You Say to Brick

by Wendy Lesser

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  A Note About the Author

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  For Ileene Smith

  I honor beginnings. Of all things, I honor beginnings. I believe that what was has always been, and what is has always been, and what will be has always been.

  —Louis Kahn

  PROLOGUE

  There was much to praise in his work, his colleagues felt, and they would not have hesitated to call him one of the greatest architects of the twentieth century. Just about everybody in the profession, across a broad range of architectural schools and styles, admired what he did. They thought of him as the artist among them. His output over the course of a lifetime was small, but his best buildings were uniquely his, and they were beautiful in a surprising new way.

  If he inspired any feelings of envy, they were rare and strangely muted. Perhaps that was because he was such a bad businessman, so hopeless at the financial side of the practice that no one worried about having to compete with him. Or perhaps it was his soft, disarming manner. Through some combination of his poverty-stricken childhood, his unsuccessful school days, and his generally unprepossessing appearance, he had acquired a personality that was completely unthreatening. Even among people who knew how good his work was, the character he radiated was affable, conciliatory, and a bit self-mocking.

  Louis Kahn was a warm, captivating man, beloved by students, colleagues, and friends, enduringly attractive to strangers and intimates alike. But he was also a secretive man hiding under a series of masks. There was the physical mask he wore permanently on his face, a layer of heavy scars produced by a childhood accident. Then there was the mask of conventionality he wore in his private life—the forty-four-year marriage to Esther Kahn, mother of his oldest daughter and partner in his Philadelphia social life—which covered over his intense romantic liaisons with two other women, Anne Tyng and Harriet Pattison, each of whom bore him a child outside of wedlock. There was also his name, which was not really his name at all, but a convenient invention devised by Kahn’s father and subsequently imposed on his whole family when they immigrated to America. The boy who had been born Leiser-Itze Schmulowsky in Estonia became Louis Isadore Kahn in America: not an escape from Jewish identity itself, but a purposeful elevation from the lowly Eastern European category to the more respectable and established ranks of German Jews. And even Jewishness, for Kahn, may have been another kind of mask, defining him in the eyes of WASP Philadelphia, not to mention the echt-Protestant architecture world, but less fully defining him to himself. If he received more commissions to build synagogues than churches or mosques, it is nonetheless the case that among his built masterpieces only a mosque (in Dhaka’s Parliament Building) and a church (First Unitarian in Rochester) emerged triumphant; the synagogues, for the most part, foundered in the design phase. “I’m too religious to be religious,” he once told a friend, after a major Philadelphia synagogue commission had disappointingly died on the drafting board following years of conflict with, and within, the congregation.

  Perhaps he also meant that his sole religion was architecture. This was what everyone who knew him sensed about him. His wife, his lovers, and his three children—Sue Ann, Alexandra, and Nathaniel—came to understand sooner or later that his work was his one great love. His fellow architects often voiced their respect for his tremendous integrity, repeatedly noting (perhaps with a combination of schadenfreude and chagrin) the way he emphasized the artistic side of the profession over the business side. Even his clients, who sometimes wanted to tear their hair out at his refusal to let a project out of his hands, perceived that his constant revisions resulted from a deep-seated perfectionism, not just orneriness or bad judgment.

  His father had wanted him to be a painter, and his mother had wanted him to be a musician. They saw these talents in him as a child, and these remained important aspects of himself that he was to cultivate all his life. But even his parents recognized that once he had discovered architecture, there was no turning back. It became his life. It would not be quite accurate to say it was a life he never regretted, for even to contemplate regret implies the awareness of a path not taken, and for Louis Kahn there was no other path. He had always been meant to be an architect, or so he believed, and such convictions were at the core of his way of thinking. “You say to brick, ‘What do you want, brick?’” Kahn remarked in one of his famously gnomic talks. “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.’” For Kahn, there was no going against the inherent nature of the materials—and that included himself.

  This is not to say that Louis Kahn was the kind of egotistical, overbearing, power-mad architect routinely handed to us by fiction and drama, in characters like Ibsen’s manipulative Halvard Solness or Ayn Rand’s appalling Howard Roark. The authors of such imaginary architects may nervously disown them, as Ibsen tries to do, or jealously adore them, in Rand’s heavy-handed mode, but either way this character is always a galvanizing central figure who wields tremendous force in his own realm. He doesn’t just control the physical environment other people inhabit. He also seems to control the people themselves. Women are violently attracted to him, and he exploits this to the full. He is the master of all fates, his own and others’, and whether things turn out well or badly for him, he is viewed by both his author and himself as the prime mover in his life.

  That caricature does not describe Louis Kahn. (Perhaps it does not describe anybody, including Baron Haussmann and Albert Speer: reality, even at its most grotesque, rarely lives up to the overheated imaginings of writers.) If Kahn was an egotist, it was of a very different sort. He was a generous egotist, who wanted others to get as much pleasure out of life and work as he did. He was a communally minded egotist, who depended heavily on his collaborators and made them feel the value of their contribution, whether it was a single visual element or the knowledge of a specific building material. He was an egotist who supported and inspired the careers of his students. He was the kind of egotist who saw and acknowledged the corresponding ego in every other living thing, and even in some things—like brick—that were not living. Perhaps, in the normal sense of the word, he was not an egotist at all, except in the way children are. But he certainly knew his own worth, he trusted his own instincts, and he was, in his own way, ruthless. It was these qualities that allowed him, in the face of the enormous opposition that life puts up against new ideas, to produce his architectural wonders.

  An architect is a strange kind of artist. Compared to a painter or a writer, he stands at a rather distant remove from his finished work. The course of his artistic project, the shape of its ultimate outcome, even whether there will be an ultimate outcome are all subject to factors far beyond his control. Money is one of these factors; so are client tastes. Local climate conditions, building regulations, and availability of materials will also come into play. Even history
—political or religious or cultural developments about which the architect has no say and possibly even no knowledge—can interfere with his project, and the larger the project, the more likely this is to happen.

  Serendipity plays a role in all art, but in architecture it plays an even greater role than usual. Like a filmmaker or an opera director, the architect must depend on many other people to execute his work. These people not only need to know what they are doing; they must also have some affinity with, or at least understanding of, the architect’s own private vision. When you contemplate all the things that can go wrong and need to go right for a building to end up as its designer imagined it, it is remarkable that any of them succeed.

  With many architects—and Louis Kahn was certainly among them—the interplay between these constantly arising difficulties and the architect’s own fertility of imagination is an essential part of the process. Kahn was not an isolated genius who came up with perfect ideas and then supervised their exact construction. He was a collaborator of extraordinary abilities. He knew how to inspire people to do their best work, and how to infect his associates with his own enthusiasms. Whether contemplating his own ideas or those of others, he was always relentlessly picking and choosing, tinkering and rejecting, until he finally got what he wanted. Faced with the demands of clients—which were often economic demands for a reduction in scale or at least cost—he would repeatedly go back to the drawing board to find a new approach. He was not a prima donna; in this respect, at any rate, he was a practical builder. At the same time, he was not a pushover, and he could not be forced, especially later in his career, to sign off on a project he wasn’t satisfied with.

  Yet that desire to have his way, that personal sense of involvement, did not result in anything as specific as a definite architectural style. When you see a building by Robert Venturi or Frank Gehry, even if it’s one you’ve never seen before, you are likely to recognize it as a Venturi or a Gehry because of its trademark stylistic qualities: its postmodern symmetry and fanciful façade, say, or its billowing skin of titanium. Louis Kahn’s great buildings, by contrast, often look quite different from each other, and when viewed from the outside, some of them may not even look particularly distinctive. You cannot necessarily recognize a Kahn project by the way it looks. What you can recognize is the feeling it gives you to be inside it, to wander around it. That feeling—a combination of exhilaration and repose, a sense of being intimately contained and at the same time offered access to grand, expansive possibilities—may well be what defines a Kahn work, for us and for him. It doesn’t happen every time: he had some failures, just as every artist does. But it happens often enough to make a difference.

  * * *

  What kind of difference does architecture make in our lives? This is not a rhetorical question, and it is not just a matter of beauty (though beauty, considered in its widest sense, is bound to play a role). Rome is without a doubt more beautiful than Rochester or Dhaka, but for most of us Rome is not an option. Architecture needs to come to us—and unlike most other art forms, architecture comes to us whether we want it to or not. You have to go to a museum to look at paintings, attend a concert to hear live music, pick up a novel if you intend to read it. These art forms are, in that respect, relatively passive. Architecture, on the other hand, is aggressive: it surrounds us all the time, not just in our homes and offices but in public places. It is ever-present and often forgettable, but even when we aren’t particularly focused on it, it can make us feel better or worse, depending on its quality.

  Consider, for example, two pieces of public architecture that Louis Kahn did not design but that he used frequently. Both are train stations: 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, built in the early 1930s, and Penn Station in New York, constructed in the late 1960s. Between them, they pretty much define the full spectrum of architectural quality, from best to worst.

  If you approach 30th Street Station from the east by driving along Philadelphia’s JFK Boulevard, it presents itself from quite a distance as a visible destination. Standing on its own by the bank of the Schuylkill River, this huge symmetrical structure rises eight stories high at its center, with lower matching wings on either side. As your car or taxi pulls up to the station, you step out under a grand portico which, with its tall columns and massive roof, reflects the whole width and height of the main central structure. You are in no doubt that you have arrived somewhere.

  Even if you come by subway and approach from the other direction, entering the building sideways through one of its lower wings, you will soon find yourself in the enormous main concourse that occupies the central structure. This room (and it does come across as a single room, despite its vast size) measures nearly three hundred feet lengthwise and about half that in width, with an intricately painted coffered ceiling hanging ninety feet above your head. Natural light floods in from all four sides—so much light that in the daytime the thirty-two tall windows surrounding the main concourse have to be veiled with gauzy curtains. These multistory, multipaned windows, which extend from below mid-wall up to the rim of the high ceiling, are evenly distributed around the pleasingly proportioned rectangle of the room, so that five occupy each of the narrower ends and eleven line the longer sides. Even if you don’t consciously count the windows on each wall, there is something intuitively reassuring in the combination of their odd numbers and the regular, even spacing between them—a kind of grand symmetry that allows you to locate yourself within the space, physically, visually, and psychologically. From any point in this immense room, you can have a sense of exactly where you are.

  The emptiness above your head is by no means wasted space. Though it cannot be used commercially—perhaps because it cannot be used commercially—that seven-story gap of pure light and air feels like a crown on your head, a symbol of your own worth as a valued traveler passing through. Far from diminishing you or making you feel antlike, the grandeur elevates you to its own level. (It’s a phenomenon Kahn himself remarked on in a different context, when he said of the ancient Baths of Caracalla: “We know that we can bathe just as well under an 8-foot ceiling as we can under a 150-foot ceiling, but I believe there’s something about a 150-foot ceiling that makes a man a different kind of man.”) And though there is a faint echoing effect produced by all that empty space, this does not in any way interfere with the audibility of the murmured conversations taking place on the comfortable wooden benches grouped intermittently around the edges of the 30th Street concourse. If you eavesdrop on these passengers, you will hear a surprising number of them commenting on what a nice train station it is. People notice such things.

  Even at night, when this grand room needs to be lit artificially, a sense of light and warmth remains. Ten large and beautifully designed Art Deco chandeliers hang from the coffered ceiling, five to each side of the long rectangle, well set in from the walls. They descend low enough to cast a clear light but remain high enough to leave plenty of space between their bottommost metal-banded rim and the unobtrusive information booth, complete with destination boards, that occupies the center of the room. The chandeliers cast a warm light that picks up the golden tone of the stone walls, the rosy gray of the marble floors, the polished glow of the old wooden benches, and the gilded ornamentation on the tall Corinthian columns that separate the end windows from each other. Nothing can quite match the glory of the room’s daylight appearance, but even after dark, 30th Street Station is a comfortable, pleasant place to sit and wait. And though you do have to migrate downstairs when the time comes to catch your train, you have been so generously accommodated in this elegantly humane waiting room that you don’t really mind the brief descent.

  If you are taking the train from Philadelphia to New York, you emerge ninety minutes later into something like a living hell. At first you hurry along narrow platforms between grimy trains, anxious to get out of this subterranean region that feels even deeper and darker than the one you left behind in Philadelphia. But then, after you climb the crowded s
teps from the track level to the so-called main concourse of Penn Station, you discover that you are still underground. No natural light has ever entered this relentlessly oppressive space, and the artificial lighting, which emerges from various indistinct sources, is cold and harsh without being bright.

  The main room of the station is long and narrow, but it seems to have no particular size or even shape because its edges are for the most part indecipherable. The floor beneath your feet is made up of large gray and beige squares that look as if they were designed for the sole purpose of bearing heavy traffic. The ceiling feels so low that it seems to press down on your head. What makes the space feel even more cramped is the gigantic destination board that hangs down from the ceiling midway along the concourse, taking up over half the vertical space and about three-quarters of the room’s width. There is no seating in this entire concourse (a couple of spartanly furnished waiting rooms, divided by class and set aside for ticket holders only, are cloistered off to the side), so the people who are waiting for their train’s announcement stand like clustered zombies in front of the giant notice board. As you weave your way through these unhappy shades, you thank your stars that your journey is almost over, even if that means you must now choose between the dingy subway and the frantic mess that is Eighth Avenue.

  The experience of present-day Penn Station is made worse by the knowledge that something marvelous once stood in its place. Even for those who never saw the grandly classical Pennsylvania Station that existed before 1963—and most of the many millions who now use this station did not—something of its memory still clings to the place, like a long-lost childhood dream underlying a painful adult reality. If you search online for images of Penn Station in New York, fully half the pictures that come up will be photos of that triumphantly arched stone, glass, and steel interior. It makes you wonder about your fellow humans, the ones who allowed that beautiful building to be torn down and this monstrosity put up instead. It also makes you understand, in a distressingly visceral way, why architecture might matter to us.