by Wendy Lesser
Vincent Scully highlighted the connection between Lou’s own physical nature and the buildings he designed in a compelling description he gave of the man himself. “The other thing about Kahn that one felt right away was the vitality, the love of life that came out of him,” Scully remarked. “He had a kind of physical generosity; he gave off life. He was a wrestler, you know—a very muscular person who walked on the balls of his feet. His hands were very big, fleshy, strong, and he gave off a sense of power.” Scully knew of a woman who had once spotted Lou in New Haven and had followed him down the street because “he looked so vital, so strange, so alive, so full of life in contrast to the death of most things and people.” And this quality, insisted Scully, was intimately connected to his work: “Kahn had that, and he gave it in his buildings. This was one of the greatest things about him: to make people realize that the arts—the physical arts—are physical; they are experienced in physical, empathetic ways. That’s why I dislike the things that are written about Kahn that are all cerebral, philosophical, sociological … He was physical; Lou had the physical perception of form, and that is what made him a great architect.”
There is an old photograph of Lou, taken during a 1936 summer vacation at the Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, that gives a sense of the man Scully was describing. In it, Lou stands with his back to us, dressed in an old-fashioned archery outfit and aiming off to his left with a huge bow and arrow. The skimpy costume clings tightly to his narrow hips and slender waist, and the revealing cutouts around the torso show off the taut muscles of his strong back and wide shoulders. Kahn is thirty-five years old here, but he still has a full head of ungrayed hair, and he radiates both the animal vitality and the athletic self-confidence of a very young man.
His head is turned slightly to the side, so that one catches a glimpse of the profile, recognizably Lou’s. But either because the photograph is taken at some distance, or because the heavily muscled left arm blocks the lower half of his face, the scars are hardly visible. In this respect, it is a bit like a self-portrait he sketched in pencil during his Grand Tour in 1928–29, a graceful drawing which portrays him in half-face as the dinner-jacketed dandy smoking a pipe, with nary a scar in sight.
He may have succeeded in ignoring them, but in some people’s eyes the scars were definitive. “I think there’s a lot in his architecture related to his personal life,” said Jack MacAllister. “One is the imperfections of the material.” For MacAllister, the building processes Kahn favored because they showed how something had been made—the pocked concrete, the die-marked extruded steel—were directly linked to his facial scars. And even the colleagues who took a somewhat less reductive approach included the scars when listing the obstacles in Lou’s path. “Lou had a lot of things to overcome,” Richard Wurman pointed out. “He had a terrible voice, he was scarred, he was short, he was poor, he couldn’t drive. And I think he did whatever he could, maybe not consciously, to overcome these things. I am not a shrink—I do not know that it is so—but it could be one of the interpretations.” Wurman was explicitly referring to all the involvements with women, but he also thought this theory applied to Lou’s architecture career. “He was overcoming whatever insecurities he had—from his poor background, from not being one of the guys. Comfort is not your friend,” Wurman stressed. “What’s your friend is what you learn by overcoming that. Lou had a battle.”
Nathaniel Kahn imagined a battle, too, but in a very different way. For him, Lou’s whole approach to both life and work was like something out of King Arthur. He noticed his father’s scars, but thought of them as part of Lou’s chivalric ferocity: “There was something of the warrior about him. Definitely.” And this need to wage war on the conventions of architecture, not to mention the conventions in general, influenced the rest of Lou’s appearance as well. Nathaniel pictured him as a kind of matador, flirting with the traffic as he dashed across the street, wearing his coat over his shoulders like a cape, flamboyantly aware of how he looked. “Even his outfit: he’s dressing up,” said Nathaniel. “He took great pride in his clothes. He had very fine shoes. He liked black wingtip shoes, and he had a pair of beautiful brown shoes—cordovans, I think. It was a role; he put on his architect’s outfit to do battle in the world.”
Alex Tyng (who, like her sister, had virtually no awareness of the scars and always thought of her father as “handsome”) also noticed the elegant clothing. “He just had to find the perfect thing all the time, and he was not satisfied with second-best,” she pointed out. “His clothes were carefully picked out, and I always laugh when I hear people say he had baggy pants and shoes that didn’t match and a crooked tie. His tie was crooked because it was hand-tied, and his pants were specially tailored. He always wore subtle colors and very fine materials with certain textures and only black socks. He had a very definite sense of what he wore, a sense of taste. I suppose people liked to see him as a character and wanted to be able to make a caricature of him, but I never saw him as such.”
Jack MacAllister could have been one of the people she was referring to. “He had a kind of peasant quality about him,” said Jack, “the way he would sit and say that a boiled potato was the best meal he’d ever had, and really and truly enjoy simple things. I mean Lou didn’t really like sophisticated personal things, as far as his own lifestyle. And in a way,” he acknowledged, “that’s humility.” But MacAllister was also arguing against the idea of a humble Lou, suggesting that what he really had was “peasant charm,” not humility in the ordinary sense. “I don’t think Lou was humble at all,” Jack insisted. “And I don’t even think of that as derogatory. I think he knew he was goddamn good.”
It’s true; he did know that, from quite an early age, at least in regard to his artistic talents. When he took the boat over to America from Europe at the age of five, he was proud that the captain valued his drawings enough to reward him with oranges. It did not occur to Lou that anything like pity could have entered into the transaction. And the same was true of the preferential treatment he received from his family, and particularly from his “noble,” “unselfish” mother. The fact that all the scarce family resources were centered on him—the way his mother always rooted for him and supported him, even at the expense of the other children—was something he attributed to his own manifest abilities. An outside observer might have imagined that at least part of Bertha’s motive was a sense of guilt and overprotectiveness in regard to this damaged, somewhat sickly child. But one of the things she protected him from, it seems, was any suspicion that this could have been her attitude. Where others might have seen pity, he saw only admiration and faith. “My mother held true to the absolute confidence in me,” he remarked toward the end of his life.
And perhaps this affected him in another way as well. Pity was simply not a part of his vocabulary. He did not see himself as its recipient, and nor did he have the capacity—or the need, or the wish—to feel it for others. He could be empathetic, especially on the grand scale, as he was in Bangladesh and India; and he could be loving and warm and appealing and companionable, to lovers and children along with colleagues and friends. But when his desires came into conflict with someone else’s, he had an inherent ruthlessness that enabled him to see his own choices as the only possible ones. Pity did not come into it, because pity might have stopped him, and he needed above all to keep going—or rather to keep beginning, again and again.
* * *
In the course of his half-century as a practicing architect, Louis Kahn produced an estimated 235 designs. Of these, 182 were commissions; the other 53 were speculative drawings, planning-related projects, designs for objects, or competition entries, none of which resulted in lasting structures. Out of the commissioned plans, 81 ended up being constructed, but that included a number of office remodels, home interiors, and small alterations or additions done mainly in the years before his reputation began to solidify. Of the forty or so projects completed after 1952, a mere handful account for Kahn’s huge and continuin
g reputation. The indisputable masterpieces are the Salk Institute, the Kimbell Art Museum, the Phillips Exeter Library, the Indian Institute of Management, the Yale Center for British Art, and the National Assembly Building of Bangladesh. To this select list many people would be inclined to add the Richards Medical Building, the Rochester Unitarian Church, the Yale Art Gallery, and, as of 2012, the FDR Four Freedoms Monument. Kahn himself might have appended the Trenton Bath House to the list. But even granting all of these, as well as generously including, say, three of the nine private houses, you still come up with only fourteen major buildings out of a lifetime of very hard work.
“Success…” mused I. M. Pei when Nathaniel Kahn went to interview him for My Architect and pointedly contrasted Pei’s successful record of construction with Lou’s small output. “Three or four masterpieces more important than fifty, sixty buildings.”
Among well-known architects, Pei was not alone in finding Kahn’s work inspirational. “My first works came out of my reverence for him,” Frank Gehry confided. “As time goes by,” said Moshe Safdie, “Kahn somehow stands out as the measure, the standard, something to compare to, to evaluate by, to give sustenance to.” Calling Lou “the most beloved architect of our time,” Philip Johnson went through a list of the other greats (Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies, Le Corbusier), pointing out how mean or difficult each one was, then added, “Lou—there was a man.” What made his achievement even more remarkable, Johnson felt, was how inveterately he ignored the business side of the business: “How he ever got any clients is a mystery … Lou did it by being an artist.”
Renzo Piano, who as a young man worked with Kahn for a year or so on the Olivetti-Underwood factory, had an even fuller sense of indebtedness. “Magic,” he said, when asked what he had learned from Louis Kahn. “Or searching for magic. I started to learn that there’s a magic in architecture. There’s a little red line that connects the art of building, putting things together, with the art of creating marvel, stupor, amazement.” And the other thing he had learned, he felt, was the importance of obstinacy. “Louis Kahn was an incredibly obstinate man. I remember I found him many, many times in the morning, eight o’clock in the morning, still asleep in the office, because he was working so late he was just sleeping in the office on a table. When you work together with somebody like that,” Piano observed, “you understand that sublime persistence is the only way to get to the center of things. For Kahn everything became architecture in some way. Even music. The entire experience of life becomes architecture.”
In speaking about what Lou brought to the profession as a whole, many of his former employees emphasized the ageless universality of his work. His buildings “aren’t tied to the fashions of the time,” argued MacAllister. “It’s the making of space. It’s timelessness,” suggested Wurman, pointing out that “his influence is not stylistic.” “The idea of not having style, it had depth to it,” Anne Tyng elaborated. “He was really going beyond styles, beyond any particular historical forms, to the beginnings of form—the most basic idea of form, which is geometry.” Rafael Villamil, who eventually left architecture to become a painter, expressed a similar view in his own terms: “He was influenced by others, but he made those ideas his own. He was an artist finding his voice. You could not put his work under any style, like Internationalist or Brutalist or Postmodern. His work was Kahn.” Whereas Villamil considered most modern architecture to be “frivolous, arbitrary, contemporary, and loud,” he characterized Kahn’s buildings as “profound, mysterious, ageless, and silent.”
Yet at least one of Lou’s admirers, rather than stressing the agelessness or timelessness of his work, pointed instead to Kahn’s unique relationship to time. “Mies, Corbu were all forward-looking architects, interested in the formation of a new world order. Louis Kahn was the only one who was also a backward-looking architect,” said Shamsul Wares. “He was the only one who could understand the value of looking backward.” This did not mean he was like the postmodernists, merely quoting historical forms. According to Wares, “He didn’t copy anything. He developed ideas from the past.” Nor did this approach subtract one whit from his impeccable modernist credentials. “The first thing about Kahn is that he is a modernist,” insisted Wares. “Because of his understanding of the development, he understood that modernism is necessary, but he also understood the problems of modernism. At one point modern architecture became very lightweight architecture. Other architects didn’t care for heaviness; they disliked it. They thought modern architecture is floating things. Kahn understood that heaviness gives stability. He didn’t like the instability of modernity.”
Shamsul Wares was also interested in the painstaking method Kahn used to arrive at his finished work. “He is a hard worker. He is unlike many architects who instantly conceive what they want to do. None of Kahn’s design was achieved from his first idea,” Wares commented. “The grand idea cannot come in a single sitting. He’s someone who can put up his ideas through his drawings—not through his brain, but through his drawings. He cannot come to the final version at the beginning.”
This slow pace may account, in part, for why Kahn was able to finish relatively few buildings. But it also explains some of the special appeal of working for Lou on those seemingly endless projects. It was the process, not just the goal, that those who learned the most from him remembered long afterward. “The standout in the office, and what you do miss, is the search: trying to find an answer and coming up with it, and then you keep going,” remarked Henry Wilcots, who spent ten years working under Kahn and another nine helping to finish the Dhaka project after his death. “The finished building is just a bump in the road, just another detail.”
But to reach that bump was still an achievement, especially in the absence of the original maker. Of the major projects left unfinished when Kahn died in 1974, only three ultimately reached completion in a form that was recognizably his: the Dhaka Assembly Building, the Yale Center for British Art, and the FDR Four Freedoms monument and park. Probably what accounts for these three successes is not just how far the projects had proceeded before he died, but also who was responsible for their completion. In each case the fidelity to Lou’s vision rested in the hands of his long-term employees and friends—people who intimately understood not only what Lou was trying to do, but also how he might have gone about doing it.
The easiest project to complete, because it was the furthest along when he died, was the Yale Center for British Art. By March of 1974, the basic structure was nearly finished: the first three floors were in place, the fourth-floor concrete columns had been poured, and the precast “V” beams for the roof had been selected by Kahn though not yet installed. He had also chosen the stainless steel that would make up the exterior panels of the building. Marshall Meyers, whose firm Pellecchia & Meyers was assigned to finish the Yale Center, estimated that completing the job would take about a year and a half. Instead it took three full years. There were three hundred additional drawings that had to be made, plus cartloads of correspondence to be dealt with, and every action had to be judged against what were presumed to be Lou’s original intentions.
Meyers, commenting on the difficulty of the assignment, compared it to “restoring a building that hadn’t been built yet. What attitude do you take?… Sometimes there was a document or drawing Lou had done that showed his intent. In other cases one could only rely on recent precedent. If a circumstance in construction occurred that required a change to his original intent or no documentation existed, then you had to reflect on his attitudes and architectural principles.”
Luckily for the project, Meyers had worked for Kahn in responsible positions over the course of many years, both as his employee and as an independent colleague. In fact, Marshall Meyers had already left Lou’s office to found his own architectural firm when he was brought in as the “project representative” at Yale, around the time the museum’s first-floor columns were being poured. So their collaboration on this building as two independent architects
began while Kahn was still alive.
It was typical of Lou to maintain good relations with the talented colleagues who had left the firm of Louis I. Kahn. Kahn recognized that there was only so far ambitious young architects could rise at his essentially one-man office, and he understood their wish for independence—even if, as David Slovic pointed out, the change meant deciding “to quit a job that’s doing the capital of a country and do someone’s kitchen.” When his staff architects made the decision to leave, Kahn generously stood behind them, often sending jobs their way. After the Salk project was over, for instance, Jack MacAllister went to Lou and told him he wanted to start his own practice. And Lou said, “Let me help you. I had a man come in last week who wants a complete remodel of a Philadelphia house and I can’t do it. Let’s see if he’ll let you do it.”
Even if someone was leaving to become something other than an architect, Lou would support his decision. Richard Saul Wurman, who became widely known as a conference organizer, writer, and all-round intellectual guru, remembered asking Lou early on, “Am I making a mistake by doing all these other things I’m interested in?” What he was really wondering was whether he should try instead to concentrate on architecture alone, as Kahn had. Lou’s answer epitomized, for Wurman, the way Kahn encouraged you to become yourself. “Ricky,” he said, “even when I get a haircut I’m an architect. Do what interests you.”
Once they had left, Kahn stayed in touch with his younger colleagues and used their talents whenever he could. Fred Langford was brought in as Lou’s concrete consultant on the Kimbell after he had departed to found his own specialized firm. Dave Rothstein, who had done the models for both the Trenton Bath House and the Richards Building while he was still working in Kahn’s office, was called back over the years whenever a new model was needed. In 1973, even though he had his own thriving practice by then, he did the model for the Roosevelt Island monument—in exchange, as he recalled, for Kahn’s involvement in the early stages of Rothstein’s Bishop Field Estate project in Massachusetts. Time and distance never seemed to dim Lou’s connection with his protégés. “He would look at you and say something from five or six years ago,” Rothstein noted. “He kept track of where you were, not just architecturally, but in life.”
