by Wendy Lesser
“When I was about five, my parents separated, but I wasn’t told of the separation,” Alex Tyng recalled as an adult. “I suppose that, since they weren’t married, they (even my mother) didn’t think it was necessary.” But still, Alex noticed that something had changed, because her father didn’t come around as much. The little girl went through what she later remembered as “a period of not seeing Lou as often—probably between the ages of five and seven. By the time I was eight I saw him regularly again.”
Up to that point, Alex would have called hers a happy childhood. Her mother was reliable and supportive, and her father was a steady if intermittent presence. “I remember him drawing with me, bringing me blank books to draw in and colored pencils,” she said. “When he visited, which seemed often, he would be there when I went to sleep and be gone when I woke up. A couple of times I woke up and saw him leaving my mother’s room in the middle of the night.” The drawings she did at that time reflected her confidence in this setup. There was one she called “Family,” for instance, executed at age three, which showed three enthusiastic stick figures—a mother and daughter in triangular skirts, a foregrounded father in pants—all smiling widely, their arms raised in joyful triumph. The colors were as bright and cheerful as the people being depicted.
But when her parents separated, her drawings began to alter. She became obsessed with scary things—witches, ghosts, pirates, and especially haunted houses, which she drew frequently from the age of six onward. “Sometimes I drew houses in perspective and sometimes I drew what I called ‘cut-throughs,’ showing the rooms inside,” Alex noted. In one such cut-through, the Victorian-style structure’s irregular rooms and multiple stories were peopled with ghosts and skeletons, all drawn in a blood-red line of paint. Another drawing, entirely in pencil, showed two identical houses from the outside. A few lines of childish printing at the top of the page explained that “once upon a time there was a haunted house and a unhaunted house they looked alike only [one] was haunted and the other wasn’t.” Alex also composed an illustrated story called “House of Secrets” at around this time. “I think I became aware that there were things I didn’t know and couldn’t find out,” she observed many years later, and one result was that, from the age of seven or eight, she found herself seeking out and reading books “in which kids solved puzzles created by adults to cover up the truth.”
* * *
“If you could go into the Land of Oz every day or a reality show, I’d go into the Land of Oz,” said Richard Saul Wurman, attempting to explain why the men who worked with Kahn couldn’t have cared less about the complications in his personal life. “The reality show is not of interest. This was a place, for most of us, that never was before and never would be again.” They knew—or most of them knew—that Lou’s private life was “odd,” but what they really cared about was “When is he going to get back to the office? We all wanted a piece of Lou’s time.”
According to Wurman, the atmosphere surrounding Kahn’s work and ideas was electric. “The passion to be an architect then was palpable. It was a special time to be alive. You knew that then. It was like being in Paris and knowing Picasso. So you’re in the midst of a historical moment and you know it disappears. So yeah, you felt special. It was a special moment.”
In his first experiences at the office, Richard Wurman, as Kahn’s student, had been set to work on occasional charrettes—those brief, intense, all-hands-on-deck periods when a model or a plan was being prepared. (The word itself came from the nineteenth-century French term for the kind of cart—a “chariot,” as it were—that was sent around in the École de Beaux-Arts to pick up the just-completed models from the hardworking architecture students when their projects were due.) Later, a couple of years after he graduated, Wurman was invited to come work for the office full-time.
“My working for him started when he called on a Christmas Day—he didn’t even know it was Christmas—and said, ‘Ricky, can you come into the office?’ And I said, ‘Lou, it’s Christmas,’ and he said, ‘Well, can you come in tomorrow?’”
(Lou’s Christmases were in fact something of a mystery. Wurman placed him at the office, as did other employees over the years. But his family, including nieces and nephews as well as his daughter Sue Ann, remembered him dominating the celebrations held at 5243 Chester. “I remember Lou mostly from those Christmases,” said his nephew-by-marriage Edward Abelson. “Lou seemed to do most of the talking at the Christmas dinners: I remember him telling stories about the people he had met and the places he had been.” Sandra Abelson, Lou and Esther’s niece, fondly recalled that “when he brought Christmas gifts for Esther and Sue, he always had one for me too.” But she also noted that “sometimes on Christmas Day he’d leave the house for a while, saying he was going to the office. Once I must have shown how sad I was, because he assured me he’d be back as quickly as I could say, ‘Jack Robinson.’ I said it repeatedly that afternoon and thought it worked eventually, because he was back in time for dinner.” Yet even as his family consistently mentioned his presence at Christmas dinner, other people remembered his being with them instead. “He spent more than one Christmas with us, and not with his family,” insisted his colleague Jack MacAllister. It almost seemed that there were two or three Louis Kahns, enough to satisfy everybody—or, as Wurman was later to put it, “Everyone had a different Lou.”)
Soon after Richard Wurman showed up for work in January of 1961, Kahn sent him off to England to discuss the development of a Thames barge for the American Wind Symphony Orchestra. What the twenty-four-year-old architect didn’t realize until he got to London was that the working drawings (which did not yet exist) were supposed to arrive there with him. Having packed for a week, Wurman stayed for six months, finishing the job himself. “I had no funding, I had no money to live from day to day, and Lou wouldn’t take my calls. It was trial by fire,” he commented. Swearing to himself that he would never work for Kahn again, Wurman stopped off at the Philadelphia office briefly on his return to pick up his final paycheck. Lou, who had been out, came in and said, “Oh, Ricky, what are you working on?” and immediately put him to work on another project. “His innocence was disarming,” Wurman observed. “It was the ‘emperor has no clothes’ innocence. That’s seductive. He was incredibly seductive because he meant so much to us.”
And they, as a group of needed colleagues and associates, apparently meant a great deal to him, too. “He wanted to do good work. Doing good work and finding realizations of patterns had to do with hearing himself talk. So we were all sounding boards,” Wurman pointed out. Or, as Sue Ann put it, “He ran the office like an atelier. He had this idea of competing ideas, letting other people come up with various things, and then he would choose.”
Among the odder sounding boards Kahn attracted into his atelier was a fellow named Gabor, variously described as a philosopher-genius, a crazy Hungarian, a crackpot, and a young architecture student (though completely without drawing skills) who had walked all the way from Ohio to learn at Kahn’s feet. Gabor did have a last name—it was Szalontay—but nobody ever used it; he was simply Gabor. He showed up sometime in 1960 or early 1961, at the age of about twenty-two, and he stayed forever.
His function, it seemed, was to listen to Lou talk and occasionally to make enigmatic responses. Sue Ann, who by this time was an undergraduate at Penn, would sometimes drop by her father’s office at nine or ten at night and would find just the two of them, Lou and Gabor, having a conversation. “Everyone remarked on this strange relationship. He would talk to Gabor for hours,” said Sue. “It was very fruitful to keep explaining himself.” At the end of each session Lou would hand Gabor a twenty-dollar bill; sometimes he even put in a time sheet for him. “Gabor earned his twenty bucks by listening raptly. I don’t think he debated him, but maybe he did,” Sue Ann added.
Even years later, when Lou had become much busier and much more famous, Gabor remained a notable presence. Gary Moye, who studied with Kahn in the late 1960s and then w
ent to work in his firm, recalled first noticing Gabor in Lou’s master’s class studio. “Early in my first semester he appeared nattily dressed in a dark suit and bow tie and sat among the students as Lou addressed the class,” said Moye. “Lou was talking about light and when he paused Gabor asked, ‘What if the light were blue?’ Lou took the question in stride and began a new stream of speculation. I remember thinking at the time—Wait! What the hell?”
Gabor, despite the absence of any obvious means of support, never seemed down and out. On the contrary, he was always neatly attired in a variety of outfits. Many people assumed he had a series of women willing to take care of him. “My classmates and I would sometimes observe him in the cafeteria picking up girls,” noted Moye. “He seemed to be quite successful at it.” Later, when Gary was employed by Lou, he happened to be at the office working one weekend when the telephone rang and he answered it. “A young woman asked for Gabor,” Gary recalled. “When I explained that I knew him but he actually didn’t work there, she responded by saying, ‘You must be mistaken, as he is Mr. Kahn’s personal assistant.’”
Moye also remembered one other tale that exemplified, for him, the weird philosopher’s role in Lou’s life. “One of the stories that became legend in the office,” he observed, “was about Gabor being assigned to work on a project charrette.” The project coordinator set Gabor up at a board and gave him a drawing to work on, but when he returned some hours later, hopeful that the task might have been completed, he found Gabor contemplatively staring at a still-blank piece of paper. The angry coordinator, faced with a looming deadline and burdened with this unhelpful assistant, “stormed off to confront Lou with the problem,” said Moye. “As the story goes, Lou responded by saying, ‘I pay the rent, I pay the electricity, I pay the water, I pay the gas, and I pay Gabor.’”
Lou himself explicitly acknowledged Gabor’s importance to him in a talk he gave before a group of Rice University students in 1964. “About a month ago, I was working late in my office, as is my custom,” Kahn began, “and a man working with me said, ‘I would like to ask you a question which has been on my mind for a long while: How would you describe this epoch?’ This man is a Hungarian, who came to this country when the Russians entered Hungary”—in other words, in 1956, about four years before Gabor first showed up in Lou’s office.
Kahn told the students that in response to this question he sat absolutely still thinking for at least ten minutes, “and finally I said to Gabor, ‘What is the shadow of white light?’” (The non sequitur was apparently a conversational strategy they shared equally.) “Gabor,” Lou continued, “has a habit of repeating what you say. ‘White light … white light … I don’t know.’ And I said, ‘Black. Don’t be afraid, because white light does not exist, nor does black shadow exist!’” Lou went on to bring up the possible colors of light, and from there he moved to the writing of fairy tales, and thence to the various qualities of words—all of which set him thinking about three untitled talks he was about to give at Princeton. “After that night of discussion with Gabor, I knew the titles,” Kahn announced triumphantly, adding, “How rewarding it is to have a person who is concerned about everything, not just little things.” From Lou’s account of this largely one-sided “discussion,” one might conclude that the titles emerged from Kahn’s comments alone rather than from any words of Gabor’s, but that, for Lou, seemed to be the point: the membrane between his thoughts and Gabor’s was so permeable as to make attribution impossible.
“Gabor was bizarre,” Richard Wurman acknowledged, “but Lou would get something out of talking to him.” And however much he may have irritated the younger architects who came to work in Kahn’s practice—one of Lou’s final group of employees, a woman named Reyhan Larimer, became so exasperated with Gabor that she once took off her shoe and threw it at him—he was clearly there to stay.
The period of Gabor’s first appearance at the office, when the late 1950s were shifting into the early 1960s, was a particularly important time for Lou. On the basis of his rising reputation, a number of new architectural commissions were coming into the firm, and among the most significant of these were two Philadelphia assignments, the Richards Medical Building and the Mikveh Israel synagogue. One was to elevate Kahn’s reputation, promoting him to the acknowledged first rank of modernist architects; the other was to prove one of the most frustrating disappointments of his career.
The Alfred Newton Richards Medical Research Building at the University of Pennsylvania came to Kahn’s firm largely through the good offices of G. Holmes Perkins, the dean of Penn’s design school. The commission was awarded in early 1957, and construction on the laboratory towers had already begun by the very next year, at which point the project was extended to include a set of similar towers for a biology building next door. Though Kahn had worked on other hospital and medical buildings in the Philadelphia area, this was the tallest, as well as the first to use precast concrete. As a design project, the Richards Building practically trumpeted Modernism, with its large glass windows blending uninterruptedly into flush concrete and brick walls on the multistory structures housing the scientists’ labs and studies. Yet there was also something faintly archaic and monumental-feeling in the looming, windowless brick towers that held the exhaust stacks, the stairwells, and other “servant” functions. It was the first Kahn project to articulate so clearly what he had listed, in response to the 1958 Berkeley questionnaires, as one of his primary architectural innovations: “The distinction in the planning of spaces between the ‘spaces which serve’ and ‘the spaces served.’”
In that same series of interviews, Kahn had been asked, “Do you feel that you are lacking any particular skill or subject competence for the practice of architecture?” and had answered, “Engineering and mechanical skills, although this is a minor lack.”
Nick Gianopulos, who was one of the many engineers Lou employed in the course of his career, pretty much agreed with this self-assessment. “Yes,” he said, when asked if Kahn indeed lacked these skills. “But he recognized competency and talent in others, because he had a very strong intuitive nature. Lou had this knack of being able to intuitively grasp an idea and translate it into something structural. And he was so well grounded in the classics and classic architecture. He knew how huge stones came together. Well, in a sense precast concrete is huge stones coming together.”
Perhaps it was Lou’s intuition that allowed him to understand, from the moment he first worked with August Komendant on the Richards Building, how useful this brilliant engineer would be to him. Komendant and Kahn had originally met in the mid-1950s, when Gus, as he was called, appeared in Lou’s office to make a case for his company as a subcontractor on the Trenton Jewish Community Center. That project never reached completion. But in 1957 Lou briefly consulted Gus about a design he was entering (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) in the Enrico Fermi Memorial competition. Later that year Kahn brought his students to the concrete factory in Lakewood, New Jersey, where Komendant worked as a consulting engineer, and the two men had an even better chance to take each other’s measure. Like Kahn, Komendant had been born in Estonia; unlike Kahn, he had spent his youth and early manhood in Germany, where he trained and began working as an engineer. After the war he was hired by General Patton to redesign bridges and develop other concrete work in Europe. Now, in the 1950s, he ran his own American consulting practice that specialized in prestressed and post-tensioned concrete.
Kahn had already formed close connections with a number of engineers before Komendant, and at least one of these men, the Paris-born Robert Le Ricolais, became a lifelong friend and Penn colleague, someone with whom Kahn frequently taught seminars. Le Ricolais was something of a visionary himself; among other things, he had helped develop the whole idea of space-frames (though since he and Kahn didn’t meet until 1953, the ceiling for the Yale Art Gallery probably came to Tyng and Kahn indirectly rather than directly from Le Ricolais). He was a poet as well as an artist, and in the semester
s when they were both teaching, Lou enjoyed meeting Le Ricolais outside of school time, often for weekly drinks at Le Ricolais’s Philadelphia apartment. But partly because they shared what others might have viewed as a certain degree of high-flown idealism, Robert Le Ricolais could not fill the down-to-earth function in Lou’s work life that came to be occupied by the scientifically knowledgeable August Komendant.
When Kahn decided to include Komendant as the consulting engineer on the Richards Building, he had already hired Keast & Hood as the official structural engineers. So Nick Gianopulos and Gus Komendant inevitably found themselves working together, on this and later projects. “We had this love-hate affair for years,” Nick said of Gus. “He always got the best of the deal. He’s a born winner.” But irritated as he may have been by the man’s character, Gianopulos had to acknowledge Komendant’s remarkable level of engineering skill. “I had no doubts about his talents,” he affirmed. “His motivations were something else. But he was a superb mathematician, and he could use mathematics creatively in a structural sense.” He was, Nick felt, “an excellent engineer.” And if Komendant was difficult, Kahn seemed able to handle those difficulties. “A lot of people never used him a second time,” Gianopulos observed. “Lou did, because Lou could cope with him.”