You Say to Brick

by Wendy Lesser

  ACHIEVING

  “Dr. Salk to office, 1501 Walnut,” said the sole entry in the office calendar for March 1, 1962. The address was underlined because it signaled a departure: this was the first appointment in the new office, to which the firm of Louis I. Kahn Architect was finally moving from its cramped quarters five blocks away. In the new location, at the corner of 15th and Walnut, Kahn and his employees were to occupy two floors instead of one; and because this solidly undemonstrative, pale-stone-clad building jutted a full story above its adjoining neighbor to the west, the top floor in particular was filled with natural light. That fifth floor was where Lou’s own office would be, next to the long, high drafting room that was lit by tall windows on both sides.

  His daughter Alex was just turning eight at the time of the move, but she distinctly remembered both offices. “He lived—slip of the tongue—he worked at 20th and Walnut when I was a little girl, on the second floor of a two-story building,” she recalled. “He moved to 1501 Walnut from there.” The new location, as it happened, was on one of the classiest blocks in downtown Philadelphia, with a fashionable men’s clothing store located diagonally across the intersection and the brokerage house of Butcher & Singer directly opposite, its ticker tapes visible through large glass windows in front. But these trappings of affluence were not the kinds of things a child would notice.

  “I remember the smell, which smelled like plasticine and pencils and paper,” Alex said of her father’s final premises. “A good smell, kind of sweet, like people were working. It wasn’t elegant—just a big space. His personal office was kind of small but it had nice big windows. It was a corner office. It was kind of spare. There was a table in light-colored wood and some bentwood chairs. He had a colored pencil sketch by an architect, Doshi—just a colored, lively sketch, maybe 24 by 30—taped up on the wall. And then he had books everywhere. He had a little mat in the corner where he would take naps. There were things sitting on windowsills and tops of shelves. They changed; probably if he traveled somewhere and people gave him things, he would put them on the windowsill.”

  But that process of accumulation was still to come. In March of 1962 Kahn had only just moved in, and he was using the new space mainly as a formal setting in which to greet his most important client. In fact, it was the steady income provided by the Salk project (along with contributing amounts from other jobs like the First Unitarian Church in Rochester, the Carborundum factory in Niagara Falls, the private houses built for Margaret Esherick and the Shapiros in the greater Philadelphia area, and the beginnings of the Fort Wayne and Bryn Mawr commissions) that had allowed Lou to acquire the larger office.

  The recent improvement in his financial condition was clear from the tax return that Louis and Esther Kahn filed jointly that spring. The income from Kahn’s architecture practice was listed as an astonishing $366,309—an enormous jump from the $66,757 he had reported four years earlier. More to the point, Lou’s substantial 1961 income enabled him to show a profit for almost the first time in his career. Of the $28,445 the Kahns declared as their taxable income that year, a full $13,713, or nearly half, came from Lou’s architecture firm. Considering that his practice had generated a loss throughout most of the previous two decades—a loss that was always offset against Esther’s steady earnings as a medical technician and, more recently, Lou’s as a professor of architecture, which together rarely totaled more than $13,000—this year marked a serious change in his ability to earn an income.

  That the Salk Institute commission was profitable (and indeed would remain the only profitable project that Kahn ever undertook in his career) was hardly its major virtue in his eyes. Lou was notoriously careless about money matters. “There’s a picture of a bad businessman,” he once said about a photograph of himself that was hanging in the office, and though his employees felt he intended the comment as rueful self-mockery, it could also have contained an element of pride. What Jonas Salk was offering him was worth much more than dollars and cents. It was a chance to try out innovative ideas with a sympathetic and intelligent collaborator. It was an opportunity to build something that could be strangely, unexpectedly beautiful, and at the same time enduringly useful.

  When the two men first met in 1959, Louis Kahn was just beginning to be recognized as an architect, while Jonas Salk was already a world-famous epidemiologist whose successful vaccine against polio had put him on the cover of Time magazine. Salk had recently decided he wanted to build his own biological research institute, and the City of San Diego had given him, free of charge, a stunning twenty-seven-acre site overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The buildings themselves would be paid for by the March of Dimes, Salk’s supporters and allies in the fight against polio. With the site and the funding both assured, all that remained was for Salk to find the right architect for the job. Scientific colleagues who had heard Kahn speak about the Richards Building at a bicentennial event at Carnegie Mellon told Dr. Salk that perhaps this man could give him some useful advice about the architectural selection process. So in December of 1959 Jonas Salk came to Philadelphia to meet with this potential advisor and visit the Richards site.

  He was not greatly impressed by the towering brick-clad building (which proved, when completed, to be the bane of those who had to work inside it), but Salk and Kahn hit it off personally. Both men came from Eastern European Jewish immigrant families, and Salk, like Kahn, had grown up in one of the poorer sections of a large East Coast city—in his case, New York. Yet this common background was not enough to explain the instant sympathy that arose between them. It may have had more to do with the fact that the two of them were at once intense realists and intense idealists. “I found being with him a very warm, stimulating experience,” Salk said. “The kind of person he is—the poetic, mystical type—always warms my heart.” From the very beginning, they found themselves able to treat each other as equals, despite the obvious gaps in age (Kahn was thirteen years older) and status (Salk was infinitely more famous and successful). “I have to say he exhibited as much respect for me as I have for him,” Salk commented toward the end of their project together, “and because of this, the two of us were able to struggle through many difficulties.”

  Kahn’s take on the relationship was, if anything, even warmer. “When you ask who has been my favorite client,” he said toward the end of his life, “one name comes sharply to mind, and that is Dr. Jonas Salk. Dr. Salk listened closely to my speculations and was serious about how I would approach the building. He listened more carefully to me than I did to myself, and then he recorded these things in his mind. During the time for our study, he constantly reminded me of premises which were not being carried out. These premises, which he thought were important, were also the basis of his questioning in his own way of thinking. In that way he was just as much the designer of the project as myself.”

  Shortly after their initial meeting, the two men went to La Jolla together to visit the empty site—a second visit for Salk, the first for Kahn. That was in January of 1960. Somehow the status of “advisor” got converted, without any formal discussion, into the position of architect for the project, and by March of that year Kahn’s office had produced a model that Dr. Salk could take around in his efforts to publicize the project. By November the City of San Diego had signed off on the plan, and Kahn’s firm moved rapidly ahead with its work.

  Sixteen months later, in March of 1962, the design had already gone through one major revision, shifting from a Richards-like complex of eight high-rise towers to a more site-suitable, lower-height scheme involving two-story laboratory blocks grouped around two garden courts. In addition to the labs, this scheme included the Village (a set of residential apartments for visiting scientists, located to the south of the main complex) and, to the north, a grand communal structure called the Meeting House. When Salk had first discussed his proposed institute with Kahn, he had mentioned that he wanted it to be a place to which Picasso could be invited: a place, in other words, where the best in art and sci
ence would mingle freely. The Meeting House was Kahn’s response to that idea.

  Working with the engineers August Komendant and Fred Dubin, his collaborators on the Richards Building, Kahn put together the “folded plate scheme” that replaced the initial towers. The name derived from the V-shaped hollow beams that were designed to carry ductwork and other services along the full length of each lab block—the point being that the fold, as in a creased piece of paper, would enable the beams to carry greater weight. It was a clever feat of engineering, and all of Kahn’s associates on the project, whether architects or engineers, were extremely fond of the design. They proudly presented the scheme to Salk when he visited Philadelphia in January of 1962, and when he voiced certain criticisms, they made revisions that were shown to him in March. Things seemed all set to proceed toward construction.

  And then the project shifted direction once again. On March 27, out in Southern California, Salk and Kahn met with potential contractors to select a construction team. Later that day, after the meetings were over, Dr. Salk strolled through the site on his own. “It was twilight,” he recalled. “I tried to imagine how the buildings would look, and I must say, I suddenly became terribly unhappy.” The following day, March 28, Kahn and Salk had an appointment scheduled in San Francisco to present the status of the project to its funders. “Well, I told Lou on the plane the next morning that I thought we had to start over again,” Dr. Salk said, “because I really was not happy about the plans. And I sketched for him what I thought I didn’t like, and also what I thought was needed.” Salk’s objections centered on the extreme narrowness of the two gardens—“not gardens at all, but two alleys,” as he described them—and on the excessive width of the lab buildings.

  Kahn, though he had invested more than a year of his firm’s time in the folded plate scheme, felt the truth in Salk’s criticism. As an architect he was always willing to change course, even on a nearly completed project, if he saw that something better could be done. It was one of the most characteristic aspects of his method, and it often proved frustrating for both employees and clients, though in this instance it served him well. “He was always very gracious in saying that this gave him an opportunity to build an even greater building,” Jonas Salk would later remark. Lou worked quickly to come up with a new design, and it was the revised plan—with its mirroring rows of six-story labs standing behind rows of study towers, which in turn faced each other across the sole open space—that finally got approved for construction a few months later.

  * * *

  “When the folded plate went out, a lot of the kids lost interest,” said Fred Langford, who at the time had only recently started working at Kahn’s office. “But I was new and young and still interested. Then we got the Vierendeel truss.”

  Langford was referring to the new scheme’s key engineering element, the long, flexible beams that August Komendant had adapted so as to make possible both the open-plan labs and the innovative full-height service floors between them. When Dr. Salk saw the plans for these Vierendeel-supported interstitial floors, he reportedly said he liked them because they reminded him of something he knew about from biology—that is, the mesodermal layer that separated the external skin from the tissues beneath it. Vierendeels had already served a significant function in the Richards project, but now Komendant lengthened and strengthened them for the Salk. “That was good for earthquakes,” Langford pointed out, “because as Komendant said” (and here he adopted the engineer’s distinctive German-Estonian accent), “It vill r-r-roll back and fort’ like a drunken sailor.”

  With construction ready to commence, Kahn sent two of his young employees out to La Jolla to keep a close eye on the project. Fred Langford was thirty-four at the time; Jack MacAllister was only twenty-eight. Jack had been with Lou part-time since 1955, full-time since 1956, and he was known as a problem-solver. “Jack is quick on his feet. He’ll get us out of it,” Lou would say when a crisis arose, particularly one involving money. Fred had just joined the firm in 1961, but something about him inspired Lou’s confidence. Perhaps it was that he got along easily with people. Maybe it was because he was one of the few architects in the office who seemed fully on board with the new Salk design. It may also have had something to do with his commendable drafting skills, which definitely impressed Lou (“He would look at something I was drawing and say to the others, ‘This man can draw!’” Langford grinned). In any case, Kahn decided to send him out to California before he had even worked a year in the Philadelphia office. “Fred, you get to go out there and be tough,” Lou told him.

  Knowing that Langford had worked in construction before becoming an architect, Kahn asked him, “Fred, what do you know about concrete?”

  “Nothing,” Fred answered.

  “That makes two of us,” said Lou.

  Of course, as trained architects they already knew a great deal about this material, not least the distinction that always eludes laypeople: the difference between concrete and cement. Concrete, as Langford would later put it, “is everything: sand and stone and cement. Cement is the matrix, your powder. It starts with limestone. You grind it up, you heat it up in furnaces, until it becomes powder.”

  That cement powder, as he and Kahn soon came to realize, could vary considerably in color, which in turn would affect the color of the finished concrete. “Lou didn’t like the first samples he was seeing from California—they were too blue, too green, not warm enough,” said Langford. “One of our first assignments was to call up the cement plants and get them to ship us samples. We got them from, oh, ten or twelve places. And finally the one with the warmest tone—pinkish-like—it came from Santa Cruz. They were adding something, the pozzolanic ash, to get the color Lou loved.” It would not have escaped Kahn’s notice that a similar ingredient, a volcanic sand called pozzuolana, was what the Romans had used in constructing the Pantheon and the Colosseum.

  Those who worked closely with Lou on this project were well aware of the connection between his love of ancient monuments and his feeling for concrete. “The permanence—he liked the idea of the old castles, the old Roman buildings, the Colosseum,” commented Langford. In fact, Kahn seemed to be attracted to anything old and ruined. Once, when he was talking to Fred about the remnants of the old Spanish monasteries in California, he said, “There’s a beauty in the fact that they’re now in repose.” It was an effect he actively sought out in his own work, and according to Jack MacAllister, concrete helped him to achieve it. “Lou loved ruins,” said MacAllister, “and with concrete, the building before it’s built is already a ruin, in a way.” But Jack also felt that Lou’s affection for concrete had a rational basis in his ideas about form and materials. “Lou loved concrete because it had substance,” he observed. “Steel buildings have no substance because the structure disappears. With concrete, you can see the structure. And it’s already architecture when it’s unbuilt—without the finishing, without what comes on top—because you can see what it will look like.”

  For the concrete to end up looking the way Louis Kahn and Jonas Salk wanted it to look, many obstacles had to be overcome, and it was probably both men’s perfectionism that resulted in the Salk Institute’s special variety of architectural concrete. To begin with, they agreed that the concrete should be poured in place, since that would make it structurally more solid as well as visually more distinctive than anything precast could be.

  “Precast is much easier—you can reject something before it goes in place. Pour in place requires much more skill,” noted Langford. “Precast is like a Lego set as opposed to a monolith: the monolith is more difficult to construct, but stronger in the end. Lou favored poured in place.” And part of his reason, Fred felt, was that the precast look was “more machine-like,” whereas Lou always wanted his buildings to look constructed by human hands—even, or especially, when the material was as industrial-seeming as modern concrete.

  The key to good poured-in-place concrete lies in the formwork, that containing plywood s
tructure into which the fresh concrete is poured, and which must then be stripped off as the concrete begins to dry and cure. Fred Langford became obsessed with how to design the formwork so as to produce the effects Lou wanted. The decision to coat the plywood in polyurethane resin rather than oil had already been made before Fred arrived at the La Jolla site, and the resin coating was what gave the smooth, almost marble-like feel to the concrete. But precisely because of its delicacy, the concrete from resin-coated forms was more likely than the normal variety to show the “bleeds,” those places where the cement granules had oozed out of the forms at the corners.

  “Lou wanted a perfect corner. Most builders would put in a chamfer,” said Fred, referring to the sliced-off diagonal corner often used to soften the edge of a building. “A chamfer could accept a little more bleeding. But that wasn’t what Lou wanted. He liked the idea of the light and the shade being definite.” Yet even as he insisted on the sharp ninety-degree edge, Kahn also made it clear that he didn’t want any bleeding, because of its effect on the visual quality of the finished concrete: “It becomes a scar,” Langford pointed out. So all through the sample panel work, Fred struggled to eliminate the bleeds, even going so far as to invent a new formwork design that made the wooden frame much more solid and airtight at the corners. He was also anxious to save money by conserving the plywood forms, which tended to break up as they were stripped off. “My goal was to satisfy Lou with the articulation of the surface, but get more reuse out of it,” he said. In this, too, Fred ultimately proved successful—so successful, in fact, that he was able to patent the system of rubber blocks used to protect the forms.