by Wendy Lesser
The materials that made up this atrium and the rest of the museum had a smoother, sleeker look than anything Kahn had used before. It wasn’t just the presence of the dark-hued steel. Even the oak and concrete panels, though similar to what Lou had employed at Exeter, Kimbell, and elsewhere, seemed more elegantly finished here at Yale. The form-holes were still visible in the concrete, but they were even more discreet than at Salk; the shadow joints were there to separate concrete from wood or wood from metal, but they too were somehow less evident, becoming mere lines of demarcation. The galleries, as they rose floor upon floor, were perfectly tailored to their different purposes: a light-filled space for special exhibits, a darkened level suitable for drawings and prints, and finally a top-lit, side-lit, grandly roofed upper gallery, where glorious natural light poured in on gloriously light-filled Turner paintings. The whole thing had something of the feel of an elegant gentleman’s club that had been hijacked for artistic purposes.
Nowhere did this feeling come through more clearly than in the long, high, second-floor Library Court that occupied the center of the museum. This was a room designed to soothe the weary museum-goer, the overstressed Yale student, or the casual visitor escaping from the frenzied urban street. With its high paneled walls, its gently muffled skylights, its comfortable dark brown leather sofas, and its large Persian rug spread across an oak floor, the room invited one to sit and rest. On the walls hung Paul Mellon’s largest and in some cases most treasured British paintings. (That Lou had envisioned precisely this arrangement from the very beginning was demonstrated in an early sketch of his, which showed Stubbs’s gigantic Lion Attacking a Horse on exactly the wall where it eventually ended up.) The room was the acme of gentleman’s-club perfection.
And yet Kahn had allowed a primeval intruder to venture into this inner sanctuary, subtly altering the feeling of the whole space. At one end of the long room, and visible from every point within and around it, stood a massive concrete cylinder that seemed to have flown in from another universe entirely. This freestanding gray tower, which in fact housed a staircase leading up to the higher galleries, was like a giant piece of the ancient world plunked down in an upscale London interior. The curved windowless façade that it presented to the room, textured as only Lou’s concrete could be textured, was implacable, indomitable, unforgiving of the niceties of club behavior. It was the important thing, the memorable thing about the room. Its gesture toward the harshly archaic, toward the seeming ugliness that always precedes a new idea of beauty, gave it a strength that the merely beautiful lacked. (“Picasso said something very wonderfully, that everything that is created must be ugly,” Lou observed at about this time. “I, not having read Picasso until just recently in a booklet by Gertrude Stein, tried to say it by saying that a thing must be archaic. But it has historical connotations which are not as good as Mr. Picasso’s harsh word, ugly.”) Yet despite its insistence on its own centrality, the concrete cylinder also offered something to the room at large, transmitting its power and its strangeness to the more sedate elements, so that even the Stubbs animals gained a demonic side in its presence. Kahn had used a similar effect in smaller settings before—in the tall, curved, stone fireplace, for instance, that dominated the living room at Fisher House—but here at the Yale Center it finally made complete sense.
* * *
Even as he was starting work on his plan for Yale, the forthright and the implacable were, in their own ways, getting ready to intrude on Lou’s extended family life. As her older sister would later point out, Alex Tyng had never been one to take any guff. For years Alex, like her mother, had accepted the fact that Lou’s schedule meant he wasn’t often available for family dinners and so forth. Ever since elementary school she had thought of herself not as a fatherless child but as a child whose father was extremely busy elsewhere. Now that she was in her mid-teens, though, her perceptions began to change.
It started late in 1969, when Alex was fifteen. She was supposed to go to a Christmastime concert of the Vienna Boys’ Choir with two friends. Afterward Lou promised to take them for tea at the Hunt Room, an elegant Philadelphia gathering place in the grand old Bellevue Hotel. He duly met up with the three girls, and they were all sitting together in the Hunt Room, having a good time, when someone came up to the table and said, “Hi, Mr. Kahn.” Alex never really focused on who this person was—it wasn’t anybody she recognized—but when Lou made the introductions, “he introduced me as Alex Tyng, and he didn’t say I was his daughter,” she recalled. “I mean, we went to a lot of places together and people knew I was his daughter. He used to take me to the art store, and we used to go to rare book stores together. I never thought he was trying to hide it. I think he was just caught in an awkward moment and didn’t know how to introduce me. But it just struck a raw chord. Things were not quite right.”
The following year, when she was sixteen, she was talking to a good friend of hers, a very direct, matter-of-fact boy, and he asked her how often she saw her father. “And I said, ‘Oh, once a month or so,’ and he said, ‘Is that all?’ And I’d thought, well, a busy guy with three families…” But this exchange got Alex thinking in a new way.
She had always known about Nathaniel, ever since the day he was born. “I remember being told by my mother as we were crossing the street. She said, ‘By the way, you have a baby brother.’” That happened when Alex was eight and a half. Nearly eight years later, shortly after that signal conversation with her friend, she decided to call Nathaniel and Harriet on the phone. “I told my mother what I was going to do—I didn’t ask her, but I told her—and she was okay with it,” said Alex. So she just looked up the phone number and called their house. “Nathaniel answered, and I said, ‘Is your mother there? This is Alex Tyng.’ But I didn’t want to say this is your sister. He said she would be in later. So I called back later when she was there, and she was delighted and said, ‘Why don’t you come over?’ and I did.”
From the first moment they met, Alex and Nathaniel got along really well, despite the significant age gap. They had plenty to talk about together. It was as if each had been waiting for someone exactly like that to come along—someone with whom to compare notes about their mysterious father. “Like: why didn’t he ever show his teeth when he smiled?” Alex remembered. “My mother told me he didn’t have good dental work as a child, so he was self-conscious about them.” Neither Alex nor Nathaniel could recall seeing or hearing Lou brush his teeth; perhaps, Alex suggested, he didn’t have any. (Nathaniel had in fact seen his father laugh and knew for sure that Lou had teeth, but he kept silent, not wanting to ruin his older sister’s fun.) Together, they worked out a complicated plot that would allow them to take a picture of him caught in a sudden smile, using a Rube Goldberg–like camera device that they invented on the spot. Of course the plot was never executed—it was undoubtedly not executable—but Alex, at any rate, found the whole game highly entertaining.
Anne and Harriet, too, became friendly through their children, to the point where they would occasionally rely on each other for child-minding. “I have great memories of going to their house,” said Alex, who found Harriet to be “a people person, very understanding and warm—great to talk to. She was like an alternate mother. And also she always had great food, and my mother wasn’t much of a cook. Harriet was a really good cook.” Nathaniel, meanwhile, had fond memories of eating at Anne Tyng’s house. “The meals she served were so different from my mother’s,” he recalled. “There were a lot of seeds involved—I never had a sunflower seed before I went to their house. And she made a wonderful big salad with lots of radishes.” The physical environment, too, struck him with its novelty when he went to visit Alex and Anne at 2511 Waverly. Anne had recently remodeled the house to create an architectural aerie for herself at the top of the narrow building, but the downstairs remained much as it had been for years, with a single long room containing kitchen, dining space, and living area. “They had these stained-glass lamps that cast a beautiful colored
light,” Nathaniel remembered. “No candles. My mother was big on candles, Anne on stained glass—a very different kind of light.”
Most of all, though, what Nathaniel recalled about Anne Tyng was her personality. “Anne was a lovely person, an interested person,” he said. “She was interested in me. I remember long discussions with her about geometry, particularly the spiral: about how things came back to the same thing again, but they were better. Her vision of life—I don’t mean an individual’s life, but life itself—was very orderly. It was positive. Things were getting better in the universe, according to Anne.” Nathaniel paused to bring to mind this unusual woman, his sister’s mother. “I still remember the sound of Anne’s voice,” he said. “She did not make small talk. She thoroughly engaged you, whether you were eight years old or an old person.”
Alex’s experiment in seeking out her younger brother had gone so well that she decided to try the same thing with her older sister, someone she had known about all her life but had never met. “I just decided I would call her up. It was ridiculous that we didn’t know each other,” said Alex. “She was about thirty, living in New York with her husband, and she said fine, come see me.” So Alex and a friend went into New York on a shopping trip and stopped at Sue Ann’s for lunch. “And it was fun,” observed Alex. “She said she was just waiting for me to call her—waiting until I was old enough to want a relationship.”
Now that Alex had gotten things out in the open, she wasn’t about to let her father lapse back into silence. On behalf of herself and Nathaniel, each previously so isolated, she would probe him about the existence of other relatives. Did they have any cousins? Where did they live? What did they look like? (Alex was very aware of not looking anything like the members of her mother’s family; she looked, in fact, like Lou.) Did he have any photographs? Could he bring some back the next time he went to Los Angeles?
Alex also, as part of her effort “to inject some normality” into their lives, took Nathaniel with her on her visits to Lou’s office. She wanted them both to be as involved in his regular world as possible. When she happened to find out, in the spring of 1971, that Lou was about to get some kind of big award, she insisted that all four of them, the two mothers and their two children, be invited to the ceremony. She succeeded in procuring the invitations, but Harriet and Anne declined to go, so Alex and Nathaniel, aged seventeen and eight, went on their own.
The occasion was the Bok Award, formally known as the Philadelphia Award, one of the most prestigious honors that could be conferred on eminent native sons. (The previous year’s winner had been Eugene Ormandy, internationally renowned as the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra.) Louis Kahn was the 1970 recipient, and the ceremony was held at the elegant Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts on April 21, 1971. The event marked such a significant milestone in Lou’s life that his sister, Sarah, flew in from Los Angeles to attend. So did Jonas Salk and his wife.
For the presentation itself, the audience was asked to sit down. Alex had “started to notice that people would try to shove us to the back of the room—this would happen at every event. This time someone said, ‘The seats in the front are for important people,’ and told us to go to the back, but then I saw just regular people, not important people, sitting in them.” After the presentation, there was a receiving line that included the Salks, some local political figures, and Esther and Louis Kahn. Alex persuaded Nathaniel that they should go through the receiving line. When they reached Esther, Alex put her hand out. Esther looked straight at her, clasped her own hands behind her back, and said, “Hello, Miss Tyng,” in what Alex thought was a very cold voice. “And when Nathaniel put his hand out—he was a very polite little boy—she ignored him,” reported Alex. “She just looked over his head.”
Lou was standing next to Esther in the receiving line, and this encounter did not go unnoticed. He reacted by hugging his two children warmly. Then he took them with him and introduced them to various people in the room. Alex remembered meeting her aunt Sarah; Nathaniel remembered meeting Jonas Salk. Both were convinced that the people to whom Lou introduced them as “Alex and Nathaniel” knew that they were his children—though if Sarah understood this, she never mentioned the fact back in California, where the relatives remained completely ignorant of their existence.
“To be fair to Esther, it was not an easy thing, to have your husband’s other children show up,” the grown-up Nathaniel Kahn pointed out many years later. “You have to say to Lou: What did you have in mind here? How did you think this was going to go?”
For Esther, the ceremony was meant to be one of the crowning moments of their married life, an occasion when her decades-long support of Lou and his work at last yielded public acknowledgment for both of them. “I think she recognized his genius. She admired his talent and wanted to have a part in it,” said the Philadelphia architect Peter Arfaa, attempting to explain why Esther had stayed with her wayward husband in spite of everything. And Lou, too, must have been aware of the stakes for her, because he knew how much he owed her. Part of the debt was emotional, and it was linked to guilt; as Arfaa put it, “He appreciated her loyalty—he appreciated the fact that she had accepted his disloyalty, and he was obligated to that acceptance.” But part of it was solidly financial, though in ways that added up to other and more important kinds of debt. If not for Esther’s steady support, her years of being essentially the sole breadwinner, Lou’s dream of setting up his own practice and making a go of it might never have become a reality. “Without Esther he could not have made it,” Arfaa asserted. “I mean that literally.”
And Lou knew this. Once, a few years earlier, he and David Slovic had been driving home from an important presentation that followed an all-night work session, and David, groggy and relieved, had felt relaxed enough to bring up the subject of Lou’s marriage. He had asked—“in a kind of innocently young person’s way”—why Lou stayed with Esther rather than getting divorced, given that he’d obviously fallen in love with other people and even had children with them. “He said, basically, she’d been supporting him for many years, all through the Depression,” Slovic remembered. “So he felt it was appropriate that he stay with her. He felt an obligation—that it was the right thing to do, to be with her.” Alex Tyng sensed that, more than just an obligation, it was an actual feeling, a warm feeling of loyalty. “I think his loyalty to Esther was admirable,” said the adult Alex, recalling the difficulties brought about by Lou’s multiple lives. “She did support him all those years. But then there should have been loyalty to other people too. I don’t think the way he dealt with the situation was good.” Later, she recalled, when she would try to talk to her father about why he had created these strange family circumstances for them all, he would never answer. “He would be silent,” Alex said. “But he would think about it. In the few years before he died, I think he was starting to think about us as people.”
* * *
“He was a man of agony,” said Shamsul Wares, the Bangladeshi architect. “He had disturbances inside. On the exterior, he was a very nice person. Probably women were attracted to him because of this: his greater understanding of humanity. He was a sensitive person.” And this, Wares felt, was at least partly because “he had a difficult life in his childhood. People who have a difficult life always become more perceptive. Sometimes they also become more reckless—they want to grab things.”
Among the other difficulties, clearly, had been his scarred appearance. “He never talked about it,” said Fred Langford, referring to the childhood accident that caused the scars. “But I certainly thought about it many times, and how it shaped him. I imagine as a child his classmates would call him ugly, so it made him reclusive, left him alone a lot, and that’s how he developed his drawing, his art. A lot of artists develop that way.”
But if Lou had initially lacked self-confidence, it would seem that he eventually came to possess it, or something like it. “Probably growing up he was very self-conscious and unconfident. In my t
ime with him he acted very confident,” Fred remarked. “I saw him give a speech in La Jolla. He never made notes. He’d walk out on the stage, start rambling, and then he’d tee off like a jazz trumpeter. That takes confidence.”
Increasingly as he grew more famous, Kahn was asked to give these oddly intimate, entrancing, free-form lectures of his, not only in the classroom, as he had always done, but also at all sorts of formal occasions. The audiences ranged from the general public to music and art students to architecture professionals. The venues could be as local as Philadelphia and as far-flung as Zurich. One of his most passionate and comprehensive lectures, titled “The Room, the Street, and Human Agreement,” was delivered in Detroit in June of 1971 on the occasion of his receiving the American Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal for lifetime achievement, an award given to only one architect annually. Lou was singularly, almost childishly proud of such recognition, as Richard Saul Wurman realized when Kahn came to give a talk in Aspen in June of the following year. At that point Kahn had only just returned to Philadelphia from the British Isles, where on June 13, 1972, he had been given the English equivalent of the AIA prize, the Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects. When Wurman met him at the airport in Colorado a few days after the London ceremony, Lou arrived cupping within his hands the British gold medal, which he had carried through multiple flight changes from Philadelphia and beyond. “Ricky, look at this!” he exclaimed, holding out his hands like a boy with a new treasure.
But that was in private. In public, at the 1971 event where he received his first gold medal and delivered his lecture, Kahn was appropriately mature and serious. A version of the talk he gave to the AIA was captured on film by Duncan White elsewhere during that same year, and in the movie you can actually see what could only be sensed in the printed transcript from Detroit: the way Lou directly addressed his audience, without notes and without any evident nervousness or embarrassment, his trademark bow tie askew, his white hair and thick eyeglasses gleaming in the light.
