family,” the interviewer wrote in an apologetic cover letter to the researcher, “I simply did not place enough confidence in my memory to write in what did occur to me, but if it is any help to you this is what I remember: One wife, two children (boy and girl). Wife devoted to his career, supportive—warmth, etc. Wife a musician? Relationship with all three excellent—contributes to his sense of security and provides him with a feeling for the ‘continuity’ of human existence.” This imaginary musician wife may have stemmed from a mix-up between Esther, who enjoyed concerts but was not a musician, and Lou’s mother, daughter, or brother, all of whom were. (“My brother was musical, had extreme talent, but no interest in school,” Lou had mentioned during the interview, in one of his rare allusions to Oscar.) As for the boy and the girl: if Kahn told the interviewer he had two children, one named Alex and the other named Sue Ann, Speisman might well have deduced that the former was male, the latter female. But because the interview results are so haphazardly reported, one cannot conclude that Lou said anything at all about his second family—especially given the fact that, on the Personal Data Blank he filled in himself, he indicated that he had only one child.
The official test results are, for the most part, even more inconclusive. The Rorschachs were done in a nonstandard way and are therefore uninterpretable; the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and the Architect Q-Sort Deck are unreadable without a key; the Strong Vocational Interest Test is just plain useless; the Metaphors tests and the Study of Values test, while intriguingly titled, yield only numerical responses; and so on. Still, there are a few moments in this three-day battery where something important seems to emerge from the overall static.
In a test called Semantic Differential, for instance, Kahn was asked to rank various subjects—Architecture, Science, Art, Creativity, Success, and Myself—on a spectrum of descriptive words that ranged from one extreme to another. For the most part the evaluations came out pretty much as expected. Architecture, for instance, was absolutely “permanent,” “strong,” “deep,” “stable,” “safe,” “pleasant,” and “good.” Lou defined Success as utterly practical, masculine, and active, but also characterized it as completely difficult, unstable, and complex. Yet there were some surprises too, especially on the page that referred to Myself. Whereas every other category—including Architecture, even including Creativity—got the most “public” rating possible, Lou located himself far over on the other side of the spectrum, toward “private.” He also put himself one step away from fully masculine (though this was not necessarily a negative in his eyes: Creativity, Art, and Science were all centered midway between masculine and feminine). On the beautiful to ugly spectrum, he placed himself exactly in the middle.
This is all mildly illuminating. But by far the most interesting results, from a personal p
oint of view, came in the Thematic Apperception Test, where Kahn was asked to make up verbal descriptions for five rather complicated visual images. The first of these pictures shows an older woman in profile, looking out a window, while a younger man stands behind her; both are unsmiling. “The son has just told his mother about his plan to leave the household,” Lou responds. “Constant disagreements with his father are the cause of his decision. The Mother’s looking out in space as though reflecting times gone by when care-free happiness was all every one knew. He remembers these days too, but is bitter though unhappy determined.”
In reaction to an image of a young woman with dark hair next to a wrinkled old woman in a cowl or hood, he says, “It was so obvious, the same face years ago. To think that so fresh and inviting a figure would one day be but just interesting, no longer desired. I knew her mother when she was the image of her.”
A semi-abstract, semi–Social Realist stairway, with a doll-like figure climbing upward near its base, yields the description, “The massive structure brutally made with the least sensitivity was before her every day as she climbed the stair of endless treads to her work. She was so young. Some day she thought I will own this dump and install an elevator. But how can anyone penetrate this mass. Not even dynamite is able.”
Another picture shows a masculine figure in coat and hat standing alone in noirishly lit obscurity. Lou’s response is: “Waiting in hopes she would pass again. Though he knew it would not happen still he counted off seconds, minutes playing the game of love and circumstance—a fairy tale of existance, unreal though still real because he was alive and capable of such a turn of mind.” Unlike the other descriptions, this account abruptly changes its viewpoint in the last sentence: “There I was watching him suggestively shaped by the light in a drooped pose of resignation.”
And then there is an image composed merely of shapes and voids, so abstract that it reads equally well vertically and horizontally. About this indeterminate chaos Kahn says: “This is the best way I can express my dream. All the movement made by the wind and the waves seemed to form themselves into clanging spirits undulating and inter mingling. Nothing was I knew things to be, still, I knew that they are part of existence. A dream, a manifestation of order is real though only to the single being. The wind became the flame the flame became water.”
In the face of such material, interpretation seems utterly beside the point. These little stories are the thing itself: the Avernus leading directly down into the cauldron of personality. In contrast to the cool placidity of the rest of the test results, these TAT descriptions are white-hot with a man’s living presence. You are there with him, at least for the moment, inside his wishes and dreams and fears and regrets; and you are also standing outside him, just as he occasionally stands outside himself: “There I was watching him…”
* * *
This romantic fellow—the Louis Kahn who presumed that a man waiting alone on a street must be waiting for a beloved woman to pass by—was evidently the one who showed up for a Christmas party at Wharton Esherick’s house later that month. For it was there, in December of 1958, that Kahn first met an attractive young woman named Harriet Pattison.
Harriet, who came from Chicago, was the seventh and last child born to William and Bonnie Pattison. Her ancestors on her mother’s side, the Abbotts, had arrived on the shores of New England in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, and Bonnie Abbott Pattison, who graduated from Wellesley in 1906, was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. After settling in Illinois, the Pattisons produced five daughters and two sons, one of whom—Abbott Lawrence Pattison—was already an established artist by the time his little sister Harriet reached high school. Abbott’s massive, WPA-style Kneeling Woman won the Art Institute’s prestigious Logan Medal for the Arts in 1942, and in the subsequent decades his semi-abstract, semi-figurative sculptures in bronze, steel, and marble could be found all over Chicago.
Harriet herself, after attending a progressive school called Francis Parker, went briefly to Wellesley and then to the University of Chicago, from which she graduated in 1951. After that she enrolled at the Yale Drama School to study set design, though she ended up transferring to the acting program. Along the way, she also took a course in color theory with Josef Albers. Leaving Yale without an advanced degree, she traveled to Europe and lived for a while in Scotland, where she spent a semester in the graduate philosophy department at the University of Edinburgh. By the late 1950s she had decided to concentrate on the piano, which she played extremely well, and she had come to Philadelphia in order to study with a teacher named Edith Braun.
When they met in December of 1958, Pattison had just turned thirty and Kahn was nearly fifty-eight. Harriet had come to the Christmas party with Robert Venturi, a young architect who, like Kahn, taught at Penn. Lou had great respect for Venturi (“Bob Venturi knows more about architecture than all of us combined,” he told a colleague many years later), and Venturi’s personal life had already overlapped with Kahn’s in curious ways. For instance, during Venturi’s Rome Academy fellowship—which coincided with Anne Tyng’s stay in Rome—he had driven Anne and Alex to the American Episcopal Church in Florence for the baby’s baptism, had stood up as her godfather, and had then loaned Anne the money to pay for their passage back to America. Now he had brought Harriet Pattison as his date to Esherick’s party, and though she left with Venturi that night and continued to see him for a while, she and Lou had instantly become smitten with each other. Lou soon began visiting her in secret, and though he referred to her in public as “Bob Venturi’s girlfriend,” he thought of her as very much his own.
This was made abundantly clear in a letter he wrote to Harriet from Europe in September of 1959, less than nine months after they first met. “Dearest Best My Wonderful Sweetheart,” the letter began. “How your image and all that I feel gives radiance that is ever with me. Once it appeared unbelievably real. The wife of Aldo Van Eyck, a Holland architect of unusual ability, reminded me right away of you—with cut of her beautiful face and graceful body. But above all I felt you in me by the loving closeness to her husband and her artful way of sharing her faith in him.”
Kahn had been invited to the Netherlands to give a talk at the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne meeting in Otterlo, and as he said in the letter to Harriet, “After my talk at the conference it was expressed as the presence of a new beginning. Harriet it was a good moment.” But the trip was even more important for other reasons, because during his two-week stay in Europe Lou also went south to France to see two key works of Le Corbusier’s: the Ronchamp Chapel he had so loved when he first saw its photo five years earlier, and the monastery at La Tourette. He found Ronchamp to be “a great great work”—the letter to Harriet included a quick sketch of it—but perhaps even more telling in terms of his own career was his exposure to La Tourette. “The building is a coming together of spaces boldly and even violently meeting each other with its own light quality,” he said in another letter to Pattison. “I felt all humility before this masterpiece of Corbusier’s. I kept telling the monk who guided me thru of my reactions—the meaning profound in the nakedness of every form. The joyous courage that comes from realization in art and that only a religious man could act with such fearless invention for the sheer need rather than the desire for creation.”
Le Corbusier’s varied and striking use of light in this monastery was to have a profound influence on the work Kahn designed from that point onward—not just in explicitly religious buildings like the Rochester church and the mosque at Dhaka, but also in the other light-filled structures he proceeded to create, including the Exeter Library, the Kimbell Museum, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Indian Institute of Management, among others. What’s more, Kahn seemed to comprehend almost instantaneously the impact Corbu’s work would ultimately have on his own. “All the time I talked to him,” he said of his conversation with the monk, “I was thinking of course if my own realizations are testing agai
nst what I saw. I felt nothing but humility and strength and a powerful will to continue more than ever … an artist never sets out to solve a problem for which there is a known solution and a known appearance (or feeling). He draws from the circumstances and need the essence of new clusters of affinities, which he models into a new image.”
When Kahn returned to Philadelphia from this European trip, it was not only his architectural life that had changed its direction. Personally, too, things were realigning themselves. He was still committed to maintaining his domestic life with Esther (for even as he was writing extensively to Harriet from France, he was also sending postcards to 5243 Chester Avenue, including one in which he entertained his wife with a small bout of conspiratorially tongue-in-cheek French pretentiousness: “Tout le monde, Tout La France est beaux et sympathique. Carcassone—c’est l’architecture tres importante”). And he was still working closely with Marie Kuo at the office, sharing his most important projects with her. But the relationship with Anne Tyng had taken on a new form. After nearly fifteen years of being his lover, Tyng had announced to him that though their work together would of course continue, their sexual life was over. “I suggested to Lou that our relationship should become platonic because I realized he was involved with someone else” was how she discreetly put it—though in fact, by 1959, she had been forced to confront not just one but two rivals. The affair with Marie was painful for her, but it seems to have been the passionate connection Lou felt with Harriet that finally persuaded Anne to end things between them.
