Kahn, Louis I.

Kahn, Louis I. (20 Feb. 1901-17 Mar. 1974), architect, was born in Kingisepp, Saaremaa, Estonia, the son of Leopold Kahn, a paymaster in the Russian army, and Bertha Mendelsohn. The family emigrated to Philadelphia in 1906, where he attended public schools and took additional courses in art and music for gifted children. Kahn graduated in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania in 1924, where the head of the design studio and Kahn's senior-year critic was the French-born Paul Philippe Cret, who conducted architectural education at Pennsylvania according to the model of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Kahn served as chief of design for the exhibition buildings erected in Philadelphia for the Sesquicentennial Exposition of 1926. In 1928-1929 he undertook an extended European tour, returning on the eve of the depression. He married Esther Israeli in 1930; they had one daughter. After brief stints in the offices of Cret and the firm of Zantzinger, Borie, and Medary, Kahn found himself unemployed, as he was to remain for most of the 1930s. It was during this time that he became interested in the modern architecture that would soon be christened the International Style. Kahn was particularly concerned with the use of modern architecture as a tool for social change, and in collaboration with other young, unemployed architects he began to experiment with the design of public housing. He and his friends submitted several projects to the infant federal housing program, but none was funded. Kahn's developing stature as a housing expert did, however, lead to his employment in 1935-1937 by the Resettlement Administration as assistant principal architect (with Alfred Kastner) for Jersey Homesteads (now Roosevelt, N.J.). In 1939 two large Philadelphia projects of his design (in partial collaboration with Kenneth Day) were granted federal funding, but construction was blocked by local political opposition.

With the outbreak of World War II, Kahn's talents were at last fully employed. He spent most of 1941 and 1942 designing seven communities for wartime factory workers, five of which, totaling more than 2,200 units, were built. In this work Kahn was associated briefly with George Howe and, for a longer time, with Oskar Stonorov, who remained his partner until 1947. With work like Carver Court, near Coatesville, Pennsylvania (1941-1943), and the Lily Ponds Houses, Washington, D.C. (1942-1943), Kahn demonstrated his up-to-date awareness of the aesthetic and social issues of modern housing. But he felt increasingly confined by the functionalist and materialist themes of modernist ideology and he became disenchanted with centralized government control over architecture and city planning. Together with Stonorov, Kahn authored two pamphlets that called for a humane, client-oriented approach to postwar planning and architecture. Both Why City Planning Is Your Responsibility (1943) and You and Your Neighborhood: A Primer for Neighborhood Planning (1944) eschewed large-scale demolition of neighborhoods and exalted the concept of strong, local-level political activism. They attracted much attention during the last years of the war, as Americans began to contemplate the future.

Diminished government support for housing after the war meant that Kahn's larger scale ideas were deferred. He continued to serve his ideals in work for labor unions, for which he designed office buildings, summer camps, and clinics. But during the early postwar period, Kahn, like most architects of the time, found his principal employment in the booming suburbs. His house designs of the period, notably the Weiss House, East Norriton, Pennsylvania (1947-1950), and the Genel House, Wynnewood, Pennsylvania (1948-1951), combined rustic materials with the modernist jutting rooflines and clustered, "bi-nuclear" planning. They merit comparison with the contemporary work of Marcel Breuer and the most recent architecture graduates of Harvard, where the program had been overhauled by Breuer and Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus.

Kahn's reputation might have been pinned at this middling level if he had not been appointed to the architecture faculty at Yale in the fall of 1947. In his Yale classes, he began to grapple with the problem of designing monumental public buildings for postwar society. This was a preoccupation of many architects at this time and one about which Kahn, with his interest in public service, felt deeply. But Kahn's small-scale practice had not given him much chance to deal with public architecture. Yale not only afforded him the opportunity to explore the question of "monumentality," as he and others called it; in the commission for the Yale Art Gallery (1951-1953), the university also offered Kahn his first opportunity to build at a monumental scale.

In the design of the Yale Art Gallery, Kahn adopted the characteristic "open plan" of modernism, but rather than the chilly slices of universal space that were the norm for the day, he created galleries that were wrapped in powerful masonry and warmly textured by a rugged ceiling structure. The ceilings were contrived at once to resemble heroic space frames--although the building code required him to create this effect by disguising a more conventional system of tilted concrete beams--and to allude to the coffered ceilings of ancient architecture. R. Buckminster Fuller was the champion of such technological displays, and Kahn's associate Anne Tyng (with whom he had a daughter) had been experimenting along the same lines. Antiquity was newly alive in Kahn's imagination after his brief sojourn in the winter of 1950-1951 as resident architect at the American Academy in Rome, whence he had departed on a one-month tour of Greece and Egypt. The Yale Art Gallery's big-boned structure and historical allusion lifted it out of what was then mainstream modernist thinking, and provided one of the first clues about his idea of the course to be taken by postwar architecture. For a time, it seemed that Kahn's work could be subsumed within the broader movement called Brutalism, that muscular style of rough-textured concrete and exposed steel that flourished in the fifties and early sixties, but his individuality was soon made apparent.

The building that clearly separated Kahn from the other architects of the early 1950s was the diminutive Bath House (in fact, a swimming pool changing room) that he designed in 1955 for the Trenton Jewish Community Center in Ewing, New Jersey. Here he gathered four pyramid-roofed pavilions with perfect symmetry around a central courtyard. The four discrete spaces, each with its own supporting structure and distinct function (men's and women's shower rooms, a check room for clothing, and a sheltered stairway leading up to the pool), rejected the generalities of modernist open planning. Moreover, the fundamentally classical plan here abandoned relaxed, modernist asymmetries. Despite its tiny size, the Trenton Bath House seemed grave and serious.

In 1957 Kahn returned to his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, as a teacher, and also as the architect of the Richards Medical Research Building (1957-1965). In the Richards Building he revealed the fuller development of the thinking that lay behind the little Trenton design. Rather than universally useful spaces, Kahn created small laboratory studios, defined by his understanding that medical research was conducted by small teams, and stacked them in a group of brawnily structured towers that alluded to the picturesque hill towns of Italy. After it was too late, Kahn's clients realized that their research would have been better served by larger, easily rearrangeable laboratories, but contemporary architectural observers had no such reservations. For them, the Richards Building offered a stunning alternative to the slick steel and glass of the International style, especially as it had been commercialized in America. In 1961 the building was the subject of a one-building exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in which it was hailed as the most significant design of the postwar period. Progressive Architecture (Apr. 1961) identified Kahn as the central figure of a new "Philadelphia School," whose other members included Robert Venturi, Romaldo Giurgola, and Robert Geddes.

Kahn's growing fame was not based solely on his still rather small architectural output. He had also established himself as a provocative teacher, who drew students from around the world to his Master's Studio at the University of Pennsylvania, and he was the most compelling theorist of his time. Kahn's philosophy had matured throughout the fifties, and in November 1960 he presented his thinking with special eloquence and clarity in a broadcast lecture for the Voice of America. Published by VOA as the booklet Structure and Form (1961) and widely republished in subsequent years, the 1960 lecture explained architecture in Platonist terms that emphasized the difficulty and seriousness of the architect's task. Kahn's argument distinguished between an immanent, generalized "form," strongly shaped by the architect's definition of the clients' needs (such as Kahn had created for the Richards Building), and the real-world "design," developed by the architect after taking into account such constraints as site, budget, and building material. This idealist argument reinvigorated modern architecture by attaching it to the similarly principled architecture of the past--notably the classical tradition that had survived into Kahn's own lifetime through the energy of the École des Beaux-Arts. While his intention was thus to broaden and strengthen modernist thinking, his open acceptance of the architecture and architectural thinking of the past also helped to inspire the more negative critique of twentieth-century architecture that came to be called Post Modernism.

The work of Kahn's office expanded dramatically in the early 1960s. Following the Richards Building came another laboratory project for the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California (1959-1965), this one reconfigured as a horizontally oriented open plan and expanded to incorporate a small village of residences and a large meeting center. There was also Erdman Hall, a dormitory for Bryn Mawr College (1960-1965), and a synagogue for the Philadelphia congregation of Mikveh Israel (1961-1972, unbuilt). Kahn's international reputation brought him the two largest commissions of his career: an entire campus for the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad (1962-1974) and a new capitol complex for East Pakistan at Dacca (1962-1983), christened Sher-e-Bangla Nagar after the declaration of Bangladeshi independence. All of these designs dealt with the challenge of defining architectural environments for what he considered to be the two archetypal human activities: the individual activity of study, research, or contemplation, and the congregant activity of learning, worship, and government. Each building created memorable spaces within powerful shapes, harkening unmistakably to the masonry architecture of antiquity and the middle ages.

Distinctive of all these buildings was Kahn's emphasis on planning. For Beaux-Arts and modern theorists alike, the plan was the only acceptable starting point for principled architectural design. Whereas modernism had embraced the freedom of the open plan, Kahn now reverted in his mature work to the orderliness of the Beaux-Arts style. Not that the order of his planning was always overt. Indeed, after experimenting with rigid symmetry in the Trenton Bath House, Kahn turned increasingly to patterns of clustering and oblique alignment that were powerful on paper, where the architect worked out his platonic ideas, but often almost undetectable to the casual visitor. Two unbuilt designs that were presented to their clients in 1966--St. Andrew's Priory in Valyermo, California (1961-1967), and the Dominican Motherhouse of St. Catherine de Ricci in Media, Pennsylvania (1965-1969)--pushed this seeming informality into the semblance of collage.

The work of Kahn's last years assumed the mien of a quiet classicism. In contained, symmetrical buildings like Phillips Exeter Academy Library (1965-1972), the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (1966-1972), and the Yale Center for British Art (1969-1974), Kahn's architecture achieved a magical kind of equipoise between light and structure--the simplest and yet most demanding elements of architectural expression. The most celebrated of these designs was the Kimbell Museum, whose multiple, barrel-vaulted bays were split along their crowns to admit a slice of the Texas sun--an alchemical weaving together of structure and that absence of structure through which light enters. Landscape design played an increasingly large role in Kahn's later work, as in the courtyard of the Salk Institute and the grounds of the Kimbell Museum. In this he often collaborated with Harriet Pattison, the mother of his third child.

Kahn's enduring fame rests on his success in restoring a sense of serious, almost spiritual, purpose to modern architecture as it passed the midpoint of the twentieth century--in making it once more a difficult, idealist endeavor. By creating simplicity out of the often intractable material of the real world, and by attaching the philosophy of modernism to its historical antecedents, he enlarged the challenge and increased the means for a new generation of architects.

Kahn died of a heart attack in Pennsylvania Station in New York City while returning home after a visit to Ahmedabad, India.



Bibliography

Kahn's papers are the property of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, on deposit in the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania. The Louis I. Kahn Archive: Personal Drawings (7 vols., 1987) reproduces the autograph drawings from that collection. The most thorough biography is David B. Brownlee and David G. De Long, Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture (1991), which includes a complete list of works and a bibliography of Kahn's writings. The latter are anthologized in Alessandra Latour, ed., Louis I. Kahn: Writings, Lectures, Interviews (1991), and in Richard S. Wurman, ed., What Will Be Has Always Been: The Words of Louis I. Kahn (1986). Kahn's travel sketches and other nonarchitectural drawings and paintings are assembled in Jan Hochstim, The Paintings and Sketches of Louis I. Kahn (1991). Vincent Scully provides a prescient and compelling view of Kahn in Louis I. Kahn (1962). Similarly vivid are the several articles published by William Jordy. For them and the vast body of periodical literature, see Jack Perry Brown, Louis I. Kahn: A Bibliography (1987).

David B. Brownlee