An
earlier blog entry of mine, “Genealogy of
Influence,” promised a series of posts about the architects and
theorists who influenced my architectural world view. This is the latest post
in the series.
As I write this it is Super Bowl
Sunday. The event’s venue, SoFi Stadium,
is the most expensive stadium ever built(1),
an enormous and lavish monument to excess, with flash and dazzle to spare. Much
closer to home, today’s edition of The Register-Guard revealed a proposal to redevelop the former Taylor’s Bar
and Grille into a 13-story, mixed-use high-rise. On the heels of recently
announced plans by the Duck Store to raze and rebuild the properties it owns along East 13th Avenue and Kincaid Street,
as well as the Glenwood Restaurant’s similar fate, it’s clear the entire district immediately west
of the University of Oregon campus is poised to be dramatically transformed.
What the world’s most
expensive stadium and the local developments have in common is they are
byproducts of cultural economics and value systems unrestrained by notions of
timeless permanence. Too often, the default assumption is the latest, the
biggest, the most fashionable, or the most profitable is always better. The implications
for architecture and placemaking of such thinking are clear, yet many of us remain
distracted by the shiny object. We too often live for an ephemeral present, devaluing
stability and meaningfulness over time.
This is my roundabout way of arriving
at the iconic subject of this post: Louis Isadore Kahn, widely known as
one of the most important American architects of the twentieth century. Kahn is
especially notable for his interest in creating architecture that transcended
the circumstances of any given moment. His most famous and influential
buildings—among them the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, the National Assembly Hall of Bangladesh, and the Kimbell
Art Museum—share a depth and solidity that presented a monumental and hierarchically
ordered alternative to the lightweight designs and “universal space” favored by
his early contemporaries (Le Corbusier and his proto-Brutalism notwithstanding).
Louis Kahn
Kahn was born in 1901 on Osel,
an island off the coast of Estonia. His parents moved the family to the United
States when he was four, settling in Philadelphia. Apart from his architectural
career, Kahn was a deeply flawed human being—in the words of one critic, the
great architect was “disheveled, insensitive, narcissistic, work-obsessed”—a
man who led a mysteriously complex and contradictory life. He fathered two
children out of wedlock with two mistresses. One of his offspring—filmmaker Nathaniel
Kahn—produced the award-winning nonfiction movie My Architect, which
chronicled the son’s efforts to better understand his father and his father’s work.
Louis Kahn would tragically die in 1974 of a heart attack on the floor of the
men’s restroom in New York’s Penn Station.
Kahn received a Beaux-Arts training
at the University of Pennsylvania, where one of his teachers was Paul Philippe Cret.
Cret instilled in his students a reverence for Beaux-Arts principles. At the
time, the trajectory of European modernism was establishing its ascendency over
historical approaches to the design and organization of buildings. Indeed, upon
establishing his own office in 1936, the work of his European contemporaries
heavily influenced Kahn’s approach to architecture. Nevertheless, Cret’s teachings
would lastingly guide Kahn throughout his career.
Slowed by the Great Depression
and the Second World War, Kahn’s professional work would not take off until he
was into his fifties. It was during his time in Rome as an American Academy
fellow (1950-51) that he developed his unique philosophy of architecture,
inspired by the monumentality of the ancient ruins he studied. The first
building he completed following his return to the U.S.—the Yale University Art Gallery—revealed his emergent ideas about space, light, and geometric
clarity. His subsequent design of the Trenton Bath House proved to be pivotal and highly influential. Kahn himself considered the project “a
generative force,” the DNA of which would be recognizable in every building he would design
thereafter.(2)
In addition to his
professional achievements, Kahn was a renowned teacher. He joined the Yale
University School of Architecture in 1947, later teaching at MIT, and finally
at the University of Pennsylvania from 1957 until his death. He also served as
a visiting lecturer at Princeton University. Among the students who would learn
from him were the post-modern architects Charles Moore, Robert Venturi, and Hugh Hardy. A significant number of faculty at the University
of Oregon during my time in architecture school there were likewise students
under Kahn or worked in his office, including Bob Harris, Bill Gilland, Thom
Hacker, Richard Garfield, Gary Moye, and Bill Kleinsasser. I strongly felt Kahn’s presence, albeit second-handedly.
Kahn’s lyric pronouncements (which
occasionally sound Yoda-like to my ears) garnered him a reputation as a mystic
or a guru. “I wanted to illustrate Silence and Light,” Kahn said. “Silence I
felt—this way about.” He legendarily described one’s conversation with a brick
in seeking to understand the nature of its materiality:
You say to
brick, “What do you want brick?” Brick says to you, “I like an arch.” If you say
to brick, “Arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete lintel over an
opening. What do you think of that brick?” Brick says, “I like an arch.”
To this day, Louis Kahn’s philosophy
and work profoundly influence my thoughts about architecture and my own approach
to design.
The clarity of his seminal concept
distinguishing “served” spaces (those spaces actively used) and “servant”
spaces (those that serve the utilized) as first expressed most clearly in the
Trenton Bath House project appealed to me. Likewise, Kahn’s belief in the power
of rooms, that he regarded the room as the “beginning of architecture,” that a
plan comprises a “society of rooms,” resonates. A hierarchy of spaces does not
render a design less egalitarian as it might have years ago when overlords literally
relegated servants to servant spaces. Universal space of the kind promoted by the
European modernists—that in which each point is equal to and undifferentiated
from any other—released architecture from the stricture of old-fashioned walls,
symbolically breaking down social barriers; however, Kahn averred that each of
us internalizes the rooms we inhabit. Rooms become realms of the intellect,
places for learning, commemoration, and appreciation, liberating as opposed to
constraining.
In his excellent book, Between Silence and Light – Spirit in the Architecture of Louis Kahn (which I
purchased upon its initial publication in 1979) author John Lobell expounded
on the great architect’s search for a deeper order and the human relationship to
it, which Kahn defined as the meeting of the measurable and the unmeasurable. According
to Lobell, Kahn regarded architecture as a manifestation of the order of our
experience, a model of our consciousness, the fitting of ourselves between the
earth and the sky, the patterns in which we relate one to another, and the
physical presence of our institutions. Kahn recognized the importance of
acknowledging our innate need to give order to our world and our relationship
with it.
Kahn believed a great building
tells those who first use it the meaning of their age, and to those of the
future, it tells stories of its past. He designed his buildings to stand
outside of time, while not ignoring the immediate uses called for by his
clients. He designed them recognizing uses change over the years, but that what
makes us human does not. What Kahn sought was to connect people with the deep
parts of order, nature, and being human, and their implications for
architecture.
People too often fail to
prioritize timelessness, the eternal, and permanence. For Louis Kahn, these were
among the most essential qualities of meaningful, memorable, and lasting buildings
and places. Change over time is inevitable, but given the chance, the best architecture
transcends that change.
(1)
SoFi Stadium cost more than a mind-boggling
$5 billion to build.
(2) Unfortunately,
I have yet to visit one of Kahn’s projects in person. My best opportunity to
date came during my 2018 visit to New York, but alas I did not find the time to
visit the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, Kahn’s last completed design.
