by Wendy Lesser
It is not a campus that stands on its own dignity. There is humor in the design as well as grandeur, and sometimes the grand scale itself gives rise to a witticism. Consider, for instance, the gigantic concrete lintels that rest above the walls of the men’s dorms, each lintel spanning a huge brick cylinder that holds an interior staircase as well as the two concave brick walls on either side of it. This smiling lintel, set beneath a pair of elongated arches, takes the same form as its smaller cousins elsewhere on the campus, but here it is so long, so oversized, that it almost seems a kind of Claes Oldenberg joke. Yet even with its evident sense of humor, it remains elegant and serene, at once a joke and not a joke.
An even bigger grin can be found farther down those same walls, in the paired arches set within the slightly concave brick faces. Here the open arches are designed to mirror each other—one arching upward, the other downward, with an hourglass-shaped span of brick between them, so that there is a curve at the bottom of each arch as well as the top. But because the walls in which these arches appear are themselves bent inward, there is a further ripple to the design, a further dimension to the curve. In the harsh glare of the sunlit exterior, the convolution is barely visible to the eye: while you can sense that each arch is concave, you can’t fully see the effect. But if you enter the stairwell and look at the design from within the dark interior, so that the inward-flooding light highlights rather than flattens the contours of the arch, you can see that this three-dimensionally curving shape resembles nothing so much as a widely grinning mouth, of the sort a skilled child might carve into a jack-o’-lantern. It is a delightful joke—a pun, almost, since it causes you to smile at a smile—but it is also a serious and beautiful piece of construction.
The men’s dorms, located off to the left as you enter the campus, are the only ones with these grinning arches, just as they are the only ones possessing the tall, windowless, cylindrical stairwells. In the women’s dorms, which lie just behind the main classroom building, the design is wider, lower, and rounder. Curved surrounding walls with dry gullies below them segregate the buildings from the adjoining walkways, and arched doorways manned by guards at desks mark the entrances. The ladies appear to have been given the role of damsels in a moated castle, whereas the men are more like frat-boy knights, with their phallic stairwells and jack-o’-lantern cutouts. Whether this says anything about how Kahn viewed the sexes, or whether it was just another kind of allusive game he was playing with design, is not something a casual observer could ever hope to answer. Both sets of dorms appear spartan and attractive in equal measure; both feature ground-level buttresses that emphasize the medieval fort look, and that seem to call out for water to lap at the foot of the brick. They are probably not all that different, as living places. But the women’s dorms, especially as glimpsed from the big side windows of the central classroom wing, possess an added level of mysterious allure, a whiff of inaccessibility, that makes them seem like something out of an old fairy tale.
The classroom wing is the heart of the campus, and you are likely to find yourself repeatedly drawn back to it. A long, straight, thin wedge of brick, punctured at regular intervals by large open rectangles and their crowning arches, the building is both a welcome refuge from the sun and a privileged recipient of its filtered light. If you approach it from the direction of the adjoining Vikram Sarabhai Library (which, with its obliquely angled entrance and radiant brick-lined reading room, offers yet another evocation of Trajan’s Market), you will probably find yourself at the main classroom level, one floor up from the ground. Here the corridor soars to a double height, and the cutouts stretch all the way from floor to ceiling, with only a concrete bench set within them to keep you from falling out the open window. Though long and high, the hallway feels perfectly proportioned, with the brick walls set close enough so that you feel embraced but not smothered, and with the concrete ceiling high enough above your head to give you a sense of grandeur and ease. You can see light coming in from the end of the tunnel and also from the cutouts along the way, but you find yourself enjoying the relative darkness, for in this climate deep shadow is more often friend than foe. As you pass by the large side openings, you notice not only the entrancing views they provide (of the nearby women’s dormitories on one side and the faculty offices across the plaza on the other), but also the cooling cross-breezes they bring in.
Moving further down the hallway, you are drawn forward by the light at the end, and as you approach you can see that this light comes mainly from an immense circular window set high in the far wall, as well as from smaller square windows bunched into the lower corners of the end-room. Far behind you, at the other terminus of the central corridor, there is a similar room that serves as an exit lobby, its square windows converted into doors; but at this end the small room has no exit except the door you came in by, and no visible function except to serve as a place of rest and contemplation. Benches are set into each of the floor-level corner windows that abut each other at right angles, so you can sit with your back to one window and glance out another; meanwhile, in front of you, an inner brick wall pierced at three levels with differently shaped windows runs up to the very top of the building. As the sunlight passes through the high circular opening on the outer wall, it plays on the brick walls and the stone floor in constantly changing shapes, calling to mind Kahn’s oft-repeated misquotation from Wallace Stevens, “What slice of the sun does your building have?” (to which he famously added the gloss “as if to say that the sun never knew how great it is until it struck the side of a building”).
If you ever tire of this remarkable internal view, you can always look out through the lower windows at the tall, stately, square-cut water tower that stands at some distance from the rest of the campus. Closer to hand, you can glimpse small clusters of students seated beneath you on the grass. A slight murmur of their conversation may reach you in your secluded chamber, but mainly there is silence, and tranquility, and room to think.
* * *
Toward the very back of the Institute, past the dormitories and a playing field and a small road and some luxuriant gardens, lies a corner of the campus where Louis Kahn has left his personal mark. These are the “sample arches,” the hand-fashioned structures he created and left behind to show the workers how to lay the bricks and mortar, and how to rub the corners of the bricks so they would fit more closely together. “He wanted a thin joint,” Doshi says, contrasting this to the way Le Corbusier had the workers lay a thick mortar between his bricks. And indeed, if you look at the brickwork in the City Museum, you will see how much rougher and messier it looks than the walls of the IIM. But then, Le Corbusier was going for a rougher appearance in general: his concrete often looks like something from an industrial process—almost as if it were still in its wet state, still emerging from the cement mixer—whereas Kahn’s concrete is singularly smooth and fine, a finished product.
Both the concrete lintel with its upturned tips and the patterns of brick forming the arch itself are clearly visible in the sample Kahn created. They are like a tangible signature, reminiscent of the quick sketches of forms and joints preserved on the basement wall of the Salk Institute: a lingering sign of his presence, testimony to his actual hand in the work. Here, at the very back of the Institute campus, you can look at these remnants in peace, surrounded only by the sound of birdsong, the rustle of wind in the trees, and the occasional splash of a spray hose as a gardener hand-waters the plants.
It is a much more moving memorial than the explicit one, which consists of a sign affixed to one of the columns of the central piazza announcing in Hindi and English that this space has been officially named “Louis Kahn Plaza.” In fact, this central courtyard, grand as it is, may strike you at times as one of the less functional parts of Kahn’s design. On sunny days, its enormous length and width make it too hot to traverse comfortably. Even the eternal Indian dogs choose to lie only in its shaded patches, cooling themselves against the paving stones. Humans hug the buildings as
they navigate around the plaza, or else choose to go inside the tunnels that line it. They will generally walk the extra distance it takes to adhere to the right angles rather than cut across in the direct sun. In rainy weather it must be even worse, with the monsoon pelting down and the grassy part of the rectangle turned to mud; then everybody, including the dogs, must stick to the inside corridors.
Admittedly, there is a magnificence to the views this great space creates as one looks across it or down its length. Without them, you would not be inclined to think of the Roman Forum or Ostia Antica. And yet the design falls short on a practical level, because if people are not drawn to walk across it, then the plaza serves no communal function; it just feels vast and empty. However grand the visual effect is, there is something missing, and one intuitively feels the lack. Kahn himself evidently recognized the problem, for up to his very last day in Ahmedabad he was still tinkering with plans for this area. His final sketch of the plaza—a rough, thought-filled drawing, done in charcoal on yellow tracing paper—was dated March 15, 1974. Perhaps, if he had lived, he would eventually have come up with something to fill the gap.
* * *
Time has, to a certain extent, ravaged the buildings of the Indian Institute of Management. Moisture has seeped into the softly rubbed bricks and corroded the steel rebar that lies within the walls. Cracks have appeared in the concrete lintels and ceilings, some of them large and jagged. An earthquake in 2001, so severe it knocked the concrete caps off the cylindrical stairwells, caused widespread damage that took years to repair. The bricks that pave the central plaza are half torn up, awaiting new bricks to take their place. And everywhere the walls have been faintly or in some cases grossly stained by the constant tug between intense rainfall and severe heat.
Yet the essential feel of the place remains unharmed. It is not just that the structure was built to look like a ruin, so that even time’s damage can’t make it look bad. That may be partly true, but it is not the whole story. The campus itself remains a congenial place, its buildings and arches and shadows and light a never-ending source of pleasure that you hesitate to leave for the last time because there still seems so much to explore. What you feel when you walk through the Institute is that Kahn at long last got to build the kind of city he was envisioning when he helped make plans in the 1950s for Philadelphia’s center. It is a pedestrian city, quiet and peaceful but still interesting, where you are surrounded by old brick buildings that are high enough but not too high, and where winding paths and secret courtyards and hidden exits through alleys and tunnels bring people together in unexpected ways. Kahn never got to construct his pedestrian Philadelphia: those who opposed him argued that he was being egotistical, utopian, and willfully unable to accept things as they are. But what you sense in the Indian Institute of Management is precisely the opposite of egotism. It is a kind of letting go.
“It’s like an offering,” says Doshi of the shapes between the buildings, the way the massive structures create a sense of organic, human space. “See, one has to be modest, and Kahn was extremely modest. He was very shy. When you respect something, you want to give it some distance.” Yet it seems he was also proud of what he had done. “He said, ‘This is perhaps my best campus,’” Doshi recalls.
That affection may have had something to do with the role the project played in Kahn’s life. He had reached a certain age when he started it, a certain stage in his career, and the project itself—its large size, its slow pace—gave him time to think. “Twelve years: time to reflect,” says Doshi. “So when you look at Lou at the age of sixty-two or sixty-one, when he came here, and then twelve years on, you can almost imagine his mental state—searching for what he does in life. In India, the sixties start the last phase. You know you have to now serve, and not covet.” In Kahn’s case, the constant need to go away and come back may have reinforced the lesson. “Here you come, and the work has happened a little bit more, little bit more. You think about time, and why it takes so much time, and why you want to be here. If you don’t think about time,” Doshi concludes, “you don’t think of memory.”
BEGINNING
I like English history. I like the bloodiness of it somehow—you know it’s horribly bloody—but out of it came something … I have one of eight volumes, and I only read the first volume and only the first chapter, because every time I read it I also read something else into it. And the reason is that I’m really interested in reading Volume Zero. And maybe, when I get through with that, Volume Minus-One.
—Louis Kahn
Naturally, he couldn’t remember everything about the beginning—not only because a small child’s memory is vague to nonexistent, but because much of it happened before he was born. And there were other things, too, that hid the past from him.
Many of the names changed. The Russian province of Livonia, whose capital was Riga, got parceled out between two separate countries, Latvia and the southern part of Estonia. The island known as Ösel turned into Saaremaa, and the town of Arensburg came to be called Kuressaare. Leib and Beila-Rebeckah Schmulowsky renamed themselves Leopold and Bertha Kahn, and their son Leiser-Itze became Louis Isadore. So the historical record—already fuzzy, especially in the case of Jews in that time and place—became even more confusing, more difficult to penetrate, harder to read. People covered their tracks, and what they didn’t intentionally cover up, history disguised for them.
The man who came to be known as Louis Kahn always said, and believed, that he had been born in the town of Arensburg on the island of Ösel. But in the official record that was kept at that time, Leiser-Itze’s birth—like that of his younger sister, Schorre, and his even younger brother, Oscher—was registered in the mainland town of Pernau (now Pärnu, on the Estonian coast). This does not necessarily mean he had his facts wrong. In 1901, when Leiser was born, all Jewish births in the province of Livonia, to which both the island of Ösel and the city of Pernau belonged, had to be recorded by a rabbi; under Tsarist rule, it was the responsibility of the rabbis to keep track of the Jewish population and report to the authorities. Ösel was one of the largest islands in the Baltic Sea, second in size only to Gotland, and the town of Arensburg, with a population of 5,000, was its biggest settlement. Yet the Jewish community of Arensburg, which numbered fewer than a hundred people in 1901, was not large enough to sustain a full congregation. So any Jewish child born on the island in the early years of the twentieth century would have had to be registered in Pernau, where there were enough resident Jews to support a rabbi.
Of course, it’s possible that Beila-Rebeckah and Leib actually traveled to Pernau for the birth, or even lived there for a time. After all, their first child was born on February 20, in the dead of winter, when there was no regular ferry service linking the island to the mainland. Perhaps the young parents, nervous about being isolated, temporarily moved to the mainland for their child’s winter delivery—though this would not explain why their second and third children, born in June of 1902 and June of 1904, were also listed as Pernau births. Or perhaps they moved to Pernau in advance of each birth to make sure that there would be a professional mohel who could perform the ritual circumcision, if necessary, since they could not know beforehand whether the child would be a girl or a boy. Certainly there was a circumcision, in the case of Leiser-Itze; it is recorded as having taken place on February 27, a week after the birth.
But it’s also possible that the rabbi just recorded the birthplace inaccurately, putting down the place of registration instead of the actual place of birth. (Such errors invariably crept into the records: Leiser-Itze, for instance, was listed in some documents as Itze-Leib, though an Ashkenazic Jewish family would not have named a son after a living father.) Or possibly the confusion arose because the Schmulowsky family was trying to finesse the issue of their address. Jews in Tsarist Livonia were not really supposed to live for any length of time outside the legally approved locations, such as Riga, and while the town of Pernau was already outside the official settlement ar
eas, Arensburg was even farther out.
Yet Arensburg was certainly where Beila-Rebeckah’s family was based. Of her six living siblings, five had been born in Arensburg between 1881 and 1890, and the town was listed in a census report as the “constant residence” of her parents, Mendel and Rocha-Lea Mendelowitsch. Beila herself, the oldest of the Mendelowitsch children, had been born in Riga in 1872. Two younger sisters, including one who died at the age of seven months, were also born there between 1874 and 1878. Then the family moved to Arensburg, a popular Baltic resort town which, as of 1875, had a direct ferry connection to Riga. The trip took only nine hours; steamships between the two ports ran twice a week in summer, then somewhat more irregularly through the end of November, when winter finally closed in. So it was easy for Arensburg’s Jews to go back and forth between the Livonian capital, where most of them had come from, and the Ösel resort. By the time the Mendelowitsches arrived, Jews constituted the fourth-largest ethnic group in Arensburg, after Estonians, Germans, and Russians.
