You Say to Brick

by Wendy Lesser

  One of the most interesting foreign trips she sent him on was not, in fact, connected to any specific project. In the summer of 1965, Kahn was invited to travel to the Soviet Union as part of the State Department’s cultural exchange program. Vincent Scully, who went along on the same trip, later reported on the experience of looking at Russian architecture with Lou. “Once during one of those summer nights in Moscow we walked around the Kremlin,” Scully said. “The Kremlin towers are wonderful, romantic—they were built by Italian architects—and I said to him, ‘Lou, look how they point.’ And they do, if you read it that way. But Lou said, ‘Look, instead, at the way they bring the weight down.’ It is true, they are all masonry, and one can really see the compression coming down the wall. It is beautiful. I always thought that was the key to Kahn’s architecture.”

  An equally telling moment occurred when they were in Leningrad, at the opening of an American-sponsored show about American architecture. Scully called it “a disgracefully unprofessional exhibition, chosen to astound the Russians with the glitter and glamour of our material culture.” When Kahn was asked to speak about the exhibit to the mayor of Leningrad and his entourage, he refused. “He said it was a disgrace and he wouldn’t do such a thing,” Scully recounted. “But he agreed to walk along and be there in case there was a question.” And in the event a question did indeed arise—regarding Kahn’s own Rochester church, about which the Russian mayor commented that it didn’t look like a church at all. “That’s why it was chosen for exhibition to the Soviet Union,” Lou instantly responded, smiling. The interpreter (“a terrible square,” according to Scully) didn’t translate Kahn’s remark, but that didn’t prevent the Russians from laughing heartily.

  * * *

  As the 1960s progressed, life back at the Philadelphia office got more and more frenzied. “It was busy,” remarked Wilcots, waving his hands in all directions to indicate the apparent confusion. “There was a lot of shuffling going on. No one was gotten rid of. There was a lot of coming and going. People would arrive to work on a charrette, work a short time, and then they would move on. I don’t think anyone was ever fired.” Perhaps not, but some people were certainly laid off, particularly when the project they were engaged on was finished. “At the end of Bryn Mawr he let everyone go who had worked on it,” said Ed Richards. “They were laid off. He had run out of money.”

  From about 1965 onward, the shortage of money became an increasingly desperate theme in Kahn’s office. Louise—whom Henry described as “the mother hen, a very jolly kind of person”—had to hold down a second job with a catering firm to support her family, as the income from her secretarial job became more and more erratic. Henry himself, despite the fact that his wife worked as a nurse, had problems paying his bills because his paychecks often didn’t come on time. Gary Moye once found himself getting so far behind financially, even with moonlighting jobs added to his regular work, that he told Lou he had to quit. “He turned on the charm and asked me to stay,” Moye remembered. “He said that he would be receiving payment soon for one of the projects and that he would pay me up. I told him I couldn’t accept that since everyone else was in the same situation.” Then Lou told Gary to take the weekend off and come back on Monday, by which time he would have something worked out. “On Monday he called me into his office and gave me a personal check from Esther to cover some of my back pay,” said Moye. “I have always wondered how many other times she may have helped Lou in this way.”

  David Slovic, who was paid at an hourly rate while he was still in architecture school, would find himself negotiating with Louise or Dave Wisdom about the arrival of his checks. “They were very open about it. ‘We’ll have a problem paying you until two weeks from Wednesday—how much do you need to survive until then?’ And then two weeks from Wednesday the check would come through,” Slovic recalled. “This didn’t happen every time: maybe half or a third of the times. I think that Dacca was a very irregularly paying proposition,” he added.

  It was so irregular, in fact, that at one point Lou sent Jack MacAllister over to Pakistan to collect the half a million dollars the firm was owed by the government. “President Khan was a great, big man,” Jack remembered. “He spoke perfect English because he had been at Sandhurst. He called me Mr. MacAllister. After a few preliminaries, he said, ‘What can I do for you?’ I said, ‘Pay us.’ ‘Do I owe you a lot?’ he said. ‘Enough to shut us down,’ I said.” MacAllister told him that if they weren’t paid, the Dacca project would be left unfinished. According to Jack, the money was in Lou’s bank account by the following Monday morning.

  MacAllister also figured in a financial negotiation involving the Salk project. As it turned out, even this stellar client did not have bottomless pockets, and at a certain point Basil O’Connor, the head of the March of Dimes, decided to intervene. He made a conference call to Lou that also included Jonas Salk, and the two of them asked Lou to put Jack on the line as well. “O’Connor said, ‘Lou, we’re going to fire you. The project’s not on schedule, you’re not paying your bills, it’s a mess,’” Jack recounted. “Lou says, ‘Is there anything I can do?’ They said, ‘Yes. You can put Jack as the head of the project, in charge of everything.’ And Lou said, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’”

  By 1965 the budgeting problems at Salk had become so severe that the Meeting House had to be eliminated from the plans. For most of the people working with Kahn then, and probably for Kahn himself, this represented a terrible loss. The Meeting House was not only the conceptual heart of the project, the place where artists, humanists, and scientists would encounter each other’s ideas; it was also one of Lou’s most entrancing designs, with large windows surrounded by tall, pale concrete walls that allowed reflected light to enter the interior from all angles. This was a notion that he would eventually revive to stunning effect in the mosque of the Dacca Assembly Building, but that consolation still lay in the future.

  What preoccupied Lou at the moment was what to do with the Salk’s central garden. He had hired landscape architect Lawrence Halprin to come up with an initial design, but Halprin’s suggestion that they plant shrubs and trees right up against the concrete pleased no one. Then Lou came across some designs by the Mexican architect Luis Barragán, published in a Museum of Modern Art book that also contained the plans for Kahn and Noguchi’s playground. Early in 1965 Kahn decided to contact Barragán by phone, but since he spoke no Spanish, he had one of his employees, a Puerto Rican architect named Rafael Villamil, make the initial call.

  “I introduced myself and said, ‘I am calling from the office of Louis Kahn,’” Villamil remembered. “Barragán said, ‘Who is Louis Kahn?’ I was sitting next to him, and I said, ‘He says, who are you?’”

  Lou, undaunted, answered, “Tell him to ask some of his architect friends.” A friendly conversation apparently ensued, because a week after the phone call, on January 20, 1965, Kahn wrote to Barragán in Mexico City and thanked him for the time spent on the telephone. He emphasized how much he looked forward to getting Barragán’s guidance on the Salk project, adding (in his typically peculiar Lou-language, which always sounded like a translation from some unknown tongue), “I also feel from the work of yours I have seen, you are in touch with the virility of approach to man’s will of shaping the ground and the planting of shrubs, compared to the ways of nature.” A few months later, in Mexico, the two architects met in person for the first time. It would seem that they already felt comfortable enough to joke with each other, for Kahn, on seeing Barragán’s brightly painted walls, admitted that they were beautiful but nonetheless argued that concrete should always remain unpainted, to which Barragán reportedly responded, “Okay, you win the argument but I’m going to keep painting the walls.”

  Then, in a later encounter that was to become the stuff of legend, Luis Barragán, Louis Kahn, and Jonas Salk all met together at the nearly completed Salk Institute on February 24, 1966. The two rows of study towers were already in place, with their respective labs
standing behind them, but they faced each other across an undeveloped mud expanse, and the question was what to do with it. According to Lou’s version of the story, he had brought Barragán in because of the wonderful things he had done with gardens, but when the Mexican architect actually saw the space itself, he said, “There should be no garden. It should be a plaza.”

  “I looked at Salk,” Kahn recalled, “he looked at me, and we both agreed that a garden was not what we wanted; it should be a plaza. Barragán said, If you make it a plaza, it will give you a façade to the sky, and it killed me, because it was a wonderful idea. I could only counter it by saying, That’s right, then I would get all those blue mosaics for nothing, meaning, of course, the Pacific.”

  So the marvelous plaza—possibly the most powerful, intriguing part of the Salk Institute’s final design—was practically an accident, or at any rate the unpredictable result of a confluence of visions. Nor did the matter end neatly there. Kahn’s first impulse was to pave the plaza in recinto, a dark volcanic stone that Barragán had used in Mexico. “Lou liked it because it was like an elephant’s hide,” observed Jack MacAllister. “Then for some reason he decided against that and wanted a pinkish stone, the one used for the cathedral in San Miguel de Allende.” But that would have required reopening the Mexican quarry which had produced the stone, so it was prohibitively expensive. “It was about then that Lou suggested Roman travertine. It turned out that it cost less than vinyl tile. And that,” said Jack, “was the largest single shipment of travertine ever to come into the United States.” With its pale, finely textured surface and its subtle relationship to the color of the concrete, the travertine turned out to be crucial to the character of the Salk plaza. The whole space would have been unimaginably different if chance (in the form of cost and availability) had allowed Lou to pave it in dark gray or even pink, for it was the ivory-colored travertine that in the end gave the Pacific-facing complex its resplendent luminosity.

  * * *

  Now that the Salk project was starting to wind down, Kahn sent Fred Langford out to Dacca to deal with a new and different challenge in concrete. The National Assembly project—or, as it was still called in 1966, the Second Capital project—was the biggest job of Kahn’s career, and it was in many ways the most difficult. Not only did he have to deal with the Pakistan Public Works Department and all their requests and requirements; he also had to face the fact that East Pakistan was an extremely poor region with relatively primitive building techniques. In India he had got round a similar problem by building almost entirely in brick, with structures that were never more than three or four stories high. In Dacca, by contrast, he was going to be putting up an immense nine-story building reaching 140 feet at its peak. For the nearby two-story residential structures, designed to house visiting Members of Parliament, Kahn could use the traditional brick—and indeed, with their elegant cutouts and graceful arches, those residences ended up looking a great deal like the Ahmedabad buildings. But the central structure, the massive Assembly Building itself, had to be done in concrete, and that called for Fred’s expertise.

  When Fred Langford arrived in Dacca in February of 1966, he was met at the airport by his brother Gus, who also worked for Louis Kahn (and indeed was to continue working for Kahn until the very end, long after Fred had left to found his own concrete consulting firm). The two brothers went straight from the airport to a local golf course, where they played a couple of rounds together and were amazed to discover that the caddies applauded after every shot. Then they settled down to work. Gus Langford’s duties in regard to the Dacca site were various, and were to remain so during the many years he spent working on the project, but Fred’s, for that relatively brief period in 1966, were exclusively focused on concrete construction techniques.

  By the time Fred arrived, certain crucial decisions had already been made. The Parliament Building would be set on a patch of built-up land in the middle of an artificial lake, which would separate the Assembly from the surrounding brick residences. In addition to adding substantial visual interest to the site, the shallow lake would suggest an affinity with the surrounding countryside, where monsoon-level rains and converging rivers often inundated the lowlands. The building itself would be octagonal at its core and roughly diamond-shaped on the outside, though from the viewpoint of an external observer, that central structure would be so disguised by curving outer walls on one side, and gigantic triangular, circular, and square cutouts on the others, as to be nearly indecipherable in shape. And as if to complicate the essential symmetry even further, the mosque, which was to occupy one of the four points of the diamond, would be shifted ever so slightly off its axis, emphasizing the fact that it faced directly toward Mecca. Yet despite all these potentially confusing elements, Kahn managed to unify the whole building through its consistent materials: a medium-gray concrete textured by narrow wooden form-boards and striated at regular intervals with thin bands of white marble.

  Those distinctive marble stripes, one of the most noticeable features of the finished design, actually arose in response to a local construction problem. In the Dacca of that time, the only way to pour this amount of concrete was to have many individual workers, each carrying a panful of wet concrete on his head, march single-file from the cement mixer across hundreds of feet of rough terrain and up long ramps of bamboo scaffolding, where they would then dump their pans into the prearranged forms. What this meant was that the walls could only rise by about five feet a day. Looking at the results of the early pours, Lou was disturbed by the evident join, the place where one day’s work met the next. So he resolved to recess the concrete every five feet, leaving a six-inch gap that would later be filled with a horizontal strip of white marble. He then introduced intermittent vertical bands of marble into the design as well, creating a wall that would look from a distance as if it were composed of rectangular gray blocks edged in white.

  Fred Langford’s job was to make this laborious construction process succeed. He had nothing to do with choosing the color of the cement (which was imported in bulk from Russia and China, the only places where sufficient quantity was available at an affordable price), and though he checked to make sure the stone and sand brought in from the Sylhet region of East Pakistan were good enough to use in the mix, that decision too had been made before he arrived. Plywood was simply not available in East Pakistan, so the forms had to be built out of a mahogany-like wood instead; the work was done by a furniture manufacturer in Chittagong, a city more than a hundred miles southeast of Dacca. The workmanship on the form construction was much poorer than what Fred was used to—the unseasoned boards warped easily, among other problems—so Fred compensated by making the panels stronger than he had in La Jolla. On Lou’s instructions, he also made them with an indentation at each juncture point, which produced an attractive V-shaped extrusion as a regular pattern in the concrete.

  Another local problem Fred encountered in Dacca was the nature of the steel rebar. “Standard Western reinforcing rods have deformations all along the length, protruding ridges that grab the concrete,” Langford explained. But the bars in Dacca were smooth, something he had never seen before. Luckily, “Komendant and Nick Gianopulos figured out how to make these smooth rods work, by putting hooks at the ends to make up for it.”

  Actually, Komendant and Gianopulos worked sequentially on Dacca, not simultaneously—and they were not the only engineers Kahn employed on this lengthy commission. Keast & Hood, Nick’s firm, had agreed to be part of the Second Capital team when it was put together in 1963, but in 1965 they withdrew from the project. They were forced to bow out, Nick said, “because Lou owed us so much money that we were going bankrupt, and the banks wouldn’t loan us money. He owed us $90,000.” (They continued, though, to do other jobs for him over the years, and eventually they were even paid back the full $90,000, albeit in piecemeal payments. Kahn may have been bad with money, “but the obligation was always honored,” Gianopulos pointed out; “Lou always paid us what we agr
eed on. He never came back and said, ‘I lost money on this so you have to reduce your fee.’ The man had honor, but it may not have been the conventional honor.”)

  At some point after Keast & Hood left the Dacca project, Gus Komendant was brought in, mainly to work on the very difficult problem of the roof. But he too quit before it could be solved. It was left to a third engineer, Harry Palmbaum, to come up with a satisfactory way to cover over the Assembly Hall. In its final incarnation, this ceiling was an eight-sided concrete parasol that hovered over the parliamentary meeting space, resting with apparent lightness on its eight points of contact with the wall and allowing light to seep in under its edges. Such an engineering miracle would have been astonishing in any location, but in Dacca it seemed like something that had flown in from outer space—as, indeed, did the entire Assembly Building. Yet in this version of the science-fiction visitation, the aliens from the future did not obliterate the past, but somehow managed to preserve a sense of the ancient and the traditional even as they brought in the new.

  That, in a practical sense, was Langford’s task in the four months he spent on the site. Even as he worked closely with the laborers and their supervisors to train them to produce high-quality, modern concrete, he also paid attention, whenever possible, to their preferred way of doing things. For example, when he suggested that vibrators needed to be used to settle the concrete after it was poured, the laborers insisted that they could instead stir it with bamboo poles, as they had always done. Fred let them do this, and at first the concrete looked smooth from the outside; only when it was stripped did he discover that it was filled with rock pockets. “A disaster,” Fred termed it. “They had to take it down by hand: two men with hammers, taking down a wall five feet high and eighteen inches thick and about thirty to forty feet long.” He ended up importing at least one electrical vibrator (the mechanical ones available locally were pretty much useless) and he got the workers to use it during the rest of the construction.