by Wendy Lesser
Constructed of glass, concrete, and the omnipresent marble banding, with walls that are partially paneled in wood to lend the room a traditional warmth, the mosque is a precise cube, measuring just under seventy feet in each direction. While Kahn no doubt intended this as a reference to Mecca’s sacred cube, the Kaaba, the shape also has a visceral effect even on those who don’t recognize the allusion. To be held inside a cube is to be contained with an exactitude that is both pleasing and stirring. One is aware of one’s placement in relation to all six equal surfaces, just as one is aware of their congruence to and distance from each other. Things seem in balance from within a cube—and if the cube is as beautifully lit as Kahn’s is, from above and also from the side, the feeling of serenity is magnified.
That all the light within the mosque is reflected light accounts in part for its special feeling of repose. You cannot see the outdoors, because the high, curved, outer walls block your view, but the light nonetheless reaches you. The room has affinities with church architecture (those flying buttresses at the roof level, for instance), but it is clearly not a church. It honors the principles of a mosque, yet without any appearance of exclusiveness or specificity. One can partake of its contemplative nature without belonging to its religion, or indeed to any religion at all. Whoever you are, it will speak to you. And unlike the rest of this avowedly public building, it speaks to you in your capacity as an individual—a soul, if you like, or a mind. When you leave it, the desire to be back inside will stay with you, lastingly.
ARRIVING
By the end of 1966, Kahn’s firm had acquired two of the most important commissions of his career. One was a library building for the Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite private school in Exeter, New Hampshire. The other was an entirely new museum in Fort Worth, Texas, designed to house the small but excellent art collection initiated by the late Kay Kimbell.
These were not the only big jobs the practice was undertaking during that time. Among other projects, Kahn was simultaneously working on the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, the Broadway United Church of Christ in New York, the Dominican Motherhouse in Media, Pennsylvania, the Mikveh Israel synagogue in Philadelphia, the Memorial to the Six Million Jewish Martyrs in Battery Park, a large office building in Kansas City, Missouri, and two private houses, one in Philadelphia and one in Washington, D.C. None of these projects was ever built. Kahn also devoted twelve years to a massive fine arts center in Fort Wayne, of which the Performing Arts Theater, finished in 1973, was the only part to be constructed. Then there were projects like the Olivetti-Underwood typewriter factory in Harrisburg and the Beth-El synagogue in Chappaqua, both of which got built but then underwent substantial alteration over the years, so that Lou’s contribution ultimately became undetectable.
One of the few lasting emblems of his work on American soil from this period—aside from Exeter and Kimbell, that is—was the Fisher House in Hatboro, Pennsylvania, which Kahn finally completed in 1967. Norman Fisher, a doctor, and his wife, Doris, a landscape designer, had waited patiently for seven years, and in the end they were delighted with the woodsy, two-story, three-bedroom home, in which deeply recessed windows, a massive stone fireplace, and a double-height living room created a cozy, inviting place for the whole family to gather. But it was a quirky house, with its acutely angled walls, its dark bedrooms, and its minuscule kitchen, and it would be hard to argue that it stood up against the major public buildings Lou was designing at the same time.
The Exeter Library and the Kimbell Art Museum, on the other hand, extended the level of achievement that had begun with Salk and confirmed Louis Kahn’s reputation as one of America’s greatest architects. The Exeter building, which came first chronologically, was in many ways the easier of the two projects. When the enlightened principal of Phillips Exeter Academy, Richard Day, and the thoughtful and farsighted head librarian, Rodney Armstrong, approached Kahn in late 1965 with the offer of the commission, he had already been thinking about libraries for quite a while. As far back as 1956 he had entered a competition for the Washington University Library with a design that focused on the importance of individual carrels. By the time he was awarded the Exeter job, he was actively working on another library—the Vikram Sarabhai Library at the Indian Institute of Management—and though the Ahmedabad and Exeter buildings ended up being quite different, both designs had a similar airy-yet-sturdy feeling, with solid, brick-clad exteriors and high-ceilinged reading rooms lit by oversized cutouts in the walls.
In contrast to many of Lou’s building plans, which tended to go through several extreme revisions, the Exeter Library design reached its ultimate form fairly quickly. From the start Kahn was focused on the notion of three concentric spheres of activity: a central open area in which people could gather, a middle section containing the stacks, and an outer layer where study carrels would be lit by natural light. That he had always meant to house these concentric “rings” in a square structure was part of the beauty and the complexity of the design. Brick, too, had been part of the plan from the beginning, and when Lou learned that the local brickyard from which he intended to obtain the perfect-colored material was on the verge of bankruptcy, he had Exeter buy up its inventory and store the bricks on campus for the duration of the design and construction process.
By late 1966 or early 1967, Kahn had essentially worked out the plan for a four-story cube of brick and glass with an open arcade running around the bottom and a parapet around the top. At just about that time, the town of Exeter passed an ordinance forbidding buildings of more than three stories on that site. The Academy exerted its local pull and managed to get a variance for the library. But a year later, when faced with the kinds of budgetary overruns that had become typical in Kahn’s projects, the building committee itself asked Lou to reduce his structure by one story. At first, under pressure, he agreed to do so. He found, though, that he couldn’t bring himself to make this compromise in the geometrically perfect design, and he ended up explaining his position in an eloquent letter to Rodney Armstrong written in April of 1968.
Lou pointed out that when he sat down to make the revision, “without surrendering the simple beauty of the building and with the least loss of function,” he found that the more he worked on it, “the more I realized that I could not accomplish a fully worthy solution. You must understand that my intentions were to adjust to new conditions without losing any aesthetic values nor any functional values. But judgement in this work is not mathematical in nature nor is a full validity reached solely by deductive reasoning…” He was willing to do anything necessary to persuade the Buildings & Grounds committee that “the only right way to build is to the height and proportions we so painstakingly worked out over so many months … You are perhaps better acquainted than we are as to the disadvantage of the loss of the Seminar Rooms and the mixed function of rare books, staff lounge and conference rooms, faculty offices, visitor’s office that would have resulted from eliminating a story. A very great additional loss would have been the value of the high ceiling in the public areas of the first, the main floor. This loss alone, I am convinced now, would have been a drastic mistake.”
Kahn went on in the letter to say that his close scrutiny of the plans had resulted in numerous cost-saving possibilities that he was now able to propose to the building committee, savings which would nearly pay for the expense of preserving the extra story. But Lou finally rested his argument on aesthetic rather than financial grounds. “The building from the exterior is intended to present a rhythmic development … The regularly spaced brick piers diminish in size as they rise in a slow rhythm of double-story units. The loss of one story broke this rhythm and the grace and simplicity was lost,” he wrote. Then he came down firmly on his own bottom line, which was significantly different from that of an accountant or a zoning official. “My fullest consideration has convinced me that my hopeful proposal of saving a story would have presented an intolerable condition that I must now firmly say I cannot accept,
” he concluded. “I must say that I have come to a stronger confirmation of my aesthetic judgement and I was misled by my willingness to make adjustments.”
Armstrong was persuaded. The Buildings & Grounds committee was persuaded. And Exeter Library was built to its full four stories, exactly as Lou had wanted it.
Complicated as it was, this was a simple process compared to the one Kahn went through to produce the Kimbell Museum. Yet by almost everyone’s account, the difficulties were well worth it. “It’s my favorite building,” Kahn’s daughter Sue Ann said of the Kimbell. “There’s something about the space it creates and the way it makes you feel—I would love it no matter whose building it was. It’s just a space that works, with the human spirit.” A somewhat more objective source, the architect and design professor Robert McCarter, came to much the same conclusion in his monumental study of Kahn’s buildings. “The Kimbell Art Museum is rightly considered Kahn’s greatest built work,” McCarter noted, “in that it fully integrates and brings to the highest level of resolution all the elements composing Kahn’s conception of architecture.” Even Lou himself seemed to have a special attitude toward the Kimbell. Privately, he told Richard Wurman that he thought it was his best building (“If you liked Exeter, you’re going to love Kimbell” was how he put it), in large part because it did not call undue attention to itself. And publicly, at the museum’s official opening, he expressed a similar preference when he said, “This building feels—and it’s a good feeling—that I had nothing to do with it, that some other hand did it.”
Many other hands certainly had something to do with it, and they ranged from reliable old allies, such as Komendant on the engineering and Langford on the concrete, to local collaborators and contractors forced on him by the Kimbell’s board, who feared the kinds of construction delays and cost overruns that had become endemic in Kahn’s work. But Lou’s comment was referring instead to an apparent perfection of form, almost a feeling of inevitability, that the finished building radiated. It was as if Kahn, as an individual maker, had disappeared silently and completely into this thing he had made.
Like Rodney Armstrong at Exeter, Richard Brown, the Kimbell’s first director, was a strong personality who knew what he wanted in his building. Among the competitors he rounded up for the Kimbell commission were Mies van der Rohe, recently finished with the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, and Marcel Breuer, who was just completing the Whitney in New York. Compared to them, Louis Kahn—who had built only one small museum, the Yale Art Gallery, thirteen years earlier—might have seemed underqualified. But Brown felt that Kahn, unlike the others, would approach the new building with an open mind and an “all-embracing” attitude. “He’s willing to let the specific situation posed by the creation of a building guide him and tell him what the structure, engineering, and aesthetics ought to be,” Brown concluded. So in October of 1966 Kahn’s firm was awarded the commission, though with the proviso that they work with a Texas architect, Preston Geren, and his local engineers.
From the first drawings submitted in March of 1967 to the building’s completion in the fall of 1972, some things remained constant. It was clear from the beginning that Kahn envisioned the Kimbell as a series of long, thin galleries or vaults, joined at their sides and featuring identical arched roofs through which natural light could flow downward. Everything else changed radically, though, in the course of the design process. The initial plan covered a square block six hundred feet on a side; it was eventually scaled down to less than half that size. For the arched roofs, Kahn had originally proposed a folded plate scheme involving trapezoidally shaped arches. He then revised this into semicircular vaults. But as Brown pointed out, the height of these proposed galleries was totally out of proportion to the paintings that would hang within them. “The average size picture on the walls of the KAM will be about 2 1/2 feet in one direction and 3 or 4 feet in the other,” Brown reminded Kahn in an emphatic memo. “I’m worried about how a little old lady from Abilene is going to feel looking at our 15 inch Giovanni di Paolo on a wall 15 feet vertical, with a vault above which goes up to 30 feet.”
Kahn was not the kind of architect who viewed it as beneath his dignity to consider the gallery’s visitors. On the contrary, it was a way of thinking that came naturally to him. In many of his sketches for the Kimbell Museum—including some of the earliest drawings, when the rooflines had not yet reached their final shape—he included fleeting, stylized human figures. At times they were just a scribble, with a pair of compass legs attached to a roundish head. But sometimes they were much more individualized: a parent holding a child by the hand, a woman in a cloak, a person in the museum’s library putting something on a shelf, a cluster of people outside sitting on benches in the portico. Occasionally there was even more detail, as when a sketchy violinist appeared in one drawing of the auditorium, or a figure behind the counter in the kitchen wore a chef’s hat. These were not like the generic cutouts most architects use only in their finished presentations. Instead, they embodied future inhabitants of these as-yet-imaginary rooms, people who had already colonized the spaces that were just taking shape in Lou’s mind. For it was in these sketches—loose, free, drawn in black charcoal on yellow tracing paper, with an occasional touch of turquoise or red—that Kahn did his thinking. It was as if he were musing to himself about the bits and pieces of the developing plan: what if it were like this? or like this? or with that tiny alteration? And what he was thinking about, as he held his charcoal in his hand, clearly included people.
But even if Lou understood what Richard Brown wanted, obtaining it was not easy. The question was how to preserve the grandeur he sought in the arched top-lit galleries while reducing the height of the rooms. He needed a curve—did it even exist?—that would accomplish both aims at once.
The person who found it was a staff architect, Marshall Meyers, who had just come back to Kahn’s office after two years with another firm. According to Henry Wilcots, Meyers was one of Lou’s best architects, but he wasn’t consistently part of the Kahn practice. “Marshall would leave, then come back, then leave,” Henry commented, and this seemed to have something to do with the fact that Lou was “still a one-man show, even when Marshall was lead person.” Lou made him the lead architect on the Kimbell project when Meyers returned to the office in the summer of 1967, and shortly after that they jointly arrived at the solution to the roof problem.
Describing the kind of “gentle collaboration” that took place in Kahn’s office, where nobody took credit for his individual role in a design, Marshall would later say about Lou: “He never worked alone. He couldn’t. He needed to talk to someone, he needed a dialogue.” Meyers recalled how Kahn would “sketch something and then go away and then about three days later he would come back to see what had developed … He was always testing his ideas, looking for a consensus, and you weren’t helping him at all if you just thought that every scratch on paper he did was something handed down from on high.” Marshall also noted that, especially in the early stages of a project, Lou “worked best with one person. He said that if I talk to many people it is a performance, while if I talk to one person it may perhaps be an event. So he tended to work with one person, because then there would be a discourse.”
Prior to Marshall’s involvement on the Kimbell, Lou had already tried designing the vaults with a semicircular arch (too high) and a flattened arch (not very graceful), but what Meyers suggested—apparently after reading the section on barrel shells in Fred Angerer’s 1961 book, Surface Structures in Building—was the cycloid arch. The cycloid had been around at least since the days of Galileo, and it was based on the pattern described by a moving circle: that is, if you attached a pencil to the outer edge of a wheel and rolled it along next to a strip of paper, the repeated shape traced by the pencil would be a cycloid arc. It was a long, low curve, but it was also a pleasingly natural one, a continuous arch shaped by a continuous process, so that the eye did not feel cheated even as the roof height was lowered.
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br /> When Meyers and Kahn discovered this solution, they also came up with two other crucial ideas: a way of dividing the arch down the middle, by creating the curved roof out of two unmeeting shells that each formed a pair of “wings” with the adjoining shells on other roofs; and a way of transmitting but also diffusing the bright sunlight that came through the gap, by placing a silvery reflector or “beam splitter” directly underneath the opening. All three elements were included in the November 1967 plans that were submitted to the Kimbell board, and they were again part of the final reduced design that was approved in late 1968. This final plan included three parallel sets of cycloid vaults, with a middle set housing the public functions and two side sets for the galleries, placed on top of an understory that contained offices, the conservation space, and the loading docks. The front approach to the museum would be through the middle set of vaults, which would be diminished in number to allow for an entrance court; on either side, the flanking vaults would be extended out to include a shaded portico.
This design had not been arrived at by the architects alone. As always in Lou’s most adventurous work, the engineers had to be called upon to make it work. Nick Gianopulos was consulted first, but he frankly admitted that the calculations of stress, weight, and balance were beyond him, and he recommended they ask Gus Komendant. Komendant quickly approved the cycloid design with the light-slot on top, but he insisted on certain modifications, among them the inclusion of post-tensioning cables throughout the roof, so that the concrete shells would be cast around steel. He also persuaded Kahn, though not without some difficulty, to reshape the concrete frame surrounding the arched windows at the end of each vault, so that the concrete thickened at the vault’s peak, the point of greatest stress. This in turn meant that each curving glass window had to narrow correspondingly as it rose from its base on the vault’s wall toward its pinnacle in the roof—an important revision that ended up giving the Kimbell’s clerestories their subtle but distinctive affinity with church architecture.
