by Wendy Lesser
The real breakthrough, though, came when the two men were sitting together at a meeting in Dacca. “Lou and I were being very formal with each other,” Henry recalled, “and one day we just broke the ice. We were sitting in a meeting somewhere, and everyone always referred to him as Professor. And I, being a country guy, might have chuckled a little bit. And he turned to me and said, ‘In the office, everyone calls me Lou.’ And I said, “Well, I’m Henry.’ And that was it.”
As Henry saw it, these new jobs on the Indian subcontinent were not just a potential source of fame and fortune for Lou; they also gave him a deeper kind of satisfaction. “He liked going out to India and Pakistan. It’s a chore, and it’s long, and it gets hot out there, but he enjoyed engaging with the folks there. It’s a different culture, and the demands are different. And he received so much respect there. He was a complicated guy,” Wilcots mused. But that realization still lay in the future. “At our initial meetings,” said Henry, “he was just sort of a nice person to be around. He and I got along quite well, really.”
Part of the reason for that, Wilcots felt, was the palpable sense of respect between them, and part of it was their mutual willingness to leave a great deal unsaid. Each man was able to be private, almost secretive, in the presence of the other. “We only talked about architecture,” said Henry, “the process of it, the spirituality of it. We had nice drinking sessions too: in a bar, a hotel, a plane … Malt whiskey,” he recalled. “We always drank that together”—although there was also Lou’s notable fondness for acquavit, not to mention the ubiquitous gin: “In Dacca, before I knew him, he came to my door and asked if I had gin, and he filled his flask with it. He said Esther packs his bag and she always includes his flask, but he had run out.”
Still, the drinking and talking, however pleasant, were always secondary to the work. For Kahn, the problem was essentially how to make something out of nothing—how to take a flat, featureless site, “a no man’s land completely without distinction,” as he called it in a letter to Harriet Pattison, and turn it into a place “worthy of the thoughts I had before I saw it.” When he first arrived in Dacca, he had been taken for a boat ride on the Buriganga River, and this inspired him to do a lovely little sketch of a man poling a boat along in the water. It may have been this image, as well as his recent memory of Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, that caused him to think of setting the Assembly Building in the midst of a shallow lake. Other aspects of the final design might have derived in part from his recent work on the Rochester church: the ambulatory, for instance, that wound round and round the core of the building, creating a twisty, mysterious route that divided the outermost offices from the more central functions; or the light-wells that brought sunlight down to the shadowy lowest levels from high above. But there was at least one crucial element in his Dacca plan that could only have arisen in response to the local culture.
“Then at lunch it dawned on me to include in the assembly group a mosque,” he wrote in his detailed letter to Harriet. “This somehow twisted me from the hopelessness of the location. I was sure then that I could design something that could be its own force and even if an inspiring location would have other spaces suggest themselves it would not have been valuable if I had not thought of the mosque. Religion,” he pointed out, “is the basis of separation from India.”
Apparently this radical idea—to include religion prominently within the legislative building—appealed to the clients as much as the architect. “When I presented that afternoon the idea of an axial relation of the Assembly complex and a mosque,” his letter continued, “it was as though heaven descended on the authorities. They thought it was IT! I am stunned by the completeness of their approval, because they said, ‘You have put religion in this capital. Just what it needed to give the meaning it lacked.’”
Elsewhere, Kahn gave a slightly different version of the same story. “In Dacca, where I am building a Second Capital of Pakistan,” he declared in one public speech, “I was given a long and wordy program … On the third night I thought of the devil of an idea. A house of legislation is a religious place. No matter how much of a rogue you are as a legislator, when you enter the assembly, there is something transcendent about your view … The mosque was an absolute necessity for the assembly, because the way of life involved the mosque five times a day.”
Whether the idea came at lunch or on the third night, in response to the religious history of East Pakistan or the transcendence of democracy, one thing proved consistently true: the mosque (sometimes referred to as the “prayer hall”) turned out to be an essential piece of the finished structure. A grandly proportioned, cube-shaped room with huge, symmetrically curved windows embracing all four corners, it became the heart of the Assembly Building, exuding an indescribable power that could be felt by daily occupants and occasional visitors alike. As with Kahn’s other similarly stirring spaces—not just explicitly religious ones like the Unitarian Church, but the more secular ones too, the “churches” he designed for art and books and research and education—the question arises as to how he managed it. How did a man who practiced no particular religion, who believed in rationality and disdained irrationality, have such remarkable access to the spiritual element in architecture?
“Spirituality has nothing to do with religion,” observed Shamsul Wares, a Bangladeshi architect who met Kahn when he was working in Dacca. “Religion is a set pattern of rituals; religion is caught between rituals. Kahn was a man of the mind: he explored mind. Mind wants to know the truth. Religion never provides the truth—it’s a belief. Kahn was a spiritual man. He was trying to understand the truth in terms of how things happen. If atheists say, ‘We have come from nothing, go to nothing,’ what is that nothing?”
In Wares’s view, this was an investigation that Kahn pursued through light. “He found something in the light,” Wares went on. “You feel that you are washed clean. The light has some existence. It is not totally abstract. It is also visible, it is also feelable. Light is sensoriality. This sensoriality is somehow connected to spirituality: that is how light works on us. We get the idea of spirituality through the senses. His architecture,” Wares stressed, “is sensorial, not just formal.”
And this in turn, Wares felt, was linked to Kahn’s pursuit of the truth. “That we come from nothing, go back to nothing, was also at the core of his being. So he was interested in space—big spaces, giving you the sense of awe. He also knew that truth can never be known. Truth is ever hallucinatory, obscure. So he made the ambulatory, a labyrinthine process: you lose your way. And this disorientation within the building is another way of saying that truth is obscure.”
* * *
On February 7, 1963, just as he was returning from his first long trip to Pakistan, Lou got word that his father had died that day in Los Angeles. Leopold Kahn, who had belonged to his local synagogue and regularly attended services on the High Holidays, would have counted on having a traditional Jewish funeral as soon as possible after his death. So the day after Lou landed in Philadelphia, he took off again for California, arriving in time to see Leopold buried at the Home of Peace Cemetery in East Los Angeles, next to his wife, Bertha, and their son Oscar.
According to Richard Wurman, Lou “didn’t have a good relationship with his father; he mentioned that once.” But at least on the surface they were not at all estranged. Colleagues of Lou’s remembered a visit Leopold paid to the 20th Street office, where Lou set his father up with a drawing board. The man was a skillful artist, and people knew he had worked for a while in stained glass during his younger days, though that employment had been short-lived. In fact, none of the younger members of the family could remember Leopold consistently holding down a job. “Leopold was never the most ambitious man,” observed Leonard Traines, whose father had been Leopold’s first cousin. Traines also pointed out that the elder Kahn had depended for years on the younger one’s financial assistance and had learned to husband his resources: for example, when “Lou sent him the money to co
me to the East Coast by plane, he didn’t want to spend the money, so he came by bus.”
Despite his weaknesses as a provider, or perhaps because of them, Leopold was always the stricter parent, the family disciplinarian. “He demanded respect, and he was very authoritarian, and the only person who could handle him was my grandmother,” said Lou’s niece Rhoda Kantor. Her brother, Alan Kahn, concurred. “He was the noise, she was the sounds of nature,” he said about his paternal grandparents.
“I think that in terms of influence on Lou, his mother had the greatest influence,” Alan commented. “Her aura, her approach to life—she had a magical quality to her that attracted everyone. His intelligence came from her. But much of his personality came from Leopold. I think he had a very strong ego, like his father. I don’t think he had an arrogance, but I think he was pretty assured; he would stand his ground. He got that from his father.”
Leopold was not only a proud man; he was also, according to his grandson, a bit of a dandy. “He was very meticulous—very clean too. He starched and pressed his own shirts. I never remember seeing him in casual clothes. He always looked like a bandbox,” said Alan.
Ona Russell, Rhoda’s daughter, also recalled her great-grandfather’s formal clothing. “I remember Leopold with his suit on, carrying Hershey’s Kisses in his pocket,” she said. “He always had Hershey’s Kisses and he would give me one. I don’t have warm feelings about him—I was afraid of him on some level—but the Hershey’s Kisses ameliorated that.”
Fifty years later, Ona could still conjure up the sight of Leopold on his deathbed in the hospital. “I remember his face looking strained,” she said. “He looked like he was in pain. I remember him speaking with difficulty, but not incoherent or anything.”
Yet the dying man did have his moments of delirium, according to Alan Kahn, who as a trained doctor was monitoring his grandfather’s care. “He was seeing bugs all over,” said Alan, “even though he knew they were phony.” Medically speaking, there was no specific cause of death, no definitive final illness. Although Leopold had for decades been encouraging if not inventing rumors about his own ill health (it was for the sake of his health, for instance, that he and Bertha had originally moved out to California), Alan ascribed his grandfather’s death simply to old age, or “system breakdown,” as he put it.
Lou’s entire West Coast family—not just his sister Sarah, his sister-in-law Rosella, his nephew, and his nieces, but also grandnieces, grandnephews, and assorted varieties of second cousins and cousins once removed—continued to be an important part of his life even after Leopold’s death. Yet few of Lou’s colleagues, even among those who worked with him on the Salk Institute, knew anything about his Los Angeles relatives. It was as if they occupied two completely separate spheres in his life. When he came to La Jolla, he would stay with Jack MacAllister in Del Mar, and either Jack or Fred Langford (depending on whose turn it was to “babysit”) would drive him around, go out drinking with him in the evenings, and swap stories about baseball. When he visited Los Angeles, he would stay with his sister, Sarah, in her tiny house on 78th Street—the same house she had occupied with their parents since the 1930s—and get driven around by Alan or Alan’s ex-wife, Eleanor. And in either place, Lou would seem fully to belong to the people he was with.
“I remember him playing the piano at Sarah’s house,” said his grandniece Ona. “On family gatherings I would see him in his rumpled suit. There was a twinkle in his eye. You would never imagine his greatness, in that setting.” One of his grandnephews, Alan’s son Jeff, also remembered the suits (“Brooks Brothers suits, always dark gray, all the same—that was his uniform, always the same suit, always the white shirt, and the bowtie, askew”), but more than that, he remembered Lou’s conversation. “His metaphors were far-reaching,” said Jeff Kahn. “It was all pretty abstract. And we got it! I remember Dad would debrief us: What was Lou saying?” Jeff’s sister, Lauren Kahn, particularly recalled the quality of her great-uncle’s attention. “When he talked to you, you were the only person in the room,” said Lauren. “This was true even as kids. He would not dumb down what he was saying.”
For Rhoda, the memories were mostly of Lou having fun. “It was hysterical. He loved to play the piano, but he played by ear. He thought he could play really well. My brother, who could play really well, would laugh.” But Lou was never offended; on the contrary, he was obviously doing it in part to produce that laugh. “He was a fun-loving person,” Rhoda added. “He never said anything negative about anyone. He had this charm about him; he had a great smile and laugh. He had a sense of humor.” And what Rhoda especially remembered was how comfortable Lou was with everyone in the family. “They’d have big parties to get together—it was a big family, cousins and everything. And he was very egalitarian. He made everyone feel his equal.”
Yet there was also something special about having him in their midst. “There was a mystique about him,” Ona observed. “If there was a family event and Lou was coming, it was like ‘Lou is coming!’”
* * *
It wasn’t just the West Coast relatives who felt this way about Lou’s invigorating presence. “Your father is coming to dinner!” was how Anne Tyng would announce to Alex that Lou would be dropping by their odd little vertical house on Waverly Street in Philadelphia—as if something thrilling were about to happen. Even when there was no longer any romantic connection between her parents, Alex could hear the breathlessness in her mother’s voice as she ran downstairs with the news of Lou’s imminent arrival.
The dinners themselves were, in Alex’s view, rather boring. “Basically, my parents would talk about theories at dinner—their latest architectural theories, their ideas,” recalled Alex. “My mother would talk about new geometrical ideas; he would talk about silence and light. Most kids don’t want to be asked How was your day? I was dying to be asked How was your day?”
Yet however close the intellectual bond was between Louis Kahn and Anne Tyng, it did not prevent Tyng from leaving the firm. “In 1964, though Lou had plenty of work in the office, he ‘let me go’ by simply not giving me work,” Anne wrote in a memoir she published long after Lou’s death. Other people offered somewhat different accounts of their professional parting. “Anne would go off and do her own scheme when we were working on a project. It was crazy-making,” said Jack MacAllister, who was never Tyng’s greatest fan. Even Ed Richards, who was fond of Anne and friendly with her outside the office, insisted that “Lou would never have fired her. When she dropped out of Bryn Mawr, she worked on other stuff. Some of the time she worked on her own geometry. She would come into the office and say, ‘Oh, I’m so excited, I crossed a dodecahedron with a whatever’—no one could understand what she was talking about.”
To Moshe Safdie, it seemed that Tyng’s departure stemmed directly from the personal tensions between her and Kahn. Safdie, who had not been in the office long, assumed that this had something to do with Marie Kuo, even though the affair with Marie was long over by then. (Marie was still working at Kahn’s office in 1964, but by that time she had met and married Morton Paterson, an executive with the drug company Smith Kline & French; as if to signal how thoroughly that episode in his life was closed, Lou even attended their wedding.) Safdie thought he could recall the exact moment when all the simmering resentment between Lou and Anne came to a head. “One day the three of us are working—Lou, she, and me,” Safdie recounted. “To start with, the atmosphere seemed charged.” Then, according to Safdie’s memory of events, something set Anne off, though he couldn’t say exactly what it was. “There was a big fight,” he said. “She stormed out and never came back.”
Yet it was Anne and not Lou with whom Safdie developed an enduring friendship. “Anne was a brilliant thinker, even beyond architecture. She was a mentor. She kind of invested in me, more than Lou,” Safdie observed. He and his wife and young daughter made up an informal extended family with Anne and her daughter during the sixteen months he spent in Philadelphia, before he
moved to Montreal for the World Expo and the creation of Habitat 67. Alex Tyng was about nine or ten at the time.
“She was cranky,” Safdie said of the little girl. “I’ve seen it since with several single mothers who cannot somehow deal with the disciplinary issues. The kid just grows up without any sense of limits. At the same time,” he admitted, “she had something in her.”
Ed Richards, who had once visited Anne and Alex at their Waverly Street house, put the case even more strongly. “Anne made the decision that Alex was not going to be disciplined because it would affect her creativity,” he said, adding: “She was a little terror.”
From the point of view of the grown-up Alex, a highly accomplished painter, there was never any question of Anne’s deciding not to discipline her; she was simply too willful, even as a small child, to do what anyone else told her to do. And the adults around her—even and perhaps especially her father—seemed to reinforce her own sense of herself as a fully formed person. “I think he just assumed I was an artist, or would become an artist,” she said of Lou’s attitude toward her. “He was very encouraging. He’d buy me art supplies. Sometimes he was too early: he bought me an oil painting set when I was ten.”
Lou also made her feel that she was very much his offspring. “He always scrutinized me,” Alex recalled, “and since he thought that there was a strong resemblance between us, he was always trying to find more things about me that were like him.” She remembered, in particular, their playing a game of pickup sticks together. “All of a sudden he grabbed my hands and said that my hands were just like his, a feminine version of his hands. He couldn’t get over it,” said Alex. But it was more than that. “He also sensed that my mind worked a lot like his … This likeness between us did not make our relationship any easier,” she pointed out, “because sometimes it is hard to communicate on a day-to-day basis when one is a lot like somebody else. We shared the same self-motivation, the same stubbornness, the same intensity.”
