You Say to Brick

by Wendy Lesser

  August Komendant proved essential to this building in other ways as well. After the local engineers had declared the job impossible and insisted on having a flat roof instead, Komendant got himself put in charge of the whole project and pushed through Kahn’s designs. If he later tried to take credit for the designs themselves, perhaps that was forgivable. Lou, at any rate, seemed to forgive him for all his grandiosity when he said in response to a direct question about his engineer: “Komendant is very sensitive to the nature of structures. The fact that he’s an actor and a great performer is of no importance … I don’t live in concrete, I don’t live in steel, I just sense their potentialities. But he lives in them. He feels the strain of every member. He knows when a thing is pulling away, or when it’s staying at rest. He knows repose very well. He’s not worried about symmetry, he’s just a great balancer. He feels that the thing is out of balance without analyzing it.”

  Perhaps the most surprising thing about the design of the Kimbell, in the end, was that it triumphed so powerfully over all the conflicting stresses—not just the physical stresses imposed by concrete and glass and steel, but also the personal rivalries among various strong-minded designers, the built-in conflicts between the museum’s needs and the architect’s wishes, the financial and professional imperatives of all the collaborating, competing parties. That it got built at all was remarkable. That it became Lou’s most highly praised building, his and yet transcendently not his, came to seem almost a matter of fate.

  * * *

  Despite his nomadic existence during these years—which might entail rushing from Dacca to Exeter in any given month, or from Media to Fort Worth to New York in the course of a single week—Lou managed to maintain some semblance of a personal life. On June 27, 1965, he gave away Sue Ann at her wedding to Harry Saltzman, celebrated at the Curtis Arboretum in Wyncote, Pennsylvania. Friends of Sue’s and Harry’s who met her father at the marriage festivities described him as affable and charming, though even these musical types were a bit intimidated by his famous name, which had by now begun to spread beyond the realm of professional architects.

  Fame brought with it certain expectations about an improved quality of life, and shortly before their daughter’s wedding, the Kahns decided to give up Esther’s old family home in declining West Philadelphia and move with her mother to a nicer place. What they ended up buying—largely with an inheritance of Esther’s, so that she became the legally designated owner of the new house—was a traditional Philadelphia row house, four stories high and clad in brick, at 921 Clinton Street. This South Philadelphia neighborhood, with its brick-paved sidewalks and quiet, narrow streets, was coming up in the world rather than going down, and their block of Clinton, near the corner of 10th, was only a brisk ten-minute walk from Lou’s downtown office. Still, the house itself needed a lot of work, both structural and cosmetic. Various people from the Kahn firm were assigned to supervise the renovation project, but it was mainly the province of Luis Vincent Rivera, a young man who had started out as the “office boy” and, with Lou’s encouragement, had soon progressed to draftsman and beyond. Lou being Lou, the work on his own house always came last in priority, so the remodeling process dragged on for years. The improvements were initially intended to include an elevator for Annie Israeli, who had become too frail to climb stairs, but before she could be moved out of her beloved old house on Chester Avenue, she fell and fatally broke her hip. Annie died on December 23, 1966. Esther and Lou moved into their new house (now without an elevator) during the following year.

  Around the same time, Harriet and Nathaniel also changed their address, moving into the place they would occupy for the rest of Nathaniel’s childhood. When Harriet had first returned to Philadelphia to attend Penn, she had rented a flat at the Cherokee Apartments on Walcott Drive—coincidentally, a building designed by Oscar Stonorov, Lou’s former partner. A few years later, after taking her master’s degree, she moved with her son to a little white house at 8870 Tawonda Avenue in Chestnut Hill. Their benevolent landlord was Francis Adler, one of Kahn’s old clients, who occupied the large house at the front of the property. Harriet and Nathaniel’s three-story, two-bedroom house, which included an attic that Harriet could use as a studio, sat behind the bigger house at the end of a long driveway. About once a week, when he was in town, Lou would come out there to see them—though often not until the middle of the night, when his long hours at the office were over.

  “Lou didn’t drive,” said David Slovic, who frequently shared the night shift with his boss. “As a student I had this old jalopy, and late at night, when we were done working, I’d take Lou home, out to Chester Avenue. But after a while sometimes he wouldn’t go home. He would say, ‘Take me out to Chestnut Hill.’ And there would be this little boy, standing in the driveway, who had been woken up—at 3:00, 3:30, 4:00 a.m.—because his dad was coming. So that’s how I met Nathaniel: he was the kid at the end of the driveway.”

  Not all of Lou’s visits were so late. Sometimes he would arrive in time for dinner, and Harriet would cook him an elaborate meal, with a specially prepared martini beforehand. Less frequently, there would be a visit during the day, perhaps on a weekend, when Lou and his son would play or read or draw together. Nathaniel’s memories of his father from this period were like the well-preserved fragments of an ancient mosaic, bits and pieces of clarity that remained uncannily intact.

  “He had very warm hands, physically warm to the touch,” Nathaniel recalled. “He could make coins disappear, for sure.” Those hands were delicate and expressive, but they were also very strong. “I remember he used to be able to split an apple with his hands,” Nathaniel said. “And he wouldn’t use a nutcracker when he came to our house: he would crush a walnut in his hands.” The little boy somehow associated his father with knights and their brave deeds, perhaps because Lou loved King Arthur. “He gave me four beautiful books about the Arthurian legend. He loved fairy tales—the idea of chivalry, of having to stand up and fight for what was right, what was good.” Mostly, though, Nathaniel remembered the glowing intensity of Lou’s attention. “He was the kind of person that made you feel you were the only one in the universe, when he was talking with you. When he turned his light on you, it was intense, it was warm, and it made you grow.”

  He was also a kind man, Nathaniel felt. Once, for instance, “he was at our house and he couldn’t get a taxi, and there were no taxis available—or there was just one taxi on the road.” But instead of getting irritated with the dispatcher, Lou started joking with her. “Suddenly Lou is having a hilarious conversation with the dispatcher, a woman, and he’s saying to her, ‘It’s like the Depression, when there was only one meatball to go around.’”

  Usually, though, Lou didn’t need a taxi after one of his late-night visits, because Harriet would drive him home. She would bundle Nathaniel into the back seat of the car and take Lou to 921 Clinton, where he would arrive in time to have breakfast with Esther. “Since we moved here we generally talked at breakfast because it was the only time we had together,” Esther told an interviewer some years after Lou’s death, implying that what took up all the rest of his time was his work: “architecture was the most important thing in his life and everything else came second.” Though a bit evasive as an explanation of his schedule, this statement also happened to be true, and the other two women in his life perceived it as well. Later, as a grown-up, Nathaniel came to understand that both Harriet and Anne valued Lou’s work—“his mission,” Nathaniel called it—and knew that architecture was always what came first with him. The social discomfort they endured in having children out of wedlock (not to mention the financial hardship and emotional distress entailed in sharing Lou with others) was “the price they had to pay, but it was worth it because of the work that was being done,” Nathaniel said.

  By 1968 that work was being done with his mother’s collaboration, for Harriet Pattison had become the de facto landscape architect on a number of Lou’s jobs. After graduating from P
enn in 1967, she went to work for George Patton, whose office space was located just below Kahn’s at 1501 Walnut. Patton was the designated landscape architect on the Kimbell project, but it was Harriet who actually did much of the work. For those who visited the Kimbell after it opened, the luxurious grounds that led up to the museum door, with their groves of yaupon trees, their lawns of resilient Texas grass, their soothing, splashing fountains and crunching gravel walks, were an integral part of the experience. And yet Harriet herself wasn’t allowed to attend the opening ceremonies. Instead, Patton represented the whole firm. Was the reason for her exclusion “that you were a woman, or that you were involved with him?” Nathaniel asked his mother many years later. “Yes, all of those things,” Harriet answered.

  One further memory from his childhood stuck with Nathaniel very strongly. He was in first grade, he remembered, and Lou was walking him to class. Even the little boy could see that something was wrong with his father on that early March day in 1970. “He was devastated. It was a very traumatic event, a very sad day for him,” Nathaniel recalled. “I remember because he took me to school that day and he was clearly in distress.” When Nathaniel got home, he asked his mother why Lou was so upset, and she told him it was because Marie Kuo had died in a car accident.

  Marie had left Kahn’s practice in 1966, when her son, James, was born. “She said Jamie was going to be her creation,” said her husband, Mort, explaining why she decided to give up her architecture work completely. She seemed happy in her new life, and she took her son with her everywhere, even on the all-day trip to the nearby snow country she was making that last Sunday. When her little VW bug swerved off the Germantown Pike late in the afternoon of March 8, 1970, Marie was killed by the impact of the steering wheel, which crushed her pancreas; three-year-old Jamie, who was in the back seat, survived with only minor bruises. Her husband, who had been rehearsing in a community theater play, was driven by a neighbor to the hospital where she and Jamie had been taken, and that was when Mort learned she had died in the crash.

  Marie had not worked at Lou’s office for nearly four years by that time, but the bond must have run very deep, for Sue Ann, too, was struck by her father’s response to her sudden death. “Lou cried,” she said. “I had never seen him cry, and I asked my mother what happened. And she said, ‘Marie Kuo died.’”

  * * *

  But Lou didn’t have much time to mourn, for by now his professional life had grown more chaotic and distracting than ever. The office was full of young new employees and employee-hopefuls, all drawn by Kahn’s fame. The firm had recently lost its longtime secretary, Louise Badgley, who had married an oil engineer and moved with him to Saudi Arabia. Her replacement was a younger woman named Kathy Condé, quite competent but less playful and humorous than Louise had been. Meanwhile, on the business front, the practice was continuing to lose money at a rapid rate, despite Dave Wisdom’s best efforts. Lou himself seemed to be traveling constantly, whether to faraway Kathmandu (where he was asked to design a family planning clinic) or nearby New Haven.

  A few months earlier, in October of 1969, Kahn had been awarded a lavish and inviting new commission: to design a new art museum at Yale that would house Paul Mellon’s collection of British art. This came on top of two other prestigious jobs he had recently undertaken, the Hurva Synagogue in Jerusalem and the Palazzo dei Congressi in Venice. Any one of these would have been a career-capping assignment, and now Lou was faced with all three at once.

  The Hurva Synagogue project, which began in 1967, was in many ways an ideal Kahn assignment. Hurva means “ruin” in Hebrew, and this particular building had been ruined more than once: built and demolished in the eighteenth century, it was rebuilt in the nineteenth and finally toppled in the 1948 war that immediately followed Israel’s founding. Lou, with his oft-stated passion for ruins, planned to preserve the remnants of the older synagogue, located in the heart of Jerusalem’s Old City, next to his newer construction.

  Kahn was not a newcomer to Israel—he had been a consultant on housing policy as far back as 1949, and in the 1960s he had joined the seventy-member Jerusalem Committee, an advisory group which included his friends Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi—but this was by far his most important commission in the Jewish state. It came, too, just as his work on Philadelphia’s Mikveh Israel synagogue was beginning to founder, and it must have soothed his feelings to realize that even if the local Jewish community didn’t appreciate his architecture, the international one did. (The Mikveh Israel commission, after limping along for a few more years, finally came to an end in 1972, when another architect was brought in to replace Kahn. “If something fell through, he just stopped talking about it,” said Sue Ann, but “the Mikveh Israel—the fact that it didn’t get built—was one of the greatest disappointments of his life, I think.”)

  As he so often did, Kahn went through three designs on the Hurva project. The first entailed an outer wall made of the traditional golden Jerusalem stone and an inner room constructed of silvery concrete; the two were separated by an ambulatory, and the whole thing was lit from above as well as through vertical slits between the pyramidal columns of the outer structure. The second plan, completed in 1969, was both darker and more monumental than the first. For the third plan, sketched out in 1973, Kahn added a square oculus to the top of the central room, much as he had in the changing rooms at the Trenton Bath House. It was somehow typical of him to link in this way the ordinary recreational activities of New Jersey’s lower-middle-class Jews and the high pomp of Jerusalem’s magnificent synagogue—and to do so by connecting them both with his favorite building, the Pantheon. Mayor Teddy Kollek, who functioned as Kahn’s chief client on the Hurva Synagogue (and who was, incidentally, one of the most peace-loving politicians ever elected to office in Israel), told Lou he felt ready to build after receiving those third plans. He urged Kahn to deliver the working drawings so that construction could begin.

  Meanwhile, the Venice project was proceeding at the same time. Awarded in early 1968, the commission was to design a large conference center that could hold up to two thousand people for major public meetings. For Lou, both the site itself—in beautiful, ancient Venice—and the project for a public assembly space had tremendous allure. Because he had been working for years on the Dacca Assembly Building, his mind was filled with ideas about how to gather people together for purposes of public discussion. But here Kahn took a completely different approach from the concrete, marble-banded Dacca building. To accommodate Venice’s cramped space, he planned to take a bowl-shaped amphitheater structure, slice it in half to produce a longer, thinner meeting hall, and raise the whole thing up on end-supports and a suspended bridge.

  Originally the project was to be located in Venice’s Giardini Pubblici, but by 1972 it had been moved to the Arsenale, where Kahn planned to suspend it over the Canale delle Galleazze, on the west side of the Arsenale lagoon. Hanging above the water, its exterior composed largely of glass and stainless-steel panels, the Palazzo dei Congressi would have been a striking if unusual addition to Venice’s architecture. With its reflective surfaces and its encircling arms, the building would have made its occupants feel they were floating between sky and water, just as Venice itself does. Kahn was so aware of the watery, dreamlike, historic city, and so proud of being asked to design something there, that he volunteered to do his part of the job without charging a fee. When Dave Wisdom protested at this idea (“Who’s going to pay the engineers?”), Lou simply answered, “How could you charge for having your work in Venice?”

  The new Yale art museum—another structure that used glass and steel on its exterior, though to very different effect—obviously required no international travel, but Kahn still put in a great deal of time on it. First he met with the project patron, Paul Mellon, not only to get the wealthy donor’s personal approval of his selection as architect, but also to understand the art collection as the collector himself saw it. Then, over the course of several years, he worked closel
y with Jules Prown, the first director of what came to be called the Yale Center for British Art. Prown was one of those intelligent, forceful, yet sympathetic clients who, like Jonas Salk or Richard Brown, helped shape Kahn’s design in ways that even the architect admitted were useful. This was to be Lou’s third art gallery, and his second in New Haven; the somewhat mangled Yale University Art Gallery, on which he had collaborated with Anne Tyng in 1951, sat across from the new site. The Center thus represented both a chance to address past misfortunes and an opportunity to try something completely new.

  As it emerged from its final design (which, typically, was the third complete plan submitted by Kahn, after earlier plans had foundered on issues of scale and expense), the Yale Center looked unlike anything Lou had ever built before. From the street it could almost have been an expensive office complex, with its alternating panels of matte gray steel and shiny glass. One entered at the corner, through an external foyer whose heavy concrete-coffered ceiling recalled the unwelcoming entrance to the Richards Building. But once inside, the museum’s visitors were rewarded with a tall, light-filled atrium that nearly rivaled in grandeur the central spaces at Exeter and Dacca.