by Wendy Lesser
By now Anne Tyng had moved into the city from her parents’ Main Line house, and she and Lou were spending more time together than ever. “We were both workaholics: in fact, work had become a kind of passionate play,” she observed. “I think that for Lou and me loving each other and working together became integrated and took on a life of its own.” Kahn did the visionary sketches, for the most part, while Tyng brought her geometrical sensibility to bear on turning their ideas into tangible models. Together they would hum snatches of Bach, Mozart, and Haydn to keep themselves awake through the long nighttime hours of hard work. Among the other things they designed jointly during their four years on Spruce Street (in addition to working on the major contract for the Radbill Building and Pincus Pavilion at the Philadelphia Psychiatric Hospital) were six private houses, of which three—the Roche house, the Weiss house, and the Genel house—were ultimately built. Tyng thought the Weiss house was the most fun to work on, largely because the clients, Morton and Lenore Weiss, were so delightful. It would also prove to be the building in which Lou first introduced several of his signature practices.
The Weiss house, which took from 1947 to 1950 to complete, was located about four miles outside Norristown in rural Pennsylvania. Constructed largely of stone obtained from a nearby quarry, along with exterior wood walls that aged to a silvery gray, it drew on the qualities of the surrounding landscape and regional building traditions in the way Kahn was later to do, for instance, with the locally made bricks he used in Exeter and Ahmedabad. At the Weiss house, he took care to choose and arrange the quarried stones carefully, so that their colors and patterns would make sense together (again, a habit he was to practice in his selection of the two very different kinds of travertine he used at Salk and Kimbell). He specifically asked the stonemasons to make a deep indentation in the mortar between the stones, so that each stone stood out clearly from the other—a procedure he had long admired in the studio built by an artist friend, Wharton Esherick—and this in turn led him to create similar recesses when two different materials, wood and stone, adjoined each other. That was the beginning of Kahn’s idea of the “shadow joint,” which he carried over to just about every major building he eventually designed. As Anne Tyng explained it, “The shadow joint is the idea of separation between materials so that if one has a door jamb in wood against rough stone-work, one actually lets it be separate, with its own straight edge away from the irregular edge of stone. The shadow joint is an indentation between them which would have a depth at least equal to the distance between wood and stone.” This practice allowed each material to exist on its own, discrete and separate, even as it formed part of the coherent whole. It both emphasized the joint (for “the joint is the beginning of ornament,” as Kahn was repeatedly to say) and at the same time made it disappear into nothingness.
Two other aspects of the Weiss house that stood out as characteristically Lou-like were the large, multipatterned mural on the living room wall—which Anne, who helped paint it, described as Lou’s “concept of a ‘giant pointillism’”—and the enormous stone fireplace that dominated the living room and divided it from the dining room. Such fireplaces, which Kahn referred to in his own notes as “inglenooks,” were to appear in many of his designs from that point forward, not only in private houses but also, more surprisingly, in public buildings like the Rochester Unitarian Church and the Exeter Library. It was as if the fireplace represented, for him, something essential to the spirit of a place; its function was to provide physical coziness and at the same time to create a focus around which people could gather. Perhaps Lou was recalling the role of the open hearth in the wintry houses of his Estonian childhood. Or maybe his interest in domesticated fire had to do with its mythic qualities—most obviously in the Greek myth of Prometheus, less obviously in his own private myth about the “luminous turning into flame and the flame subsiding into material.” Whatever the reasons, the inglenook was to remain for Kahn the actual and symbolic center of a house, and not only in his houses. Years later, for instance, when he came to visit his grown-up niece Rhoda and her husband, Marvin Kantor, at the Southern California home they had just bought, it was the massive stone fireplace that Lou singled out for praise.
Something else that lasted for the rest of his life started for Lou in 1947, and that was his teaching. In the fall of 1947, filling a sudden gap left by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, whose visa had been denied because of his “Communist sympathies,” Kahn was invited to be a visiting critic in Yale’s architecture department. He had been offered a teaching post at Harvard the year before, but had turned it down because it would have required him to leave Philadelphia. The Yale position, though, took up only two days a week, a schedule that allowed him to commute to New Haven by train on his teaching days while retaining his Philadelphia practice.
Lou had come to Yale’s attention partly as a result of his housing work with Stonorov and partly through the two Revere pamphlets (which had reached audiences of 100,000 and more within a few years of publication), but mainly because of his prominent role in the American Society of Planners and Architects, a forward-looking group he helped found in late 1943 and early 1944. The ASPA’s members included noteworthy architects like George Howe, Philip Johnson, Richard Neutra, Eero Saarinen, and William Wurster as well as planners such as Edmund Bacon and Catherine Bauer, and though it fizzled out in 1948 without ever having accomplished anything tangible, its aims—to promote a new kind of socially responsible housing, as put forth in a program called American Village—struck many in the field as worth pursuing. By 1947, with the ASPA already nearing its death throes, Kahn had become the energetic leader of the group, and he kept it alive for an additional year largely through the force of his personality. Like the Architectural Research Group he had helped start in the 1930s, the ASPA showcased his abilities as a speaker, a theoretician, a man of ideas—abilities that must have persuaded the Yale dean, Charles Sawyer, and the department chair, Harold Hauf, that Kahn would be a good teacher.
At Yale, the architecture department was housed in the School of Fine Arts, and this gave the program a firmer link to painting and sculpture than it had at Harvard, where the study of architecture was more closely allied with urban planning. For Kahn, this meant a chance to forge alliances with colleagues like Josef Albers, the Bauhaus painter and designer who soon took over Yale’s art department, and his wife, Anni Albers, the noted textile artist. At Yale he also met Vincent Scully, who started teaching there the same year Kahn did, and whose admiration for his architecture would be deep, lasting, and helpful. Writing about his first impressions, Scully later noted that Kahn “talked a good deal about structure…, sketched quickly and impressively with that black pencil, but as yet had no consistent approach to design.” The man himself, as Scully recalled, was characterized by “deep warmth and force, compact physical strength, a printless, catlike walk, glistening Tartar’s eyes—only bright blue—a disordered aureole of whitening hair, once red: black suit, loose tie, pencil-sized cigar. It was at this time that he began to unfold into the rather unearthly beauty and command of a Phoenix risen from the fire. Earlier he had looked as fey as Harpo Marx.”
Perhaps some of the increasing gravitas came from being an official instructor of the young. The Yale post was significant, above all, in that it gave Kahn a chance to try out his architectural ideas, both practical and visionary, in the classroom. The habit of setting a “problem” for students and letting them solve it from scratch, either collaboratively or on their own, was congenial to Kahn’s way of thinking, and he soon became a revered if somewhat eccentric teacher. Even in his earliest years at Yale he was known for getting his students to tear up their ideas and start afresh: he wanted them to get back to first principles and essential meanings, abandoning the well-worn solutions they had been taught by other architects. At the same time, he insisted on locating his students firmly in the here and now of a particular assignment. As Lou remarked to himself in one of the many notebooks h
e kept over the years, under the heading On ways to teach structure in relation to architecture: “The problems must come from real conditions.” And indeed, by his second year at Yale he was getting his students to address an imaginary design problem set in a real, knowable space. He asked them to design a new UNESCO exhibition hall set in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park—not, that is, where the actual United Nations was to be located, in New York, but in the spot where Kahn had vocally argued the UN should be built. A second course he taught that year focused on a housing commission very much like his own Genel house, up to and including the client biography (again, an echo of that same notebook entry, where he observed, “If possible, the client should be known to the designer”). From that point onward, Kahn’s architecture practice and his teaching methods would remain interwoven in this way, so that each enriched the other, bringing former students to his firm and practical examples to his classroom.
The teaching had another effect as well: it finally introduced a modicum of financial stability into the Kahn household. To supplement the constant ups and downs of his independent practice, Lou now had a steady income that was more than twice the size of Esther’s. In the late 1940s she was earning about $2,300 a year from her full-time job at Jefferson Medical College; Lou’s salary from Yale was $6,300, and even after subtracting nearly $1,300 in travel costs, he still had a healthy $5,000 or so to support his family. During this same period he was also continuing to receive income from projects associated with the dissolved Stonorov & Kahn partnership, sometimes amounting to $2,000 a year or more. On his tax returns this money would be set off against the annual losses from his sole proprietorship—a money-losing habit, ranging from hundreds of dollars a year to thousands, that lasted throughout most of the decades in which Louis I. Kahn Architect had its existence. But profit had never been Lou’s chief concern, and he was far happier losing money on his own than making it with Stonorov. Among the reasons his teaching was to prove so valuable to him was that it allowed him the luxury of this preference.
* * *
With his new teaching duties added to his own busy architectural practice, Kahn was more consumed than ever by his work. But he did make time, in the summer of 1948, to take Esther and Sue Ann on a weeklong visit to his family in Los Angeles. Perhaps Leopold’s guilt-inducing efforts had at long last succeeded, or maybe Lou was truly worried about his mother’s declining health, which had included a recent diagnosis of diabetes. Among the other things Lou gleaned from the family letters of that period was a strong sense of Bertha’s rapidly worsening vision. For example, after describing how much pleasure they received from a newspaper clipping about Lou’s achievements, Leopold wrote, “When I finished it, Mother burst out crying, because she couldn’t read it her self. Mother used to read her self all the time, now she can’t, her eyes are bad and she worries a lot on account of that although the Dr. tolled her she shouldn’t worry she will not get blind all together.” Other letters pathetically demonstrated the problem on the page itself, as the highly literate Bertha attempted to scrawl a few uneven, oversized words, first in wobbly paths across the page and eventually, after an operation, in ruled lines. “My dearest children, Thank you dears for your lovely Mother’s Day gift. I can not write too much, but I am thankful to God for that,” she wrote under Leopold’s “Dear Lou, Esther & Sue Ann, I really didn’t want Mother to strain her eyes for a while yet, but she promised not to write too much. We are very glad her eyes are a little improved.” Faced with such heartrending appeals, Lou finally carved out some time for a visit and also undertook the substantial costs involved in getting a family of three across the country in those postwar years. (His solution was to send Esther and Sue ahead by train, while he flew out to Los Angeles to meet them; at the end of the trip, all three returned together on the train.)
This was the first time the eight-year-old Sue Ann had met either of her Kahn grandparents in person. “They were a devoted couple,” she observed. “He used to carry her up the stairs. He did the cooking and she did the baking.” Of Bertha, she noted mainly that “she was a roly-poly person.” As for Leopold, “Pop was very tall. He spoke all these languages. He used to correct my pronunciation of Bach pieces or whatever I was playing.”
Though Sue didn’t realize it at the time, her musical talent was probably of more interest to Bertha Kahn than to anyone else. “She appreciated music,” said Rhoda, who was still living with her grandparents when Lou’s family came to visit. “She would sing songs in German.” Her older brother Alan remembered Bertha “singing old Jewish melodies to me. I learned a lot about music from her: she loved music so much that she diffused it around her.” But even Rhoda and Alan, who got to know their grandmother far better than Sue Ann ever did, never learned that she had played the harp as a young woman back in the old country. They knew her only as an extremely sweet, remarkably wise old woman with Coke-bottle glasses, a talent for cooking delicious apple tortes, and an uncanny ability to attract people to her.
“She had a warmth about her,” noted Alan. “Neighbors from all over would come just to have tea with her.” His sister’s memories of Bertha were even more emphatic. “She was like a guru, in a simple way,” Rhoda observed. “She was very intelligent, very refined. She was a quiet force. She had a tremendous power to ameliorate problems. She would always say, ‘Take care, take it easy. I foresee…’ She would always say, ‘I foresee’”—as if the future, in Bertha’s view, always held some kind of helpful resolution in store.
When Lou brought Esther and Sue on this visit, the rest of the family congregated at Leopold and Bertha’s house to welcome them. As they had since the 1930s, the elder Kahns were living at 1123½ 78th Street, in a relatively poor Los Angeles neighborhood where Jews, Germans, and other immigrant groups dwelt among small factories and commercial enterprises. The Kahns’ own house looked something like a garage, and indeed a part of it—the guest room where Rhoda stayed for years—was a converted garage. Adjoining that was Bertha and Leopold’s small apartment, and above them lived Sarah with her husband, Joe, and their daughter, Gerry.
Lou loved his sister and always praised her as an artist, both to others and to her face (though, never having received any formal training, Sarah only practiced her art on the side, while she continued to earn her living as a milliner). His brother-in-law, on the other hand, he described as “make-shift.” The rest of the family was also a bit dubious about Joe Freedman. There was something coarse about him, they felt, and his relationship with the younger females in the family, including his own daughter, seemed slightly off. But none of this was ever discussed openly. It was not, on the whole, a family in which difficult subjects were confronted directly. There was always a great deal of warmth expressed, but there was also a lot that went unsaid or remained hidden.
One of the things that was not mentioned, at least in front of the children, was the fate of the relatives who had been left behind in Europe. By the time of Lou’s 1948 visit, Bertha would almost certainly have learned that her brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews had not survived the war. After being forced out of the comfortable Riga apartments where Lou had visited them and sent to the city’s old Jewish ghetto, they had been exterminated in 1941 or 1942. (The exception, her baby brother Isak Mendelowitsch, saved his family by fleeing to Russia, but he himself was drafted into the Red Army and killed at the front in 1944.) Yet none of this was spoken about during the Kahn family get-together, which was the first time they had all seen each other since the war ended.
“I knew,” said Rhoda about the missing relatives, though what she had managed to gather was nothing specific, just snippets of overheard conversation. “I do remember my grandmother discussing it with someone. About family. They talked in general terms about that she did have some relatives … How much they knew, whether it was assumption or whether it was fact—I don’t know.” And if his parents knew, Rhoda guessed that Lou must have been told, too. “There must have been some discussion about it,” sh
e surmised.
But Alan Kahn was less sure of this. “They sort of protected him from any home or family problems,” he said of Lou’s relationship with Bertha and Leopold. “So it wouldn’t surprise me if they didn’t tell him something that was disturbing, and that didn’t have anything directly to do with him.” Alan himself never heard a word about the dead family members, at least not that he was aware of. If his grandparents ever spoke of such things to each other, “they would talk in a language we didn’t know, whether it was German, Finnish, whatever: they knew a lot of languages.”
They spoke accentless English, though, as far as he remembered (“Grandpop had a little accent,” Rhoda amended, “Grandma none”). And English was certainly the language that prevailed during Lou’s 1948 visit with his relatives. An outdoor photo taken at the time suggests the all-American family image they were aspiring to project, complete with white picket fence. Behind the fence and in front of a series of small houses, each with its own tiny front lawn, stand the five Kahns: Lou and his mother looking comfortable and relaxed, while Leopold, Esther, and Sue appear more tentative, though not unhappy or unwilling to be there.
Little Sue Ann struck her sixteen-year-old cousin as “closer to her father than her mother at that point. Esther as a person was more difficult, colder, more formal,” said Rhoda. As for the relationship between the in-laws, well, that too was complicated. “I think there was a tolerance,” Rhoda suggested. “Grandma was always—she always showed a loving side, but I think there was a distance. I think it may have been on Esther’s part. You always had the feeling that she thought she was somewhat better, that they were peasantry. There was a general sense that she had married below her.”