You Say to Brick

by Wendy Lesser

  The structural viability of such a ceiling was a complete unknown, with the weight being the least of the potential problems. The real concern, according to the engineers, was the internal distribution of forces within the ceiling’s elements. “It could fail in tension, it could fail in shear, which are the two primary forces a structure contends with,” said Nick Gianopulos, whom Lou had called in for consultation. Gianopulos was representing the firm of Keast & Hood, formed after the recent death of Nick’s old boss, Major Gravell, who had been widely known as the dean of Philadelphia engineering. What Lou told Nick was that “Anne Tyng and I had been to see the Major a week before he died, and he said the analytical tools to assess the structure did not exist yet. He said the only way to test it was to build a full-size model, load it with sandbags, and measure it with instruments.”

  In the event, that is exactly what Kahn and his contractor, George Macomber, did. But first Gianopulos made a slight adjustment to the design. He filled in the voids between the triangular tops of the tetrahedrons—the spaces on either side of the peaks, as it were—with additional concrete, turning them into “parallel canted joists” that would strengthen the structure’s integrity. This change was invisible from below, so it didn’t affect the look of the ceiling, though it did determine the way the ducts and pipes could be threaded through the space-frame. Nick’s structural fix resolved at least one of the objections put forth by the City of New Haven, and the rest were met when the full-size test section, measuring about fourteen by fifty feet, was constructed and analyzed by Macomber. That test took place a mere two months before the ceiling’s first pour, well into the building process itself, so it was only at the last possible minute that Kahn got the engineering reports allowing the pour to proceed.

  One specific virtue of the ceiling, aside from its novel beauty, was the way it allowed ducts, cables, wiring, and even light fixtures to be embedded out of sight, deep within the shadowy recesses of the triangular openings. “I do not like ducts; I do not like pipes,” Kahn once commented. “I hate them really thoroughly, but because I hate them so thoroughly, I feel they have to be given their place. If I just hated them and took no care, I think they would invade the building and completely destroy it.” He was to come up with many different solutions to this problem, but at Yale he did it with the ceiling.

  Yet even as he hid certain things, Kahn also wanted other things to show. “The Pyramids try to say to you, Let me tell you how I was made,” Lou observed after seeing those powerful monuments, and now he invoked the same principle in his own first monumental building. He left the concrete walls, the steel staircase railings, the exterior and interior brickwork—everything, in short, except the wooden floors and the exhibition panels—bare and unfinished. “I believe in frank architecture,” he explained to a student interviewer. “A building is a struggle, not a miracle, and the architect should acknowledge this.”

  The Yale University Art Gallery, completed in 1953, instantly met with an enthusiastic response. Progressive Architecture featured the building and in particular its tetrahedral ceiling in its May 1954 issue, along with illustrations of another Kahn/Tyng project, the City Tower. (The latter, which was even more indicative of Tyng’s geometric influence, was to remain unbuilt, though it inspired several younger architects with its brash, zigzagging, intensely futurist design.) Vincent Scully praised Kahn’s museum for its “honesty, reality, masculinity,” observing that the rough concrete was “crystalline” rather than “muscular” in the manner of Le Corbusier, and that the “massive, repetitive, mathematically insistent canopy of the ceiling thus set off the specific works of art below it as, in my opinion, no white plane of plaster could have done.” Yet despite the professional applause, Kahn himself was eventually to feel dissatisfied with the open-plan galleries, whose only interior walls consisted of flexible panels that could be added or removed, which lent them too heavily to redesign by others. In his later museums, as in all his later buildings, he would focus more on the careful differentiation of functional space: “Architecture is the thoughtful making of spaces,” he would often say. Nor would he ever reuse the concrete tetrahedral ceiling in anything like that exact form.

  The one thing from the Yale Art Gallery that seemed already to bear his mature signature was the staircase. Enclosed in a massive concrete cylinder vertically inscribed with the thin panels of its wooden formwork, the angular staircase mounted upward in a clean, enticing combination of open-work steel and solid concrete. “These stairs, now. They are designed so people will want to use them,” Kahn said at the time. It was in this sense of pleasure combined with usefulness, of human motion in relation to architectural stillness, that he was starting to find his true vocabulary.

  There’s no guessing how much more powerful Tyng’s effect on Kahn’s work might have become, had an accident of history—or rather, biology—not gotten in the way. In the middle of 1953, shortly after the Yale project was finished, Anne discovered she was pregnant. She had planned to take a leave from the firm anyway, and had applied for a Fulbright to study with Pier Luigi Nervi in Italy. Now, however, she essentially had to go into hiding: the Fulbright Foundation would not have tolerated being represented by a pregnant unmarried woman, and even staying in Philadelphia would have proven socially difficult. So Anne resolved to go to Italy on her own, staying in Rome near her older brother Bill and his Italian wife. She didn’t tell them in advance about the pregnancy, though, nor did she mention it to her parents when she visited them shortly before the trip. “Only Lou and the doctor knew I was pregnant,” she recalled. “The collective projection onto unmarried mothers was that they were, at the very least, ‘delinquent’ and ‘sinful.’ I was not about to accept such archaic pronouncements. Having our baby in Rome might be positive, graceful, and even romantic for our love child.”

  What ensued during her trip was a series of letters between Lou and Anne that put into writing some of the thoughts and feelings previously audible only in their private conversations. Anne’s letters to Lou have apparently been lost or destroyed, but she was able to save all of his, and when read in sequence they help to convey a sense of the couple’s concerns, both mutual and separate, over the fifteen months they were apart.

  Love, architecture, and money—not always in that order—were the primary subjects of the correspondence. “Dearest Anne, Your wonderful letters came I must have read them five times,” Lou wrote early on, in November of 1953. He wasn’t sure where she was, so he had forwarded their Perspecta publication of the traffic studies to Paris, sent a telegram to Bordeaux, and written to Rome. He filled her in on Howe’s and Scully’s enthusiastic response to their recent joint work, and then interrupted himself: “Darling Anne I do hope you are in good spirits and that you take heart in my love for you. I feel the same emptiness which I know I must counter with diligent work.” Then back to some details about a possible new commission for a house, and finally: “Now Anne have a good time and let me know about money problems. I could send you a bill with each letter which would build up your dollar reserve which I know will do you the best financial good. By-By Honey, will write very soon again. With all my love, Lou.”

  His notion of sending her a “bill” in each letter (generally a ten, occasionally a twenty) was typical of Lou’s hopeless approach to money problems—especially since, as the months wore on, his letters came less and less frequently. But though he was admittedly, even by his own reckoning, a terrible correspondent, he was doing his best for her, and his handwritten letters often ran to three pages or more. He tried to sympathize with her anxieties about telling her brother about the pregnancy, suffering the identity changes that would go with motherhood, and so on, though even his warmest words obviously couldn’t take the place of his reassuring presence. Still, he made every attempt to convey to her his distinctive, passionate self: “My best regards to your people but if they treat you in some god damned Victorian manner I shall positively hate them.”

  Lou was eager
for Anne to experience the architectural treasures of Italy, learning from them as he had done on his two earlier trips. “Don’t fail to see Venice, Verona, Florence, Pisa, Siena. Even if you have to take a conducted tour,” he urged. “Don’t worry about the dough that is to be ever our least worry.” Yet it clearly became a pronounced worry for her, one she must have reiterated in her letters, for he ended up telling her to fill out time sheets and send them to the office. That was evidently how he planned to provide at least some support for both Anne and their baby without directly draining the home coffers.

  Alexandra Tyng was born on March 22, 1954. As if to assert her continuing independence, and perhaps also to avert scandal, Anne not only gave the little girl her own last name; she also put “Father Unknown” on the birth certificate. She sent Lou a coded telegram announcing the birth, and in return he sent her a cable on March 24: ALL MY LOVE TO BOTH OF YOU—LOU. A few days later he wrote, “Dearest Anny, Last night I dreamed about you. I was in our office telephoning you walked in and motioned to me that you could wait no longer. You had on a yellow dress and your golden hair was dressed in pony style. Your eyes some how were black and flashing looking at me reprehensibly. You were (and are of course) beautiful—Anny Anny I think of you always. I miss so much our meetings together. I hope nothing changes about our way of life—” A strange and rather naïve thing to say, perhaps, in the wake of a child’s birth, but no doubt heartfelt. As if to reinforce that they were still intellectual partners as well as parents together, Lou launched immediately after that into a long paragraph about architectural projects past (a “lousy article … about the Yale Building”) and future (“I might get a Synagogue to design”).

  And architecture did continue to be a subject of utmost interest between them. Most of the letters Kahn wrote to Tyng had at least one or two sketches incorporated within them—sometimes quite a complicated sketch, as when he detailed street patterns around Penn Center or drew alternative supports for a proposed roof. One letter contained a schematic arrangement of the words “Nature of Space,” “Order,” and “Design,” with circles drawn around the first two terms and lines going between all three—the origins, it would seem, of Kahn’s developing ideas about the relation between Order (which he saw as a given, something inherent in nature) and Design (which was the human response to Order, at its best). Kahn also wrote to Tyng about his teaching, which by early 1954 was beginning to feel overwhelming. “Now that I am full of students from the rear and from the front I can truthfully say I would much rather have a big practice or a good practice with only some contact with the academic life,” he reported. “When I see those faint scribbles after 3 weeks of seemingly stimulating directions I get a bit doubtful about the gain I give or take.” This private confession contrasted interestingly with his oft-repeated assertion that he got an enormous amount out of teaching and would stop the minute he felt he was learning less than his students. Or perhaps it simply represented his bleak view on a rare bad teaching day.

  Clearly Lou put a great deal of himself into these letters to Anne. Beyond the key insights he shared with her about their profession, there was the continuing and palpable feeling of warmth he expressed for both mother and child. “She is a perfect darling! I believe too she will be a beauty and will have much to offer this world—and You! You look so wonderful to me so beautiful—so loving,” he wrote in response to the first mailed snapshots of mother and daughter. And when, in January of 1955, Anne finally arranged passage for herself and Alex on the S.S. Constitution to New York (having borrowed the $400 for the tickets from Robert Venturi, who was then at the American Academy in Rome), Lou telegraphed excitedly to her, WILL MEET BOAT WHATEVER HOUR IT DOCKS/LOVE LOU. He was not shirking his role as either father or lover. He was doing his best to be warm, loving, and emotionally available. And yet, as usual, what he presented to Anne was not the whole story.

  During the fifteen months that Anne Tyng was away in Rome, a young woman named Marie Kuo had started work at Kahn’s practice, and she and Lou had begun having an affair. Just as Anne had been, Marie was in her mid-twenties when she came to work for Lou—it was only her second job after architecture school—whereas he was by now in his mid-fifties and beginning to be well known. Like Anne, Marie was beautiful, though in a different way. And like Anne (or for that matter, like Esther), she came from a distinctly higher social class than Lou, though her family had suffered serious reverses and she had ended up putting herself through college.

  Marie Kuo was born in 1928 in Peking, China, the oldest child of General Pehchuam Kuo, an important military and diplomatic figure in Chiang Kai-shek’s government. The Kuos, who came originally from Manchuria, had been diplomats for generations. The general’s wife, Marie’s mother, was the descendant of an extremely wealthy Manchurian family, and Marie’s first eight or nine years were spent in luxurious surroundings. Then, in 1937, her father was sent to Washington, D.C., as military attaché to the Chinese embassy. Soon after, the rest of the family—Marie, her mother, and her brother Joseph—hastily fled China to escape the Japanese massacre that became known as the Rape of Nanking. They joined General Kuo in Washington, but Marie was sent off almost immediately to a Catholic boarding school, Villa Maria, on the outskirts of Philadelphia, while her two younger brothers, Joe and the American-born Jimmy, remained with their parents.

  In 1941 General Kuo was posted to Moscow, at which point Marie’s mother and the two boys moved to a lower-middle-class neighborhood in West Philadelphia. The family wealth had been greatly depleted by this time, but Mrs. Kuo still had enough money to respond to her husband’s requests that she send cash and silk stockings to Russia. In 1945 Marie’s father paid them one last visit, during which he told Marie, then only seventeen, that she needed to be responsible for the family and so should not plan on getting married. Shortly after his return to Russia, Mrs. Kuo and her children learned that the general had a second family with a half-Russian, half-Chinese woman he had met at his Moscow posting. Marie’s mother (who never divorced her husband but lived apart from him for the rest of her life) fell into an angry, moody state and began drinking a great deal. Marie herself left the house as soon as she could, going straight from Villa Maria to Penn. She had always wanted to be an artist, but the Chinese elders in Philadelphia advised Mrs. Kuo that this would not be a good way to earn a living, so Marie was steered into architecture instead.

  Marie Kuo was neither as professionally ambitious nor as devoted to architecture as Anne Tyng had been. Though she graduated from Penn’s five-year B.A. program in architecture, she never went for her license or became a member of the AIA. But she worked as a project architect, and by all accounts she drew beautifully. At Lou’s office her artistic skills were considered quite useful: in one case, for instance, she traced over a quick drawing Lou had made and then spent a month perfecting it before it was eventually handed over to the Museum of Modern Art as a sample of Kahn’s work. Her colleagues, in addition to commending her excellent draftsmanship, were charmed by her attractive appearance and delicate manners. Jack MacAllister, another Penn graduate who started working for Lou a year or two after Marie did, described her as “sweet,” “intelligent,” and “talented,” and recalled that “she walked on her toes, like a ballerina.” Lois Sherr Dubin, a landscape architect who met Marie at Kahn’s office somewhat later, said she was “gentle, kind, bright, very pretty … My impression of her was a lovely, gentle woman.”

  But while Marie may have appeared soft and gentle to the outside world, her own family understood the degree of her strength and her forcefulness. Determined to rise above their poverty-stricken, recent-immigrant status—and, if possible, to drag her brothers up with her—she aspired to elegance in everything she did. She wore expensively tailored clothes, spoke in an accent that her brother Joe described as “almost British,” and once advised him to “surround yourself with beauty in your life.” Nor did she hesitate to criticize what she considered his boorish speech and bearing, telling h
im at one point that he should take ballet so that he would move more gracefully, less like a peasant. “Marie was classical,” observed Joe, who also trained as an architect at Penn. Then he added, “I never saw Marie that much. I guess I stayed away because she was so ‘right.’” He admitted, though, that she could be extremely generous, as when she paid all the costs of their younger brother Jimmy’s private schooling out of her earnings from Kahn’s office.

  No one could say exactly when or how the affair started, but by the time Anne Tyng returned to Philadelphia it was already in full swing, and Anne soon found out about it. Perhaps one of the men from the office told her; perhaps Marie herself gave it away. Certainly Marie felt possessive enough to pay Anne a visit, at a slightly later date, to ask her to give Lou up. Since Anne had the baby, Marie’s argument ran, she should be willing to let Marie have Lou. Anne pointed out that this was not how things worked. Another time, at the office, Anne heard Marie speaking in Chinese on the phone, assuring the person at the other end (presumably her mother) that she would not get pregnant because she was using birth control. Of course, Marie could not have expected her conversation to be understood; she did not know about Anne’s childhood in China. But what struck Anne most about the incident was that Marie felt able to use birth control despite Lou’s dislike of it—something that she herself had not always managed to do, with the obvious consequences.