by Wendy Lesser
Fred Langford’s significant contribution to the Salk project did not go unnoticed. “He was very interested in doing perfect concrete,” Jack MacAllister recalled. “So he worked on it and figured all that out: how to do the forms and the tie-holes so that they were rational, how to allow the reuse of forms, how to make the forms not leak. And the end result was the most perfect concrete the world has ever seen. When Lou saw that success, he got even more deeply into concrete, because he saw how perfect it could be. In his own way, Fred elevated Lou’s vision of concrete.”
Fred, on the other hand, always attributed the guiding vision to Lou: “The main thing on all his formwork was ‘I want to show the hands that built the formwork.’” So even the tie-holes—those circular punctures marking the spots where the plywood forms had been tied together before the concrete was poured—were left visible and filled only with rust-preventing lead, not patched over with acrylic or concrete as they would have been in standard construction. And they were arranged symmetrically because, as Fred put it, “there was a logic to it.” It was a logic that MacAllister, at least, saw as Langford’s handiwork. Certainly the symmetrical tie-holes were already visible in the detailed working drawings Fred made for the site, which showed every little circle lined up in its proper place. (Even the holes on the sharply angled walls were exactly rendered—they were elliptical in shape, to account for the diagonal perspective.) It was a case of Fred’s precise draftsmanship and Lou’s relentless search for “articulation” lining up as perfectly as the tie-holes did.
“The fact that they are organized in a way that the pattern is rational, not random,” said Jack MacAllister, was “an opportunity for design rather than just construction. Lou was leaving behind evidence of how things were made, including the flaws. He never wanted the concrete patched. I think that was directly related to his face.”
No one who met Lou could fail to notice his scars, but for some they played a more important role than for others. “When I first saw him, at first I was shocked,” confessed Fred Langford, “but in minutes you forgot about it because of his personality.” That was how most of the people who worked with him felt, or said they felt.
But for Jack MacAllister, the flaws that marked Lou’s face were an ever-present factor. “I think it was all about the scars,” he said, referring to Lou’s energy—sexual and otherwise—as well as his approach to architecture. “If you’re that ugly, you try to look for beauty in some other way.” MacAllister could never get over the ease with which this “ugly man,” as he thought of him, attracted women. There were parties at Jack’s Del Mar house, for instance, where “he would glom onto some younger woman or other and just press them to the wall—very attractive women, too. And some of them fell for it,” marveled Jack. “He mesmerized people, especially in California, where there were a limited number of people with three-digit IQs.”
* * *
Kahn’s love life was not necessarily a subject of office chatter, but those who worked regularly for him in 1962 could hardly have remained ignorant of his serious, long-term affairs. Anne Tyng was still working at Louis Kahn’s practice in the early 1960s, and so was Marie Kuo. There were evident tensions between the two women, just as there were tensions between Lou and Anne over Marie. And by the time of the move to 1501 Walnut, Kahn had already become deeply involved with Harriet Pattison. Some of the architects at Kahn’s office may have been aware of the fact that these three major affairs had overlapped in time, but most probably were not. “I think he was serially monogamous,” said David Slovic, who worked for Lou in the mid-1960s. “He wasn’t, like, juggling mistresses that I know about. It wasn’t discussed; it was just accommodated. It’s not like people thought it was normal. They wouldn’t have expected to have such a life themselves.”
His colleagues may not always have known about each stage in his relationships, but people around him nonetheless became aware, sooner or later, of his latest love interest. Sue Ann Kahn, for one, began to suspect that her father and Harriet were having an affair when Pattison made special efforts to befriend her in about 1961. Harriet had taken a job in the antiques department at Parke Bernet auction house in New York, and Sue Ann was a recent Penn graduate who had just moved to the East Village. When Harriet relocated to Philadelphia a short time later, Sue felt her suspicions had been confirmed.
But now, in the spring of 1962, Lou and Harriet’s relationship reached a kind of crisis point when Harriet found out she was pregnant. She told Lou, and the first thing he said was “Not again!” This was hardly encouraging. If he viewed her pregnancy as simply a rerun of the Anne Tyng situation, he would not necessarily feel obliged to get a divorce this time either. But Harriet was not ready to give up, and when she conveyed the news that she was going to have a baby to her rather patrician WASP family, her underlying implication was that she hoped soon to be married to the father. She did not, however, feel it was her obligation to inform anyone in Lou’s circle. That would be up to Lou.
Late in the spring, Sue Ann got a call from her father saying he was going to be in New York consulting with Noguchi and would like to drop by and visit her afterward. (Kahn was collaborating with Isamu Noguchi on a very engaging playground design for the Upper West Side, which—like so many of his projects over the years—was doomed never to be built, in this case because it was too engaging: the neighbors feared it would bring in “outsiders,” presumably of a darker, poorer kind.) Sue Ann had been trying to get Lou to visit her ever since she had moved into her first grown-up apartment the year before, and now he was coming at last. He told her he planned to be there at two o’clock, which would allow her to serve him tea, so when she got off the phone she rushed out to buy special tea things.
Lou didn’t show up at two, but Sue knew he was often late, so she waited. Three o’clock came and went and still he wasn’t there. As it got closer to four, Sue Ann called Louise, Lou’s secretary, to find out what had happened. Had the meeting with Noguchi run over?
“There is no meeting with Noguchi,” Louise told her. “He’s coming to New York just to see you. He’s on the train now.”
When Lou finally arrived at about five, Sue Ann said, “How did the meeting with Noguchi go?” But if she thought Lou would confess his strange lie, she was disappointed; he just said, “Fine, fine.” They barely had time for him to sit down for a few minutes and make a few critical comments about the apartment (“Why don’t you get some antiques?” was the one that stuck in her mind) when he announced he had to go.
“I suggested we take a cab together uptown, since I had to go to my rehearsal,” recalled Sue Ann, who at the time was just beginning her career as a professional musician. She would drop him at the train station, she said, and then go on from there. “We get to Penn Station, he opens the door, hands me a twenty-dollar bill—twenty dollars was a lot of money in those days—and he’s standing outside the door and he says, ‘Harriet’s pregnant.’ And I say, ‘Oh, that’s great, Daddy,’ and the door closed and he was gone. I’m not even sure if he heard me.”
Sue Ann never did figure out why Lou felt obliged to tell her this. Perhaps Harriet had pressured him to do so, or possibly he himself just wanted her to know about it. Maybe he expected her to transmit the information to her mother. Sue Ann certainly had no intention of doing that. But the subject came up anyway, when she was staying at her parents’ house over the summer.
Esther and Lou were still living at 5243 Chester Avenue, though now the West Philadelphia neighborhood, once solidly middle-class, was starting to decline. The household continued to function much as it had during Sue’s childhood, with Esther’s mother, Annie, occupying a bedroom on the second floor, Lou and Esther on the top floor with their own sitting room and bedroom, and Sue Ann’s bedroom sharing the rest of the third floor with the empty room that until recently had belonged to their longtime lodger, Aunt Katie, who had moved to an old-age home. Though Esther had at long last retired from her career as a medical technician and was home mor
e often now, her elderly mother still did much of the cleaning, cooking, and laundering. (It was said that when Annie Israeli reached her eighties, the family had tried sending Lou’s shirts out to a Chinese laundry for a while, but he didn’t like the way they were done, so his indomitable mother-in-law went back to ironing them.)
On that summer day in 1962, Sue was downstairs in the kitchen drying silverware when she heard a knock on the door. She opened it to find a stranger standing on the porch. He said he wanted to speak with Esther Kahn.
“Who shall I say is calling?” asked Sue Ann.
“My name is Pattison,” he said, and Sue thought: Uh-oh. She ran upstairs, told her mother that someone was at the door to see her, and then shut herself in her bedroom, wishing she could lock the door.
A short time later Esther came upstairs, flung open the bedroom door, and said, “And what do you know about this?” Without waiting for a reply, she went on, “It’s not like the other one—” and then clapped her hand melodramatically over her mouth, because Sue Ann was not supposed to know about Lou and Anne’s daughter, who had never been mentioned in her presence.
“It’s okay, Mom, I know all about Alex,” said Sue. (“It was kind of a relief to say I knew about it,” she reflected later.) Her mother then told her that the man downstairs was Harriet’s brother. He had come to ask Esther to give her husband a divorce so he could marry Harriet, who was pregnant with Lou’s child. Esther firmly showed him the door.
One wonders how this played out in the privacy of the marital relationship. Did Esther ever discuss the encounter with Lou? Did she even mention that she knew about the other children—first Alex, and now this new one? “I’m sure they talked about it,” Sue Ann remarked many years later. “In those days people didn’t get divorced. They worked it out. They slept in the same double bed for forty-four years.” She paused, reflecting on her mother’s character. “She was a very capable person,” she observed. “She supported him all her life.”
* * *
That summer Kahn was more reliant on his wife’s support than ever, for at the beginning of July he underwent eye surgery. Over the years his eyesight had been getting progressively worse. He remembered the blue-tinted spectacles his mother used to wear, and the way her handwriting had gone from sharp and clear in the early 1930s to loopily oversized in the letters she wrote him in the 1940s. For a while he must have worried that he too might slowly be going blind. But the doctors told him his problem was just cataracts, which they assured him were completely operable.
The surgery took place at the Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia, and in anticipation of it, Lou cleared his office schedule for several weeks. “Mrs. Kahn will be at home July 2–9,” said the note scribbled at the top of the July calendar, the assumption being that she would field any questions and concerns from the office. “No calls” was written under July 3 and 4. Otherwise the calendar remained practically blank until late in the month, though there was a reminder on July 13 of a 9:30 a.m. meeting at Bryn Mawr, perhaps to be attended by someone other than Kahn. On Tuesday, July 24, things finally began to pick up again, with a 9:00 appointment at Esherick House and a lunch with a Korean visitor. By the following weekend Lou was back at work full tilt, meeting up with Jonas Salk in Maryland and Pittsburgh. But it would be months before his eyesight fully returned, and then only with the help of thick, heavy-framed glasses that made his eyes look enormous.
The two projects mentioned by name on the July calendar, Esherick House and Bryn Mawr, were among the more significant commissions taking place in the background while Kahn was working on the Salk Institute. They were significant, in part, because they actually resulted in finished buildings, unlike many of the other commissions his firm undertook in those years; and they were also both in the Philadelphia area, where remarkably little of his built work could be seen. That July, the Bryn Mawr dormitory design was still in its early phases, while the Esherick project was just winding down.
Of the nine private dwellings that Louis Kahn was to complete in the course of his working life, Esherick House may well have been the most appealing. He designed and built it for Margaret Esherick, a single woman in her early forties who ran a bookstore in Philadelphia and who had, until recently, been living with her aged parents. Margaret was the niece of the artist Wharton Esherick and the sister of the architect Joe Esherick, both of whom were friendly with Kahn. When Lou agreed in 1959 to design Margaret’s new house, he also agreed to collaborate with Wharton on it—an arrangement that caused some tensions and delays, though the project ultimately survived them. In the end Kahn did most of the work himself, but Wharton Esherick retained sole responsibility for the singularly pleasant kitchen, where Gaudi-esque curving counters, a copper sink, and quirky knots in the wooden cabinetry prevailed over Lou’s sterner aesthetic. Wharton also found and installed the huge, rough-hewn, slightly warped piece of wood that ran along the divide between the living room and the stairway—not a choice Kahn would have made, but one he was able to integrate and even enhance with his own surroundings.
Esherick House was designed as a small, two-story, one-bedroom residence set on a large, lushly wooded lot adjoining a park in Chestnut Hill, one of Philadelphia’s most fashionable suburbs. From the street, the building did not look particularly inviting. Flat-roofed, stucco-clad, and oddly fenestrated, with a narrow bronze-railed balcony sited directly over the half-hidden doorway, it radiated a sense of resistant modernism. Only when you stepped inside did the delicate beauty of the place begin to reveal itself.
To the right of a small entrance room and past the elegantly simple oak staircase lay a double-height living room that ran the full width of the house. In the daytime, light poured into this room from three sides, subtly altering with each hour that passed. The narrow, vertical front window that could be glimpsed from the sidewalk turned out to be a slit between built-in bookcases, topped by a larger horizontal window with which it formed a T shape. On the long side wall, a wider vertical window extended above the fireplace to the roofline, offering slivers of woodland view on either side of the concrete chimney—and because the chimney tower itself was located at least a foot away from the external wall, the changing daylight also fell entrancingly on that smooth concrete face, creating the sense of a living gray panel between the two living green ones. At the back of the room, which faced onto a private garden and the parkland beyond, the wall was almost entirely windows, cunningly placed within various-sized wooden coffers. The way these shuttered windows were set within their wood frames emphasized the comforting fifteen-inch depth of the embrasures, and the fact that you could open and close the windows, both front and back, meant that the long, high room could be cooled by breezes in the summer.
The upstairs possessed many virtues of its own, including an airy bedroom that was as deep and wide as the living room, with a low wall of charming built-in cabinets designed by Kahn; a luxurious master bathroom whose tub faced a nearby fireplace (this had been the client’s special request); and a gallery from which the hostess and her guests could overlook the beautiful living room. But it was that ground-floor room, with its light-filled windows and soaring height, which marked this house as one of Kahn’s first great successes. He had managed to express his unique vision in small parts of a building before—in the cylindrical concrete column containing the triangularly ascending staircase at the Yale Art Gallery, for instance, or in the open pyramids of the Trenton Bath House’s wooden roofs, which seemed to rest with miraculous lightness on their corner supports. But Esherick House was perhaps the first complete building that exhibited his keen understanding of the pleasure a person could take from an enclosed space. Like the larger, grander masterpieces of his later years, this small house was capable of giving its inhabitant both a feeling of exuberant expansion and a sense of intimate protection. So Margaret Esherick must have thought, at any rate, for she insisted on moving into the house in October of 1961, before it was even done. As it happened, she spent only six m
onths there: she died suddenly the next April. Work continued on the house, though, and Lou’s meeting in July of 1962 was probably with the landscape designer, who had not yet finished the garden.
If Esherick House was one of his stellar achievements, Erdman Hall at Bryn Mawr—a much larger, more expensive project that allowed him to bulk up his employee rolls for years—was at best a partial failure. It was the last project he attempted to design in tandem with Anne Tyng, and perhaps the fraying of their personal relationship lay behind some of the problems. Tyng, with her usual penchant for precise geometry, wanted the bedrooms to be octagonal in shape, nestled together in a kind of molecular design around the circumference of the building. Kahn preferred a pattern of interlocking Ts and rectangles, with some rooms having a wide outside window and some only a narrow one. In Anne’s design, the college girls’ rooms would all have been equal; in Lou’s, some were obviously more desirable than others. At each meeting with the Bryn Mawr administration from 1960 onward, Lou and Anne would come equipped with their competing schemes, which they would then present, argue for, and revise before the next meeting. The conflict was overt, and it didn’t just affect the client. “There were two teams, the Anne Tyng team and the Lou Kahn team,” Richard Wurman said about office life during that period. “It was horrible to be in the office then.” Finally, sensing everyone’s impatience and discomfort, Lou told Anne that the era of competing schemes was over: only one design would be presented at each Bryn Mawr meeting, and it would be his. From that day forth, she ceased to participate in the project at all.
