by Wendy Lesser
* * *
Lou graduated from Central High School on June 25, 1920, and in September of that year he started classes at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Fine Arts. One of his fellow students there was his childhood friend Norman Rice, who had also taken William Gray’s course at Central and felt similarly inspired to pursue architecture as a career. According to Rice, he and Lou “worked very hard for four years, often night and day, and gained the habit of working night and day that still persists.” (Lou always worked, he interjected, “as if there were seventy-two hours in each day.”) “In the senior year,” he continued, “we attained our heart’s desire, to study in the atelier of Paul Philippe Cret, the bright star of the faculty, a great architect and teacher.” In fact the Cret course—called Architecture 6, Advanced Design—spanned three full semesters, with a fourth term devoted to competition for the Paris Prize, so it was actually the beginning of their junior year, in the fall of 1922, when they first started studying with this influential master teacher.
Cret, who was born and raised in France, was a product of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and what he brought to Penn was an essentially classical Beaux-Arts vision as put forth by his own teacher, the rationalist Julien Guadet. In Cret’s case this was modified not only by his encounter with the conflicting American traditions of neoclassicism and utopian modernism, but also by his own strenuously evolutionary beliefs. A disciple of Herbert Spencer and Hippolyte Taine, Cret believed that architecture should respond to its time and place. Twentieth-century American architects ought not to reach backward to a fake primitivism or a falsely embellished classicism, he felt, but nor could they leap forward with any kind of subjective, revolutionary, individually imposed ideal. Cret’s version of classicism, often described as “modernized classicism” or “stripped classicism,” involved a gradual, evolutionary response to the surrounding conditions, whether of techniques and materials or of society itself. “Modern architecture can then no longer aspire to the simplicity of the Antique or the Medieval,” he wrote. “A modern plan provides a multitude of rooms for various uses distributed generally over several floors, and the external and internal appearance of the building faithfully renders this complexity by the number of openings, of stories, of reduplications of apartments on each floor, etc.” One can hear in these sentences the seeds of Kahn’s eventual definition of architecture as “the thoughtful making of spaces,” and one can also sense at least one source of his belief that architecture should be true.
This advocacy of architectural truth—which included faithfulness to the site’s demands as well as the client’s needs, an emphasis on clarity of expression without any excess ornamentation, and a merging of utility with beauty—was at the heart of the program that Cret’s teacher Guadet had elaborated in his Éléments et théorie de l’architecture. Guadet’s underlying theory, as transmitted by Cret, also included a preference for axial relationships, symmetry, and proportional or balanced asymmetry—standard elements in classicism throughout the ages, as well as noticeable qualities in Louis Kahn’s mature designs. Yet if Kahn responded to such teaching, it was not necessarily because he fell under the sway of the theories. As always, his access to learning was through the hand and the eye. What he remembered of the chief architecture textbook at Penn, Choisy’s 1899 Histoire de l’architecture, was not so much the text itself as the 1,700 drawings of various historical buildings conveyed in both plan and section—that is, as cutaways seen both from above and from the side. And what he remembered from his own architectural training was the reliance on drawing itself.
“For beginning design problems Beaux-Arts training typically presented the student with a written program without comment from the instructor,” Kahn told a historian many decades later. The student would then go off into a cubicle on his own for several hours, “during which he would make a quick sketch of his solution without consultation.” This was the esquisse, or first idea, which then formed the basis for the entire elaboration of the design. “Once the sketch was made,” Kahn explained, “we had to adhere to it during the time of study. So the sketch depended on our intuitive powers.” That is to say, the student, closeted alone in his cubicle, had to forgo a reliance on known architectural precedents and come up instead with his own ideas about the nature of a library, or a legislative chamber, or whatever the assignment was. “You start as though a library had never been built,” Kahn pointed out. “So I think the esquisse was valuable in giving a sense of what, out-of-the-blue, a library should be, as though we had never seen a library.”
In pursuing this method, Kahn was helped a great deal by the excellence of his own drawing skills. He had been excused early on from the architecture school’s four required semesters of freehand drawing, and he continued throughout his four years at Penn to do extremely well in watercolor, life drawing, and rendering; he was also notably good at art history. In his final semester he competed for the Paris Prize, as all Cret’s students did, and finished in sixth place. Upon graduation in June of 1924 with a Bachelor in Architecture degree, he was awarded the Bronze Medal of the Arthur Spayd Brooke Memorial Prize, for “superior excellence.” His days of academic underachievement were apparently over.
All through his college years Lou had lived with his family while commuting to Penn, and graduation brought no change in his address. There had been one change a year earlier: in the spring of 1923, toward the end of Lou’s junior year, the Kahns had moved from a rental apartment to their own home at 2318 North 20th Street. (This was actually the second piece of property Leopold and Bertha had managed to purchase in Philadelphia; their earlier house, at 2019 North Franklin, had been bought in late 1919 but was sold only nine months later, when the city took over the land by eminent domain.) The house on North 20th Street was to remain in the family’s hands for at least eight years, and it was listed as Lou’s official address until he finally moved out in his very late twenties.
In 1925, Oscar Kahn, who had turned into something of a charmer, got married to Rosella, a lively, pretty girl from the neighborhood. Naturally Lou attended his younger brother’s wedding, where he probably flirted with the bride, as was his habit whenever he, Oscar, and Rosella went out to the movies together. Whatever the specifics were, the Kahn boys’ wedding-day behavior succeeded in bringing down their father’s wrath, for Leopold reportedly slapped both his sons across the face on this very public occasion. Family gossip did not chronicle the precise nature of Lou and Oscar’s offense (probably raunchy talk about sex or women, the relatives guessed), but what everyone remembered was that the patriarchal disciplinarian still felt entitled to hit his grown sons at the ages of twenty-four and twenty-one.
By this time Lou was certainly a grown-up in all outward respects. He had been given a position, right out of Penn, at the office of John Molitor, the City Architect of Philadelphia. Though hardly lucrative (it was technically considered part of his three-year apprenticeship in the architectural profession), the job gave Kahn a great deal of experience and, ultimately, responsibility. After one year as a lowly draftsman, he was appointed chief of design for the forthcoming Sesquicentennial International Exposition, to be held in Philadelphia in 1926 on the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Lou used the opportunity to hire on a number of his Penn classmates. “He quickly recruited his young architect friends and we became the team,” Norman Rice recalled. “Burning with our enthusiasms and with the ideals planted by our recent teachers, full of brash courage founded on naiveté, we did the Exposition and its many buildings within one year’s time. For that era, some of the buildings were very creditable. It was an exhilarating and encouraging experience for all of us, and especially for Lou.” The built structures were not, in fact, especially noteworthy, and they were all temporary. But the process did teach Kahn a great deal about industrial construction using lightweight steel and solid plaster infills—not methods or materials he would favor in his own later designs, but
useful experience nonetheless.
This public display of his talents led, in turn, to a real, postapprenticeship job in the office of the Philadelphia architect William H. Lee, which Kahn took up in April of 1927. Lee, who at that time was designing buildings for Temple University, was best known for his sometimes outlandish cinemas, which ran the full Roaring Twenties gamut from Art Deco to Aztec style. Put to work on these high-paying projects while still living at home, Lou found he was able to save money out of his salary for a planned Grand Tour of Europe—the recommended cap to a Beaux-Arts architectural education, though one that rarely fell to young men of Kahn’s social class.
And then, in June of 1927, Lou met a girl of his own. He had been brought by a friend of his to a graduation party given by some members of Philadelphia’s “Russian intelligentsia.” One of the honored guests was Esther Israeli, a twenty-one-year-old chemistry major who was about to graduate from Penn. Decades later, she was still able to recall specific details of the party—that the lights were turned down for the telling of ghost stories, for example, and that “when the lights went back on, there was someone playing the piano, and it was Lou.” Esther didn’t really meet him until the party was over, though. “Being an impatient person,” she said, “I didn’t want to wait for the elevator but ran down the stairs with my escort. Lou was waiting at the bottom, saw us coming down, and he told me later he wished he was running downstairs with that girl.” Esther’s escort, it turned out, knew Lou and lived near him, so he offered him a ride home in their car. Lou sat in the back seat, Esther and the other man in the front, and because it was a hot summer night, they decided to drive around for a while instead of going straight home.
“While we were driving Lou started to talk about a book he had just bought. It was a book about Rodin and he was absolutely fascinating though I didn’t know anything about Rodin. He was just a spellbinder,” Esther said of Lou. When they arrived at her house, the escort—who was not a boyfriend, simply a volunteer for this occasion—suggested to Lou that he should walk her up to the door, since she was evidently so taken by him. At the door Lou got up the courage to ask her for a date, but she told him she was still studying for her finals and couldn’t go out. As a graduation present, he sent her a copy of the Rodin book.
Then Lou asked her out again, and this time she said yes, though her father, a Yale-educated lawyer, insisted on meeting the young man first. Family vetting dispensed with, the two of them spent their evening at the theater. On the way home they passed the window of a prominent flower shop, where Esther commented on how beautiful the dahlias were. “The next Friday, when I came home, my mother said that Lou must be crazy,” Esther recalled, “since she never saw so many flowers in her life. Lou had never bought a girl flowers before, and he didn’t know what I meant when I said that ‘those dahlias’ were beautiful, so he sent everything that was in the window.”
“After that we saw each other all the time,” said Esther, who felt they had probably fallen in love the minute they met. Her well-heeled parents must have thought it strange that their lovely, intelligent daughter, with her dramatic dark hair and her flashing eyes, should have fallen in love with this scarred, awkward fellow from the poorer side of Philadelphia. But they didn’t try to interfere, and after nine months or so, fate appeared to relieve them of their problem. Lou announced to Esther that he had bought the ticket for his long-planned trip to Europe and “not even you are going to keep me back.”
His ship, the S.S. Île de France, left the port of New York on April 26, 1928, bound for Plymouth, England. Lou was carrying a passport issued to him three weeks earlier in Washington, D.C. In this, his first American passport, he was described as being five foot seven, with brown hair, blue eyes, and the distinguishing marks of “scars on face.” His occupation was given as “Architect,” a self-description that would remain fixed for the rest of his life—unlike his birthplace, which would shift from Latvia (its listing here) to Estonia, as the new world order decided how to allocate the pieces of the former Livonia. In the photograph that was affixed to the passport, the unsmiling Lou, looking a bit fierce, sported a jaunty handkerchief in his suit pocket and appeared to defy anyone who might question his role as the elegant young gentleman abroad.
Kahn arrived in England on May 3 and spent a full month there, acquiring postcards from the British Museum, St. Paul’s, and other London locations, sketching the castles at Windsor and Warwick, drawing Oxford colleges and Stratford-on-Avon manor houses, and visiting a series of architectural monuments that included the Canterbury and Coventry cathedrals. Along the way he also managed, at the age of twenty-seven, to lose his virginity to a woman who owned one of the hotels he stayed in. “She made the advances,” he told a psychologist some three decades later. “I felt incompetent.”
On June 3 Lou left England and went, by way of Belgium, to the Netherlands, where his primary aim was to connect with the modernist architects he had begun to hear about in America. These included Hendrik Berlage, Piet Kramer, and particularly J. F. Staal, who spent a generous amount of time with the young American and then introduced him by letter to Willem Dudok, the City Architect of Hilversum. In an unsent postcard addressed to a Philadelphia friend named Rose, Lou wrote: “A very interesting and probably the most beneficial place visited was Amsterdam. There I met with the kind of architecture I was looking for and had an opportunity to interview the most famous architects of Holland. They invited me to their studios and drove me thru neighboring towns and Amsterdam to show me their work and explained to me their objectives in the past and future. Thru one of them I am getting a list of the most important publications on modern architecture. Very helpful.” For his parents he bought a postcard with a picture of a windmill, and scribbled on the back: “Dear Mom & Pop, As you see Holland is very picturesque. I have seen a great deal here especially the modern work. Will write letter in few days. Love, Lou.” This too remained unsent, as did many of the other cards he composed during the trip.
Toward the end of June, Kahn traveled by rail to Germany and spent a few days in the northern part of the country. On June 29 he embarked by boat from Hamburg to Scandinavia, stopping first in Denmark and then visiting Sweden and Finland. In Stockholm Lou met with the architect Ragnar Ostberg, designer of the new City Hall; in Helsinki he saw Eliel Saarinen’s train station and Lars Sonck’s Eira Hospital. At very much the last minute, on July 17, he obtained a visa to Estonia, then sailed from Helsinki to Tallinn on the 18th.
From the records of his transit, it would appear that Kahn only spent a single day in the country he would later claim as his birthplace. Upon arriving in Tallinn, he immediately boarded a train headed toward Riga, crossing the Estonian-Latvian border on July 19 and registering at a Riga hotel that same night. He was to remain in Latvia for almost a full month, until he crossed through Lithuania back to Germany on August 17. The lure of Riga was not architecture, though. It was family.
When Lou’s mother left the Baltic island of Ösel in 1906, she left behind her father, her mother, and her six younger siblings, five of them born on the island. The family had been living in Arensburg, the only city on Ösel, since about 1880, though they had made frequent trips by ferry back to Riga (where Bertha herself, for example, was married in 1900). But when the First World War and then the Russian Revolution disrupted the island’s connection with the mainland, they retreated back to their Latvian roots. Lou’s grandfather, Mendel Mendelowitsch, died in Riga in 1916. Though his widow, Rocha-Lea, could have returned to Arensburg when the war was over, the family property on the island had been confiscated by then, and besides, five of her seven grown children now lived in Riga. Her Latvian passports, dated 1922 and 1927, were both issued at Riga, and she was to die in Riga in 1934; there was no evidence in any Arensburg records that she had ever lived there after the war. But in Lou’s memories, at least as he recounted them in later life, she had stayed on alone in Arensburg.
“I went to visit my grandmother in 1928,” Kah
n told an interviewer when he was in his seventies. “She had a one-room house near the place where they kept fish. There was a sterno stove in one corner and two sacks of dried fish, a chair, a table and a bed. I slept on the floor, she slept on the bed. I lived there for months, and I used to see the fishermen bring in the catch. A frugal existence. She had nothing except what her children gave her. It was a time when the Russians had taken everything away.”
The island was important to Lou because all his early childhood memories stemmed from there, and when he told this story, perhaps even he himself believed that this 1928 visit took place on Ösel. But that seems doubtful for a number of reasons. Ösel had by that time become part of Estonia, and Lou’s passport records had him in Latvia during the whole of the month that he spent with his relatives. His name does not appear on the passenger lists for either of the steamships that occasionally brought tourists from Riga to Ösel that summer, and it’s not clear how he could have made a quick, invisible trip in some other way. But even assuming he did manage to get to Ösel somehow, why is this fragment of a memory the only passage that survives from “months” spent there? Why is there no mention in any letters or notes, for instance, of a visit during his adulthood to the Arensburg castle, which was later to loom so powerfully behind his mature architecture? It seems more likely that this is a childhood memory brought forward in time to the period of his grown-up travels.
On the other hand, the visit to his grandmother could have taken place in Riga. The tiny house she and her husband had occupied when they lived in the Latvian capital—at 108 Maskavas Street, in the Jewish ghetto—was in a part of town very close to the harbor, so it could well have been the one-room hovel Lou described “near the place where they kept fish.” Or perhaps he never saw his grandmother at all on this trip, and the poverty-stricken existence he envisioned in Arensburg somehow grew out of the accounts provided by his aunts and uncles.