You Say to Brick

by Wendy Lesser

  The room, Lou argued in his talk, was “the beginning of architecture,” and he went on to call attention to its special attributes: “Enter your room and know how personal it is, how much you feel its life. In a small room with just another person, what you say may never have been said before. It is different when there is more than one person. Then, in this little room, the singularity of each is so sensitive that the vectors do not resolve. The meeting becomes a performance instead of an event, with everyone saying his lines, saying what has been said many times before.” In delivering these lines, Lou appeared to be referring to his own “performance” at that very moment, even as he also raised the possibility of a more intimate, personal, fresh encounter that could only take place between two people in private. Yet because of the way he spoke, the public and private conversations seemed to intermingle. “This room we are in now is big, without distinction,” he said. “Yet I know that if I were to address myself to a chosen person, the walls of the room would come together and the room would become intimate.”

  A feeling of close connection with one other person at a time: that was Lou’s whole way of being in the world, whether he was engaging in a love affair or designing a building. By beginning with the room and working outward from it to the street and thence to the whole of “human agreement,” he attempted to bring some of that private intensity into the public realm.

  “The street is a room of agreement,” he said in that Detroit talk. “The street is dedicated by each house owner to the city in exchange for common services … The street is a community room.”

  He could have been thinking, as he spoke, of his own design for the Dacca Parliament Building, where the ambulatory that carried people from one level to the next actually had the physical characteristics of a city street, up to and including street lamps. These hallways of the National Assembly, which were supposed to foster random encounters and fortuitous meetings, were intended to produce the kind of human agreement known as political collaboration. That Kahn did indeed have Dacca at the back of his mind as he spoke these words was suggested by a section later in the talk, when he actually brought up his work on the subcontinent. “I realized in India and Pakistan,” he said, “that a great majority of the people are without ambition because there is no way in which they are able to elevate themselves beyond living from hand to mouth, and what is worse, talents have no outlets. To express is the reason for living.” Yet self-expression on its own wasn’t worth much, in Lou’s eyes, if it didn’t lead to something larger. “I believe that the greatest work of man is that part which does not belong to him alone,” he said.

  Kahn seemed convinced that the culture at large had reached a moment of crisis. “A city is measured by the character of its institutions. The street is one of its first institutions. Today, these institutions are on trial,” he remarked in Detroit in 1971. This was certainly true of American cities and institutions at that time (and not just at that time). But it was also true, in a different way, of the faraway place that was always at the back of his mind. For even as Lou was speaking these lines, he was aware that Dacca had become enmeshed in a bloody war.

  The Bangladesh Liberation War, as the conflict over the new country’s independence came to be known, officially began in March of 1971, when East Pakistan’s leading political party, which had won a majority of National Assembly seats in that year’s election, demanded the right to form a government. This would have made Sheikh Mujibar Rahman, who was head of the separatist Awami League, the prime minister of East Pakistan. When West Pakistan’s leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, refused to recognize the sheikh and instead sent one of his generals out to take over as governor of East Bengal, Rahman issued a formal declaration of independence. That declaration was made on March 26, the same day the sheikh was arrested by Pakistani forces.

  The resulting war was notoriously violent. After the Pakistani army had invaded and taken over Dacca, there were numerous reported incidents of genocide, both in the capital and in the outer provinces. The surviving rebels fled westward to India, and a Bangladeshi government-in-exile was set up in the city of Calcutta, just over the border in West Bengal. Finally, on December 3, India entered the war on Bangladesh’s side and mounted a three-pronged attack on the Pakistanis in Dacca. The city fell to the Indian forces on December 16, a date that became known as Victory Day in the new country of Bangladesh.

  Throughout the nine months of the war, during which the people who had been paying Kahn—the West Pakistanis—were trying to wipe out the people he was directly working for, Lou had virtually no contact with his clients in Dacca. The half-poured concrete walls of the Assembly Building stood roofless and incomplete, looking less like a building under construction than an ancient pile of stones that had long been abandoned. (In fact, one theory held that the Kahn building made it through the bombings and strafings relatively unscathed because it already looked like a ruin, especially when seen from the sky.) Most of the Western contractors who had been hired to do projects in East Pakistan pulled out and quit during the war, but Kahn just kept working on his commission. Sometimes Henry Wilcots was the only architect assigned to the job, while the rest of the office occupied itself with more current projects. But all through 1971 the design process for Dacca slowly continued in Philadelphia, and it was during this period that Lou, with the aid of the engineer Harry Palmbaum, worked out his final plans for the National Assembly Hall’s roof.

  When the war was over, Kahn signed a new contract with the fledgling Bangladeshi government and went back to completing the job. Before it was done there would be the usual alterations and reductions that always took place in a Louis Kahn project. Dacca’s Supreme Court, initially scheduled to be included on the Assembly site, was given its own building elsewhere in the city, designed by a different architect in a more traditional style. A major hospital on which Kahn’s firm worked for years was ultimately reduced to its single outpatient wing. And there were smaller changes as well: among other things, the V-shaped extrusions that Fred Langford had so lovingly taught the concrete workers to make were eliminated from the higher stories of the building because they kept breaking off during stripping. But such design alterations were relatively minor, and the building as a whole slowly took shape in much the way Kahn had envisioned it all along.

  Lou went out to Dacca in August of 1972 and again in January of 1973, in both cases joined by Henry Wilcots, who generally arrived first to prepare the ground for their work. On the early 1973 trip, for instance, Lou and Henry both left for London on January 20; from there, Wilcots proceeded immediately to Bangladesh while Kahn flew to Tel Aviv, remaining in Israel for the next few days. Lou then joined Henry in Dacca on Friday, January 26, for five intensive days and nights of meetings.

  On the agenda were discussions about various design and construction issues at the capital site, including plans for a proposed Secretariat building. Among those Lou met with on this visit were the newly appointed and very capable Minister & Secretary of Works, Moinul Islam, as well as the new prime minister himself, Sheikh Mujibar Rahman. Professor Kahn, as they called him, was also invited to help develop a master plan for the whole of Dacca, whereby the existing city would be joined with new developments to the north of the Parliament area, including an air terminal, a diplomatic enclave, commercial space, and some housing. In conversations with Dacca’s chief planning commissioner, a man named Mr. Zaman whom he much admired, Lou discussed bridges, waterways, and dwellings built on mounds or over water, while he and Henry were shown maps and diagrams illustrating the flood levels during monsoons.

  And finally there were the evening events to attend—in particular, a dinner held at the home of Larry Heilman, a USAID planner in Dacca. The guests included not only Lou and Henry, but also a number of USAID staffers, along with the orthopedist who was going to head up the new hospital, Dr. Goss, and his wife. During the dinner-table discussion that evening, several people expressed their concern that so much money was being spent on th
e government buildings when housing needs in Dacca were so acute. Wilcots found their arguments specious, but Kahn listened carefully.

  That night, back in his hotel room, Lou had a dream that was so intense it woke him up. He searched for a piece of paper on which to jot it down, and ended up grabbing his BOAC receipt from the London to Tel Aviv flight. On the back of this index-card-sized sheet, in minute and at times nearly indecipherable handwriting, he scribbled down what he could remember of the dream:

  The burnt wood figure, recognizable as one I met. Clean up man to destroy chared wood – 3 inches long. The beauty in blue seemed to constantly appear lately detected at a distance. The outfit tried on trousers placed them back where gotten try to conceal having taken them. As leaving a figure meant to hid this from inquired whom they belonged to. The bottoms marred though platd.

  Some artist friends leaving in a certain car – had other plans – left them with an idea to go my own way. Crossed again found them not having left and had to join them after all.

  To those unfamiliar with Lou-speak, and even to those who know it well, these sentences might seem obscure to the point of impenetrability. He is talking to himself here, after all, and he is recounting something that does not obey any laws of logic or narrative sequencing. Still, precisely because Lou is speaking only to himself—both unconsciously (in the dream) and consciously (in his attempt to unravel it)—this account brings to light some of his deepest preoccupations. There are the references to something having been burnt: a charred wooden thing three inches long (or at least somehow connected to the number three) which is also a “figure … recognizable as one I met.” There is the anxiety of having been caught in an illicit or forbidden action and trying to “conceal” it (especially with regard to the person from whom it is “meant” to be “hid”), though that shameful act appears only to involve trying on some trousers that don’t belong to him. And there is the desire to “go my own way” when confronted with some “artist friends,” accompanied by the later discovery that he “had to join them after all.”

  Having captured what he could of the fleeting, strangely disturbing dream, Lou attempts to ground it in the preceding day’s events. “Last night,” he writes directly under his summary of the dream, and then notes down brief phrases from the dinner-party discussion about “the impropriety of building the capital in light of desperate housing needs” and other planning issues. Eventually he turns to the guests he had met at dinner: “Young people there at the Larry Heilman’s also the Doctor and his wife seem nice giving people.” He realizes he had “Said many things related to my relation with the authorities … I wonder now since I cannot sleep (it is early morning) how wise I was stating to these people which if reported I am afraid would not rest well with me.” And then, on a new line all by itself, he writes, “I wish I did not so much the determination to finish the capital”—characteristically but also suggestively omitting a crucial word (have? feel?), as if the congruence between himself and his determination was so complete as not to require a connecting verb.

  In this half-waking, self-communing language, Lou now returns to the dream and its meaning. “The dream above was like a warning,” he muses. “This strange unrelated dream somehow is recognizably connected One would not be without the other. The old thing bothers and one afraid of ones own folly which could lead to treachery.” Though he had “intended to do good for the nation,” he worries that instead he may have been “feeding another point of view for my destructive position.” Then hope surges back, and he wistfully concludes, “Yet heightening them to constructive criticism.”

  * * *

  The Dacca Assembly Building was important to Lou, in part, because of his intense if somewhat amorphous feelings about democracy. This project, above all others, had given him a chance to put into built form the various emotions and ideas he had about the nature of assembly and the mechanisms of human agreement. And now, at long last, it seemed he was finally to be granted a commission in America that dealt with similar public issues, though admittedly on a much smaller scale.

  In early 1973, Kahn was hired to design a memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the newly renamed Roosevelt Island in New York. The project made a nice bookend to the period that began with the Salk Institute commission, for FDR, himself a victim of polio, had been the founder of the March of Dimes, and the dime itself—or at any rate the profile of Roosevelt that graced the dime—ended up making an appearance in both the La Jolla and New York structures. But Roosevelt’s significance in Kahn’s life went back much farther than that. The years of FDR’s presidency, 1932 to 1945, coincided with the era of Lou’s youthful idealism, and during this period he was actively political in a variety of ways. Roosevelt’s socially minded federal programs inspired much of Kahn’s early architectural and urban planning work, and Roosevelt himself remained Lou’s favorite president of all time.

  Yet in his later years Kahn explicitly denied having any politics at all. In the early 1960s, for instance, he refused to sign a petition against nuclear weapons that some Philadelphia artists were circulating—and this despite the fact that his much-loved sister-in-law Olivia Abelson was one of the founders of the Sane Freeze movement. “He said no. He just didn’t want to be associated with politics,” said Sue Ann Kahn, who was embarrassed at her father’s refusal.

  “I would say Lou was completely apolitical,” Esther Kahn told the architectural historian David Brownlee about fifteen years after her husband’s death. When pushed, she suggested that any apparent radicalism in Lou’s past could be attributed to Oscar Stonorov and other outside influences. She had clearly managed to obliterate Kahn’s activist years of the 1930s and 1940s from her memory, just as Lou himself had attempted to do.

  There could be many reasons for someone to move away from political activism as the twentieth century progressed, including shame about Stalinism and the other depredations of Soviet Communism, distaste for American presidential elections and their increasing reliance on television, fear and concern about America’s military engagements abroad—not to mention the natural retreat toward the personal that comes with aging and financial stability. But in Kahn’s case, the McCarthy era probably had something to do with it. Joseph McCarthy’s widespread, ruthless, and damaging investigations into anybody and everybody’s left-wing past would have been particularly frightening to an immigrant who had pulled himself out of poverty and was just beginning to get a foothold in the upper middle class. Many people, and not just Lou, tried to efface their activist histories in order to preserve their jobs. For an architect like Louis Kahn, the need to qualify himself anew every time a public commission offered itself would have underlined the desirability of a squeaky-clean record. And though one cannot be certain the red-baiting scare determined Kahn’s choices about politics, one can be sure that Lou was aware of the problem, for in a 1973 speech at the Pratt Institute he warned against a way of thinking that would be “as ruinous as McCarthy, who spoiled our true consciousness, our sense of democracy.”

  In that same talk, delivered before a group of Brooklyn art students, Lou brought up “the Roosevelt Memorial in New York, which I am now engaged in doing. I had this thought that a memorial should be a room and a garden. That’s all I had.” He then went on to suggest his reasons for the choice: “The garden is somehow a personal nature, a personal kind of control of nature, a gathering of nature. And the room was the beginning of architecture. I had this sense, you see, and the room wasn’t just architecture, but was an extension of self. I’ll explain this because I think it has qualities that don’t belong to me at all. It has qualities which bring architecture to you … there is something about the emergence of architecture as an expression of man which is tremendously important because we actually live to express. It is the reason for living.”

  And this, for Lou, came back to politics of a different and perhaps deeper kind: his long-held conviction that everyone in the world, including the poor of India and Bangladesh, de
served the right of self-expression. That his memorial to FDR came to be called Four Freedoms Park was thus singularly appropriate, for it was in his 1941 speech about the “four essential human freedoms” that Roosevelt championed “freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world,” along with freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. In the monument’s final incarnation, these words from FDR’s speech were engraved on a stone wall that marked one edge of the roofless, three-sided Room from which one could look out onto Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the wide expanse of the East River.

  Kahn’s plans for the FDR memorial went through the usual series of extreme changes, but now in compacted form. From February 20, 1973, when he first brought the proposal for the memorial into Harriet Pattison’s office, and the autumn of that same year, when he came up with the final design, there were essentially three different versions of the Room: a large brushed-steel monument, a smaller but still substantial concrete edifice, and the final granite structure. The Garden, too, went through several transformations, as Harriet and Lou argued about whether there should be a long approach through allées of trees (Harriet’s idea) or something more limited and enclosed (Lou’s idea). In the end the clients—who included the city of New York, the state of New York, and Ed Logue’s Urban Development Corporation, which was in charge of new construction on Roosevelt Island—favored Harriet’s landscaping plan, just as they insisted that the concrete be replaced by granite; and Lou complied.

  While he was working on the FDR plan, his nephew Alan’s children, Lauren and Jeff Kahn, came on a trip to Philadelphia and visited Lou at his office. Decades later, Lauren vividly remembered her great-uncle explaining to her a particular segment of his design. “He was trying to make a ha-ha,” Lauren recalled, and when she asked him what a ha-ha was, “he said it’s something a farmer has in his field when he wants to keep the cattle in but doesn’t want to build a fence, so he makes an indentation in the ground, and the cows know instinctively not to go beyond it, and it’s more beautiful than a fence. And he wanted to do something like this at FDR, so people could look out without an obstructed view, but so they would also know where the edge is, and feel safe.”