You Say to Brick

by Wendy Lesser

  With Gus Komendant at his side, and with Fred Dubin, a mechanical engineer, assisting with the actual ducts and wires and pipes, Kahn was able to build in a new way at Richards, using massive pieces of precast concrete that could be lifted into place by cranes and assembled with unusual speed. The structure’s strong yet flexible Vierendeel trusses, which allowed Kahn to eliminate diagonal supports, also gave him greater freedom in the design of the tower floors, and this in turn meant that the architect could indulge in uses of space—making each lab floor essentially continuous, for instance, with eight precast columns dividing the space into cantilevered squares, and no corner columns interrupting the windows—that might otherwise have been impossible. Kahn had used Vierendeels before, in his short-lived AFL Medical Services building (built in Philadelphia in the mid-1950s, it was to be demolished in 1973), but it took Komendant’s expertise to show him how these beams could be deployed most effectively in the creation of large open spaces.

  Ultimately, there proved to be some practical problems with the Richards design: the wide-open labs made privacy difficult, and the glassed-in corner offices had a tendency to grow too hot in the direct sun. But this did not interfere with the passionate adoration that the Richards Medical Research Building inspired in the architectural community at large. In the summer of 1961, just a year after its completion, the building was honored with a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York—the first time MoMA had ever allocated a whole architectural exhibit to a single structure.

  Yet even as he was embarking on this notorious success, Kahn was already setting the pattern for the kinds of failures (perhaps they are better labeled “incompletions”) that would also define his career. Of the seven other projects that his firm undertook in 1957, the year of the Richards commission, only two were ever built: a small private house for Fred and Elaine Clever, most of which was actually designed by Anne Tyng, and some limited alteration and remodeling on the Biology Services Building at Penn. All five other projects—including houses for two different families (one in Pennsylvania, the other in Oklahoma), a private school campus in Chestnut Hill, a Thermofax sales office on North Broad Street in Philadelphia, and a remodel of the American Federation of Labor Medical Center on the same street—came to nothing in the end. All architects suffer through unbuilt projects, but Lou appeared to be coping with more than the average number, and their proportion was not to diminish as his career progressed.

  One of the saddest examples of the hauntingly unbuilt, at least in his own eyes, was the Mikveh Israel synagogue, which he worked on for eleven years before finally being told the congregation didn’t want his plans. That disappointment still lay far in the future, though. In 1961, when Kahn was awarded the synagogue commission, it seemed yet another sign of his growing success, a hometown victory to match the national honor of the MoMA show.

  “Awarded,” however, was perhaps not the right word to describe the decision-making that led to Kahn’s selection. Mikveh Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in Philadelphia (and, by their own reckoning, the oldest continuously operating synagogue in the United States), had not conducted any kind of competition or formal selection process in choosing the architect for their new building. Instead, a couple of powerful board members—namely, Dr. Bernard Alpers, Esther’s longtime employer and Lou’s friend, and Dr. Lillian Alpers, his wife—had put forth Kahn’s name, and Kahn’s name alone. The Alperses were attempting to make up for what they perceived as the slight to Louis Kahn perpetrated by the City of Philadelphia, which had built so little of his work; they were also trying to secure for their synagogue the services of an architect whose accomplishments they knew and admired. Yet even though they were able to get a majority of the board to vote for Kahn in May of 1961—at which point he began feverishly working on the design—resentments continued to simmer under the surface. The vote was not unanimous, with two trustees voting against giving out the contract: one because he felt it was too early in the process, the other because he objected to the absence of choice. There was also some concern that an architect who belonged to the Mikveh Israel congregation, Alfred Bendiner, would feel offended at not getting the commission himself (as indeed he did).

  Part of the problem, both then and later, may have had to do with Lou’s insufficient Jewishness. He did his best to learn about the guiding principles of Orthodox Judaism and the specific Sephardic tradition that this congregation derived from. But he could not conceal from the Mikveh Israel members his own lack of religious education. “Kaddish/kiddush,” he noted at the side of one of his architectural drawings, as if to help himself remember the difference between the prayer in memory of the dead and the traditional blessing over the weekly ceremonial meal. He kept referring to the sanctuary as a church and the sukkah as a chapel—blatantly Christian terms which, though they fed into Kahn’s ecumenical idea that all religions were essentially one, would have offended the ears of his clients. Kahn also had his own firm convictions about the nature of a religious building, and they included a distinct separation between secular and sacred spaces. This was something the congregation, on its limited budget, felt it couldn’t afford, and one of the final battles took place over the architect’s refusal to put the gift shop under the same roof as the sanctuary. At least in conversations with his own staff, Kahn cited as part of his reasoning Christ’s insistence on keeping the money changers out of the temple. For the Mikveh Israel worshippers, this New Testament quotation (if they ever learned about it) would have been the last straw.

  All these conflicts still lay in the future, though, and in May and June of 1961 Kahn threw himself fervently into the newly won commission. His initial design, with light filtering delicately into an enclosed chamber through pierced outer walls, was clearly inspired by Ronchamp and La Tourette, the Corbusier religious buildings he had seen two years earlier. Had these plans for Mikveh Israel reached completion, the building would have been far more memorable in every way than the rigorously vertical Richards Building, with its unmodulated, relatively unsubtle lighting effects. And yet, even as he began work on the synagogue, it was the Richards Building for which he was being celebrated.

  The MoMA exhibit honoring the Alfred Newton Richards Building opened on June 6, 1961, and the private viewing and celebratory cocktail party were held the night before. It was a grand occasion: the show’s curator, Wilder Green, had praised the structure as “probably the single most consequential building constructed in the United States since the war,” and the mood on the part of Kahn’s colleagues, friends, and family was correspondingly high. The party itself was held in the Sculpture Garden, at the end of a warm, sunny day, with the daylight blending gradually into twilight as the cocktail hour wore on. More than a hundred people had been invited, and most of them came.

  Leopold Kahn had traveled all the way from California for the event, and at the opening festivities he could be seen talking to Anne Tyng, whom he was meeting for the first time. “Why is a beautiful young woman like you not married?” he asked her. She teasingly responded, “I was waiting for you,” and Leopold roared with laughter. Harriet Pattison, standing at some distance from the two of them, wondered what Anne had said to make him laugh so. Closer to the central cluster of dignitaries, Esther Kahn performed her role as official consort and also hovered protectively over Sue Ann, who had just graduated that morning from Penn, with both her parents present at the ceremony. (The University of Pennsylvania’s president, Dr. Gaylord Harnwell, had also been invited to the MoMA opening, but he politely sent his regrets on the grounds that it fell on the same day as his university’s Commencement, even as he also chimed in with praise for the honoree.)

  The architectural celebrities in attendance included Philip Johnson, chair of MoMA’s architecture committee, and Vincent Scully, who came down from Yale, accompanied by a number of Kahn’s other former colleagues. Several practicing Philadelphia architects and Penn architecture professors also showed up. A few of Lou’s newer, younger staff we
re present, including Dave Rothstein, who had done most of the work on the architectural model displayed in the show. But it was mainly the older guard from Kahn’s office that was represented here, proudly gathered together on this noteworthy occasion to celebrate their late-blooming and now widely revered employer.

  Yet even at the time, Louis Kahn knew that the Richards Building was not his definitive achievement, nor even a true indicator of the direction he was to take. “If the world discovered me after I designed the Richards tower building,” he told an interviewer many years later, “I discovered myself after designing that little concrete-block bath house in Trenton.” In this judgment he was to prove singularly correct. It was the Trenton Bath House, begun three years before the Richards Building, that more accurately forecast the remarkable buildings of his later years. Something about that modest yet precise structure, it turned out, was capable of giving its users the same kinds of pleasures that would be generated by his masterpieces: a sense of being safely enclosed while at the same time gaining access to the world outside; a delight in the various forms of natural illumination, which changed according to the time of day; a tactile appreciation of sturdy materials like unpainted wood and rough concrete; and a feeling of grandeur even in the most quotidian of circumstances.

  Picture a girl from nearby Trenton—an adolescent, say, just a year or two younger than Kahn’s oldest daughter—who might have come to the Bath House for a swim shortly after it opened to the public. After passing by the front wall’s mural and reaching the central courtyard, she goes left to get into the women’s changing room. Slipping through one of the twisty, doorless concrete entrances that lead in from either side, she finds herself released into the surprisingly grand space of the room itself, all the larger in comparison to the tunnel-like approach. Above her, the high arch of the pyramidal wooden roof guides her eye upward to the square hole from which light pours down, making everything, even her own body, seem to bask in the ceiling’s glory. At one side of the room, a five-foot space between the roof and the wall—one of Kahn’s earliest and largest “light joints”—allows the sun to shine directly on her shoulders as she sits on the changing-room bench. Looking around, she notices how lightly the massive pyramid rests on its four corner supports, so that the ceiling almost seems to float above her head. Even the construction materials, the coarse wood and the undisguised concrete blocks, take on a kind of rough sublimity from their placement in this setting, as if to suggest that humble things could have their own form of elegance. As the girl sits in the light and watches it alter over time, with clouds passing over the sun and the sun itself slowly shifting position, she might well take this message about transcendence to apply directly to herself.

  The Trenton Bath House was a building that Louis Kahn could not have designed without Anne Tyng—not only because specific aspects of the final plan were her idea, but also because the structure’s rigorous, symmetrical geometries borrowed something of her essential sensibility. And yet it was also, ironically, his first step away from her. In its use of complementary heaviness and lightness, on the one hand, and contrasting darkness and light, on the other, the little Trenton building crucially signaled the path he was destined to take. It was a path influenced not just by his close collaborator Tyng, and not just by the more distant figure of Le Corbusier, but also by his Brutalist and Bauhaus colleagues at Yale and his Beaux-Arts instructors at Penn. Perhaps, above all, it was a path marked out for him by the ancient Roman architects to whom he had been introduced by the archaeologist Frank Brown. If the Trenton Bath House was not exactly the Pantheon, it was nonetheless Kahn’s first real step in that direction.

  IN SITU: PHILLIPS EXETER LIBRARY

  Interior of Phillips Exeter Library with circular cutout

  (Photograph by Bradford Herzog © Phillips Exeter Academy)

  It doesn’t look like anything else on the campus. A squarish structure about eighty feet high, it is noticeably taller than any of the three-story, brick-and-marble neocolonial buildings that populate the rest of this New England prep school. It sits alone on its own patch of grassy ground, set well back from Front Street, the main city road that divides the campus in half. At night, its lit-up windows beam invitingly from every floor, guiding you toward it along the paths that cut diagonally across the grass. In the daytime, especially when viewed from a distance, it manages to look somewhat forbidding, and also to seem both modern and ancient at once. Its cube-like bulk, consisting mainly of framing brick around rows and columns of rectangular windowpanes, signals its twentieth-century origins, but the glassless openings in the arcades at the top and bottom levels suggest something much older. Standing on the other side of Front Street and viewing the roofline from afar, with patches of sky peeking through the gaps between the narrow brick columns, you might almost imagine you were looking at a Roman ruin.

  And that sense of an older architecture is reinforced as you approach, for around all four sides at the ground level runs a gallery of the sort one might find in a medieval monastery. This arcade is protected from the elements by a heavy brick overhang, but it opens to the air on the outer sides, its rows of shadowy doorways recessed between the brick supports. A fierce symmetry guides the design: each opening in the arcade is at the base of a column of windows that rises directly above it, and only the tiniest differences distinguish the four sides of the building from each other. One of these differences involves point of access, for although you can circumnavigate the entire building from within the covered brick gallery, you can only enter the library through two of its four chamfered edges—that is, the two corners that are closest to Front Street.

  Anyone can just walk in. There are no guards checking bags at the door, no librarians manning desks on the ground-floor level. You find yourself wondering how secure this is. “Will my coat be okay if I leave it here for three hours?” you ask the small group of Exeter students standing near the coatracks just inside the door. “You could leave your iPhone here for three hours and it would be okay,” one of them answers. They have no doubts at all. They feel utterly safe and protected in this place.

  The ground floor is apparently meant for pleasure reading. Peering through the glass doors that lead from the entrance hall to a carpeted area further in, you can see freestanding magazine racks, comfortable chairs, wooden tables meant for small-group gatherings, and natural light flooding in through large windows. But you have no desire to explore this lower region now, because an immense, alluring, semicircular staircase is drawing you up to the next level. On both sides of its curving, symmetrical arms, the wide travertine steps and handsome, solid balustrades beckon you upward toward the castle-like notches that mark either side of the landing; and as you approach this landing, you sense that something colossal and surprising awaits you there. It is the classic Kahn seduction: the somewhat opaque exterior, the elusive front door, the low-ceilinged entryway, and then the sudden arousal and fulfillment of one’s previously unknown desire. Desire, not necessity, is the motivating force. “Need is so many bananas. Need is a ham sandwich,” Kahn once remarked. “But desire is insatiable and you can never know what it is.”

  Elsewhere in Kahn’s buildings, at the Rochester Unitarian Church, say, or the Yale Center for British Art, you need only move forward through an opening or a doorway to receive your gratification. But here, at this place for youthful learning, you must actively take control of the discovery by climbing up one side or the other of this inviting staircase (and even that—the choice of which of the two curved arms you ascend—is a decision you must make on your own). The staircase itself becomes part of your education, part of your experience. “Because it is not just a matter of being wide enough to go up, you see,” Kahn said about stairs in another context, “but to be assertive enough to realize that to go up is one of the events of the building. It’s an event of the building, and you know how much of one. It plays on your mind as being important and welcomes you as you rise on the stairway.”

 
What greets you when you reach the top of the Exeter staircase is one of the grandest and most appealing spaces Kahn ever built. Grandeur here is not just a function of size (though the library’s atrium, which reaches to the very top of the building, does feel satisfyingly huge); it is more a matter of proportions, materials, and above all natural light. As you stand in the center of the atrium, you are aware of the vast space above you, extending up the light-filled, concrete-and-wood room to a ceiling that is high above your head. Coffered in a tic-tac-toe pattern of nine large squares, the concrete ceiling rests atop a series of glassed-in clerestory windows that fill all four sides. Directly beneath them a cross, also made of concrete, extends diagonally over your head, meeting the wall at a wide strip of elegantly incised wood paneling. You can tell by looking at this joint that the concrete X is massive—at least one full story in height, if not more—but from down on the floor of the atrium it appears to float delicately overhead, letting through the sunlight from above as if it were a two-dimensional tracery.

  Below the cross, on each of the four walls, is a gigantic circular cutout through which you can see at least three floors of stacks and reading rooms, each level marked by a beautifully paneled half-height wooden wall that is actually the back of a waist-high bookshelf. These edge-defining bookshelves come more fully into view as you mount to each level of the library and look across at them, or down on them from above. The perspective alters constantly as you move up or down through the four-story space; it alters even when you stand still and raise or lower your glance. But that is a discovery you only make as you climb higher and begin to perceive the library’s full complexity—its structural variations on each level, its discrete sections and rooms and corridors hidden on every floor, its mysterious and sometimes vertiginous views. From the floor of the central atrium, the overall shape of the place seems graspable, finite. And this sense of security, this realization that everything joins up at the center, allowing you to locate yourself visually, persists through all the surprising, sometimes unnerving discoveries that the building yields up as you explore it.