by Wendy Lesser
During your quest for Idealism’s realization you too placed in the background the very things I talk about—you too have put aside—shall I say—the cloak of relationship or kinship to gain the greener pastures of other’s favor. It’s likely that you have been so enthused with your steady rise that the change wasn’t hard to take—and in time you could almost throw off the yoke of it at will. It’s very funny—now that I mention it—doesn’t it strike as strange? If you were to try and put that inner reaction into words you would find—an unbearable smallness—one that is so minute that simplifying an explanation to anyone else in words would be folly. Just can’t be done—anymore than you can say in words what Love is—or hate or describe pain—it’s yours when you feel it—and mine when I do—to have and to hold—
Frankly this wasn’t what I intended writing about. All I wanted to express was a wonderment toward your apparent disappearance. I could very easily express in poetic phrases the way I feel—but you might get the impression that this is all forethought, or an intentional plot to yank you back into the past. I don’t relive the past with any genuine delight—other than the moments I can remember (or I should say, those that were important enough to warrant remembrance).
Look what years have done. I your younger brother am 40—Rosella 39—Alan 18—Rhoda 12. I charge the fact that the list isn’t longer to Lady Luck (and the fact that she was a lady). These are my accomplishments. What I do to make my way has always been 2nd in importance—only because I realize that you don’t have to divorce yourself from yourself to gain an objective. One must have the extream delight of Love—the immeasurable warmth of parential closeness—the certain quality kinship he must possess this in fact, before he can get the full pleasure of success. (I don’t mean measure) I can’t see how your home and wonderful family can benefit from your love and devotion to them without the former values.
Watch Sue Ann, Lou, watch how you feel when she grows, grows and grows, ever taller and more beautiful, more girlish, then suddenly you have a young lady. Then you will know what I mean regarding achievement.
Certainly you will build the first Breathing wall, you’ll watch buildings erected under your supervision, or your plans materialize—but things don’t stop long enough for you to fully enjoy them. Even skyscrapers have a height limitation. Just as our careers do—but you’ll find that while all this is going on, your family is going on too. You’ll find too how much more the achievements reflected in the timely growth of Sue Ann will mean to you—later—when material things show their true value—You’ll suddenly reach out for even a splinter of the Family Tree—I hope I make sense.
Much Love,
Oscar
Addressed to Lou, quite unusually, at his work address in the Bulletin Building, the letter was mailed from California on April 9, 1945, and thus would have arrived in Philadelphia soon after the April 12 death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Nationally, locally, and within the Kahn household, this presidential death caused an intense degree of mourning: even Sue Ann, who was only five at the time, noticed how upset her parents were. So it’s possible that Lou did not give the letter his full attention when it came. It’s equally possible that, coming as it did when he was already softened by the national tragedy, it brought him even greater emotional pain than it would have otherwise. He left no record of his response to the document; he never, to anyone’s knowledge, answered it. But he clearly felt the letter was important, because he kept it by him for the rest of his life.
One reason he may not have answered it—and one reason, too, for its special importance to him—was that within nine months of writing it, Oscar was dead. Lou’s youngest sibling was only forty-one when he died of a heart attack on the last day of 1945. Oscar had been showing some symptoms of angina since the age of thirty-eight, and just the previous day, as he and his family were traveling by train from Stockton to Los Angeles, he had suffered what seemed to be a mild heart attack. Upon arriving in Los Angeles he went to the emergency room, where the doctors gave him a shot; then he went home to his parents’ house, convinced the danger was over. No one in the family seemed very worried, because no one imagined that such a young man, on the verge of making a success of his own business, could be so close to death. He was a lively, bright fellow, and family stories suggested that even Lou thought Oscar might have turned out to be the more talented of the two, if only he had been able to focus. “Oscar was interested in many shiny things,” said one of his granddaughters, speaking decades later about this man she never met. Like Lou, he had inherited artistic skill from his father and musical ability from his mother. “Oscar was naturally musical,” his son, Alan, remarked. “He was a composer, he could play all sorts of instruments—piano, saxophone, xylophone, clarinet. He only played on the black keys on the piano; he liked the sound.” Neither Lou nor Oscar had been trained on the piano, as Alan had, but “Dad used his hands differently. He never had that jerky, strong thing Lou did.” According to Alan, Lou himself “felt that my dad was more intelligent and more skilled and more creative in every way, but he never reached the pinnacles because he was too anxious to touch all the bases in life.”
His death, when it came, caught him unawares. At three in the morning on December 31, Rosella Kahn awoke to the sound of her husband’s labored breathing. He had wet the bed, too, she noticed, but in her distress she paid it no mind. Understanding that it was the real thing this time, she put her arms around him and held him until he died.
Lou immediately flew out to Los Angeles for the funeral, which was attended by all the local relatives except Alan, who was in the navy and couldn’t, or didn’t, get leave. Oscar’s daughter, Rhoda, who was thirteen at the time, recalled how important her uncle’s presence had been to her. “When my father died—my father and I were very close—it was a tremendous loss for me,” she said. “My uncle Lou came to the funeral, and his physical presence was so much like my father’s—it was like a physical feeling, that he was transformed into my father.” Reflecting on the physical similarity between them, Rhoda added, “It was his stature. The way he walked. His body type was very much like my dad’s: broad shoulders tapering into a smaller waist. Short but not too short. And they were very strong.”
Rhoda of course noticed her uncle’s scars, but “I never recoiled. The minute you start talking to him, it fades out entirely.” But she realized that the experience that caused them “must have been profound when it happened, because it completely disfigured his face.” Later, she got up the nerve to ask her grandmother about it. She had stayed on with Bertha and Leopold in Los Angeles after the funeral was over, when her uncle had returned to the East Coast and her mother had gone back to Stockton to hold down a full-time job. In fact, Rhoda lived with her grandparents for two full years, from 1946 to about 1948, and this conversation with Bertha about the scars took place roughly in the middle of that time, in late 1946 or early 1947.
“I knew pretty much about it, but I never really had talked to her about it,” Rhoda said of Lou’s childhood accident. “I was curious about it and I asked her. We often had little talks. It was in her living room. It was just the two of us. Grandpa wasn’t there.”
Bertha told Rhoda the horrific details of the burning, though she told them calmly, without evident guilt or anxiety, as if it were just a story in which she had no great emotional investment. She did say, though, that she and Leopold had both been devastated by it. “And she told me that Grandpa, in particular, thought it would be better if he died, not only because of the scars but because of the psychological damage of being disfigured like that,” said Rhoda. “But my grandmother said, ‘No, he’s going to be a great man.’”
Late in his life, Lou would recount this same story to an interviewer. By that time, in 1973, it had obviously become an oft-told family tale, gaining added luster from the fact that Kahn had turned out to be a great man, at least in certain circles. But when Bertha first told the story to her granddaughter in the mid-1940s, Lou was still a strug
gling architect, barely able to make a living from his profession. He had not yet turned into “the Louis Kahn that became famous,” as Rhoda put it.
Lou himself, after Oscar’s death, rarely if ever mentioned him. Many of the people who worked with him in the subsequent three decades never even knew he’d once had a brother. “He never talked about his siblings, or much about when he was young,” Sue Ann recalled, and then she corrected herself: “He talked about Sarah, but not Oscar.” Still, something of that old relationship—that close but distant, loving but embattled rivalry between brothers—persisted in a strange tale Lou wove into some of his writings in later life. Pondering the origins of human creativity, he remarked in one speech that man “is unable to make anything without nature, because nature is the material. But the desire of man is unique. I want to liken the sense of desire to the emergence of two brothers”—and then he went on to discuss “the luminous turning into flame and the flame subsiding into material.” Elsewhere he repeated that he had “likened the emergence of light to a manifestation of two brothers, knowing quite well that there are no two brothers, nor even One. But I saw that one is the embodiment of the desire to be, to express; and one (not saying ‘the other’) is to be, to be. The latter is nonluminous, and ‘One,’ prevailing, is luminous, and this prevailing luminous source can be visualized as becoming a wild dance of flame which settles and spends itself into material. Material, I believe, is spent light.” It seems odd, and yet somehow very important, that this imagined duality between light and darkness, spirit and matter—the kind of duality around which Kahn focused all his ideas about architecture, not to mention everything else—should take the form of a distinction between one brother and another, which is also in some way the separation of one self from another. Perhaps the fact that Oscar was never mentioned only indicated how deeply the dead sibling had burrowed into the living one.
* * *
Lou’s grief at his only brother’s sudden death may have been assuaged, in part, by the fact that a fascinating new person had recently entered his life. In September of 1945, Anne Griswold Tyng came to work for the firm of Stonorov & Kahn. A product of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Tyng had come to the office to have lunch with one of her GSD classmates, Elizabeth Ware Carlihan, who was about to leave after working with the firm for a year. “By chance both Oscar Stonorov and Lou Kahn were in the office when I reached their ninth top floor unfinished loft space,” Tyng recalled. “I had hardly been introduced before they asked if I would take my friend’s place and work for them. Since I had heard they were a progressive firm known for low-cost housing, I promptly accepted.”
At twenty-five, Anne Tyng was a very beautiful young woman who came from an unusual background. Descended from a long line of New Englanders of Northern European stock (the name Tyng was apparently Viking in origin), she had been born in a mountain village in China to a Harvard-educated Episcopal clergyman and his Radcliffe-educated wife. Anne’s mother had actually been invited to chair the Mills College economics department after her graduation in 1911, but she gave up that career to become a missionary’s wife and the mother of five children. Anne, the second-youngest, was born in 1920 and spent most of her first twelve years in China, though with occasional visits back to America (including one hair-raising escape during the 1926 Communist uprising, after which the family eventually returned to a life in China in 1929). The product of Chinese and New England boarding schools, Anne was fluent in both Mandarin and English. By the time she got to Radcliffe, at age eighteen, she had lived in rural Kiangsi and urban Shanghai, had crossed the Pacific by ship several times, had driven across America by car with her parents, and had spent over a year traveling around the globe with her older sister.
She majored in fine arts at Radcliffe, after which she entered the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1942, when women were just starting to be admitted. There she studied architecture with department chair Walter Gropius and his Bauhaus colleague Marcel Breuer; among her classmates and friends were Philip Johnson, William Wurster, and I. M. Pei. She did brilliantly in the program, but upon graduation she was only able to find a series of temporary jobs in New York (“The more established firms in New York where I had applied,” she noted, “told me that they did not hire women architects”), so after a year she moved to Philadelphia to live with her parents and look for work there. In retrospect, it seems entirely unsurprising that Stonorov and Kahn would have hired her on sight.
Her own response to them—or at least to one of them—was equally instantaneous. “My first impression of Lou personally was his extraordinary intensity,” she told an interviewer many years later. “He was not the kind of person I would consciously choose to be attracted to, though I do not know if one ever chooses whom one is attracted to. Yes, with my background he would have been a very unlikely person, but he had this intensity which I think must have been the strongest aspect of him.”
Anne was the only woman in the firm, and both Oscar and Lou boyishly vied for her attentions, but it was Lou who won out. Anne was a bit naïve about worldly and sexual matters—“I found it difficult to believe that he was happily married and at the same time so intensely interested in another woman”—but she soon gave in to what she described as “a powerful physical attraction that I realized was mutual.” She was not bothered by his scars, which she described as “part of a natural charisma,” and she even suggested that the strength of his personality, combined with the shyness produced by the scars, was an especially appealing combination. Recalling the effect of his physical presence on her, she commented, “His wavy mop of reddish sandy hair was prematurely gray and his blue eyes, which tilted impishly upward at the sides, seemed to be on fire from within, compelling me to look beyond the scars. On swelteringly hot summer weekend charrettes when Lou occasionally worked shirtless, it was hard not to notice how unusually broad his lightly freckled shoulders were in proportion to his slim hips. I had never met anyone remotely like him. He generated a profound energy—in his resilient walk, in the lively lines of his drawings, and in his ideas which seemed to take shape as he drew and talked.”
Sexual attraction aside, Tyng was there to learn and work, and she immediately plunged into the life of the office, which had its difficulties as well as its rewards. “The space was not well insulated and was not air-conditioned,” she pointed out. “Occasionally we were subjected to ammonia fumes when the Bulletin presses were being cleaned on the floor below. On the elevator at eight-thirty in the morning I was almost overpowered by the smell of Stonorov’s cigar.” But these minor complaints did not prevent her from taking pleasure in the firm’s stimulating yet informal atmosphere. Everyone, including the principals, was on a first-name basis, and everyone was given a wide range of tasks to do. When Anne, in her first few months, managed to solve a particularly difficult architectural problem, one of her co-workers praised her for being able to “think like a man”—and though she was taken aback at the formulation, she couldn’t help feeling pleased by the level of acceptance it indicated.
One of the first schemes she and Lou worked on together was a “solar house” for the Libby-Owens-Ford glass company. Anne also helped design a remodeled carriage house for a married pair of artists, a structure called Unity House for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, a shoe store, a playground, and the Triangle Redevelopment Plan, on which she collaborated closely with David Wisdom, who had been with Stonorov & Kahn since 1943. She also had time to develop her own invention on the side—a geometrical toy for children which she called the Tyng Toy—and though it was not part of the firm’s work, Lou generously helped her design the promotional material for that. All of this variety was satisfying, and she felt she was learning a great deal. But throughout her time at Stonorov & Kahn she was also vaguely aware of something unseemly in Oscar’s dealings. “Stonorov was very much the entrepreneur,” she said, “and we used to say that his left hand didn’t know what his right hand was doing. He was always jugglin
g things and was not necessarily straightforward about them. As a daughter of a clergyman, I was quite shocked by the fact that he was saying one thing and then saying something else later, never leaving things clarified.”
The problems in the partnership came to a head with two memorable incidents. One was when Stonorov took some of Kahn’s drawings to an architecture magazine to be printed, but allowed (or perhaps even instructed) the magazine to crop off Lou’s name. This infuriated Lou. But he became even angrier when he learned that Oscar had gone behind his back to obtain a new design contract just for himself, going so far as to open up a secret office at Gimbels department store in which to carry it out. Lou found out about the deception when the clients, the Greater Philadelphia Movement, began calling Stonorov & Kahn about the project, thinking it was something the firm was doing jointly. This was the last straw, and Lou—having recently obtained a commission from the Philadelphia Psychiatric Hospital which he would be able to take with him—terminated the partnership and opened a new office of his own in March of 1947.
Kahn took both Tyng and Wisdom with him when he moved to 1728 Spruce Street, a charming Philadelphia row house whose first floor was occupied by the architectural office of Robert Montgomery Brown, the building’s resident and owner. The new firm shared its secretary, Alma Farrow, with Brown—she too had been brought over from the Bulletin Building—and its second-floor office with the engineering partnership of Cronheim and Weger. Galen Schlosser, who came to work for Kahn at about this time and stayed with him until at least 1970, commented on the rather intense working conditions. “The office was originally all in one room at 1728 Spruce Street, the front of an old brownstone,” he said. “Lou had his desk there, and there were just Anne Tyng, David Wisdom, another fellow and myself. That was the extent of the office, plus a secretary. There were also two engineers sharing our space. We were very intimate, because when you work for Lou you work every day and night, so you almost live together.”