by Wendy Lesser
To be honest, the finished structure had more wrong with it than just unequal bedrooms. Though the lobby included a gracious, naturally lit atrium punctuated with intriguing cutout shapes, the rest of the building’s interior felt somewhat cramped and dark. The angularity of the diagonals combined with the harshness of the concrete walls to produce a feeling of coldness and impersonality; even the ground-floor inglenook, with its brick chimney-face and wooden floor, could not warm up the institutional space. In addition, the slate Lou had chosen for the exterior panels turned out to be too porous, and when it eventually had to be sealed with a shiny finish to prevent leaks and weathering, the building looked as if it had been covered in dark gray acrylic. But the really serious problem was that the Bryn Mawr students hated the dorm. No one moving away from her parents for the first time could find anything homelike in this modernist experiment, and for many decades after its 1965 completion, Erdman Hall remained the last-choice dormitory among incoming freshmen.
In July of 1962, though, most of these problems still lay in the future, and much of Lou’s staff was working at least part of the time toward the Bryn Mawr bid date, which was set for the spring of 1963. When Lou returned from his cataract surgery, there were probably a dozen architects and draftsmen employed at his office; by the end of the year the number would increase to twenty or so, and that would be the range within which the staff would continue to expand and contract. “They had these huge projects and very few people in the office,” commented David Slovic, who came to work there in the mid-1960s: “Lou had his own pace.” Fred Langford confirmed the small ratio of workers to work, noting that “we did work a lot of hours. In the six years I worked for him, I know I averaged sixty to seventy hours a week.”
Ed Richards, who joined the firm in late 1962 to work on Erdman Hall, had his own take on the idiosyncrasies of Kahn’s process. Like other staff members, he understood that it was essentially a one-man office, with design directives issuing from Kahn alone. But he was disturbed by the inefficiencies in the system. “He could really only work on one project, because he was so involved in it,” Ed remarked. “Our Bryn Mawr was a stepsister to Salk.” And then, once he’d got things rolling, Kahn would adopt a new project without regard to scale or cost. “Lou would work on a house,” pointed out Richards. “The time you spend, any big firm would lose money on a house or a church. You make money when you have a repetitive thing like an apartment building. My understanding is, with Kahn, he really only made money on Salk”—and that was probably because, unlike any of his other commissions, the Salk project paid him an hourly rate and not a fixed percentage of the final costs. “He was a terrible businessman,” Richards said. “The thing is, he didn’t care.”
Neither, for the most part, did the people around him, because he made the task at hand seem so compelling. “Lou brought emotional depth and poetic discussion to architecture,” said Lois Sherr Dubin, who studied at Penn’s School of Architecture in the late 1950s and had some contact with Kahn’s office in the early 1960s. “He was very, very moving when he talked about things.” And for those who worked with him, this approach could be tremendously inspiring. “The biggest lesson from Lou on the positive side was to be relentless in seeking the right answer,” said Jack MacAllister. That was why, toward the end of any design process, his employees would urge each other to keep the finished drawings out of Lou’s sight—otherwise he was likely to think of a new approach just before construction began. For Lou, the excitement was all in the search for the building’s essential nature. And if that search was sometimes difficult, it could also be terrifically enjoyable.
“Lou was very much alive. Fun to be with. Uplifting,” Fred Langford pointed out. “He could complain about something, but he was never down. Great sense of humor. He would sit down and we would all gather round and listen to him. He was not an efficient businessman—there we all were, supposed to be working for him, and in his own mind there was no difference between us and his Penn class.”
* * *
The class at the University of Pennsylvania was something Lou had continued to teach even as his workload at the office increased, and in 1962, despite his recent cataract surgery, he began the fall semester promptly on September 10. Every Monday and Wednesday at 2:00 he would show up at his studio at the top of the Furness Building and talk about architecture with his students.
“It’s very hard to tell, but he could have been the best teacher in the world,” said Ed Richards, who was one of Kahn’s students in the 1950s. “The reason is he had fabulous ideas. For almost three weeks you don’t understand what he’s saying, because he has his own language and he’s kind of a staccato sort of person. But once you get it, it’s fabulous.”
The Philadelphia architect Charles Dagit gave an example from his own studies with Lou, which took place about a decade later. According to Dagit, the class would begin with Kahn sitting in complete silence, just stroking his chin until the tension became unbearable. Then he would start talking about the “universal elements” of architecture: the stair, the column, the wall, the window, and so on. “Who invented these things?” he would ask. “Who now owns them? How did the vault begin? These are the things of our expression. They exist because they must. When did they become?” And then Lou would tell the students his parable of the wall, in which the wall has a window ripped in its side and feels weak and sad until it is strengthened with lintels above and below, and with piers on either side. “And Lou’s parable continued and continued,” said Dagit, “drawing ever closer to its ultimate and inevitable end. And so, he said, ‘the walls parted and the column became.’” This was one of his trademark ideas, always expressed in this phrase, and he loved passing it along to younger listeners.
Kahn was deeply committed to his students, allowing them not only a full measure of his time (“If he owed you three hours, he gave you three hours,” Ed Richards observed), but also offering them both wide latitude and close attention. “He gave fabulous crits,” Richards said. “He would do things like—one of the fellows in my class was designing a church. He said, ‘The way you approach this design is excellent. I would never design a church like that, but it’s a process.’” Lois Dubin remembered something similar, remarking: “He didn’t want you to copy. He wanted you to use what was within you. He wanted to introduce an order to your thinking that freed up spaces that were wonderful spaces.”
But Lou could also be a bear if he was in a bad mood. Charles Dagit recalled the risks of pinning up one’s work for the regular crits. “Lou would walk around the room in the beginning of class surveying the drawings,” noted Dagit. “He often would stop at those that intrigued him and start to speak. On the other hand, he sometimes would approach a student’s work that he did not care for … He would pause and, with his hand to his thick glasses, he would examine the drawing ever so carefully, with his nose nearly touching the paper. He would maintain that pose for thirty or forty seconds—a veritable eternity—then he would pull his head back slightly and talk to the drawing. He would say in his high-pitched voice, ‘The building is a crab’ or ‘This building is a turd on the landscape. Whose is it?’”
Ed Richards remembered a similarly unpleasant occasion from a decade earlier. “He came in one night—he was in a terrible mood—he just went around the class and tore everyone apart,” said Richards of that evening session. “It was late at night, he was tired—I don’t know, maybe something bad had happened that day. He could be that way. But on the other hand he could be so wonderful.” When he came to work at Kahn’s office, Ed noticed the same vacillation between extremes. “It was heaven and hell,” he said. “The hell part of it was when you worked all evening and Lou would go home to sleep and he would come in in the morning and say it was crap.”
To be fair, it wasn’t as if the boss was always sleeping while the staff was working: most of his other employees described Lou as working at night as well. If he went off to a movie house for a few hours in the course of the
evening, as he occasionally did, it would be to catch up on his sleep. “The time that Lou was there was at night,” David Slovic pointed out, because he had so many client meetings and other things to do in the day. So Slovic tried to work nights, too, in order to be part of Kahn’s world. “It was always exciting to work there,” he said. “Nobody was cynical. Everyone was there to help it happen, and everyone felt it was important, that he was onto something that would change what architecture was about.”
But even this young enthusiast saw that Lou could be highly critical at times. Once, for instance, they had all been working on a model so that Kahn could bring it to a client, and “towards the end a bunch of us were working on it probably two or three days straight, without any sleep, trying to get it ready for the presentation. Basically, we butchered the model,” admitted Slovic. “Lou comes in five, six in the morning, and he starts looking at the model and he says, ‘I can’t take it. This is no good.’ He wasn’t angry; he was just very clear. ‘I’ll take the drawings. I’m not going to take the model.’ It wasn’t you idiots, it wasn’t insulting to us; it was just the work. We’d not been able to pull it off.”
For Ed Richards, who arrived at the firm just as Lou was starting to recover from his cataract operation, Kahn’s critical nature and his actual vision somehow coincided. “He went from someone that was a little blurry to someone with these thick glasses,” said Ed. “He would see the grain on the vellum; he saw too much.” But for Fred Langford—who, practically alone among Kahn’s employees, always found him “easy to work with”—the blurry vision was just another side of Lou’s charm. “When people came into the office,” Fred remembered about the regular morning routine, “Lou would shake their hands. He would just stand there and shake everyone’s hand. Finally, the window washer came in, and Lou shook his hand. And he said, ‘I’m just the window washer.’ And Lou says, ‘I’m Mr. Magoo.’”
The Mr. Magoo personality came to the fore when Lou made a trip out to California in October of 1962. “He would say, ‘Where am I here? Tell me where I am on the site,’” Fred Langford recalled. Jack MacAllister said that he, too, had to act as Lou’s eyes during Kahn’s visits to the Salk site. “He was just totally blind, I mean when he first got his glasses,” said Jack. “And I’d have to walk him to the job and hold him by the hand. And he’d whisper in my ear, ‘Tell me when something’s bad so I can scream about it.’”
It was during this period, too, that Lou began to draw almost exclusively with charcoal on yellow tracing paper. He no longer did the detailed pencil drawings he had done earlier in his career, or even lively crayon sketches like the ones he had made in the initial stages of Esherick House. Now his medium was a stick of charcoal, sometimes clasped directly in his hand, sometimes lodged in a “broker’s pencil” that had been designed to hold a very thick lead. “We all had Lou’s kind of pencil,” said David Slovic. “He had a fabulous one—silver, with a big fat lead. I had one or two; everyone had one. You had to find them in antique shops.” Slovic described how Kahn would draw over someone else’s drawing, “put a trace over it and correct it as he drew.” And Lou would also make his own original drawings in charcoal. “It was when his eyes went bad that he started drawing in charcoal, so that resulted in some very beautiful drawings,” Slovic said. The younger architect remembered how Kahn would constantly erase and redraw, so that “it had all the traces of his thoughts—what we don’t have with computers—embedded in the drawings.”
To Ed Richards, though, it seemed as if Kahn’s avowed affection for charcoal went back much further. “When I was a student, he’d try to get everyone to start with charcoal,” Ed pointed out. “Charcoal is easy, and if you found something wrong you’d just…”—and here he mimicked the gesture of erasing a line with a brush of his hand. “If you had drawn all that and found something wrong, you’d be much more hesitant to change it. You’re much freer with charcoal.” And Fred Langford seconded this notion, commenting about Lou’s approach: “I think he would say he liked the charcoal because he could erase it quick. ‘Give me a hard line and then I don’t want to change it!’”
* * *
All throughout his initial months of recovering from his cataract operation, Lou was planning another great adventure: a voyage to India, with an exciting new project to work on. Earlier in 1962, his friend Doshi had telegraphed him asking if he would like to design the new Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, and Lou, after some hesitation, had accepted. “I will help you realize your dream,” Doshi assured him.
The two men had known each other since the late 1950s, when Balkrishna Doshi—then a young Indian architect who had already worked with Le Corbusier in Paris and Ahmedabad—was visiting the United States on a Graham Fellowship. Brought to Kahn’s Philadelphia office by a friend from New York, Doshi showed Kahn photographs of some of his work, and the older man seemed impressed by the affinity between their ideas. After looking at the design of Doshi’s own house, which separated off the kitchen, bath, and staircase from the living and sleeping rooms, “he started talking about the master and servant spaces, a concept of which I was quite ignorant,” Doshi reported. “He then pulled out his embassy project in Luanda and mentioned about the similarity of approaches between my house and the embassy plan.”
The 1959 design for an American consulate in Luanda, though it was never built, became the seed behind many of Kahn’s ideas for the buildings he later did in hot climates, including Salk and Ahmedabad. “I came back with multiple impressions of how clever was the man who solved the problems of sun, rain, and wind,” Lou was to say upon his return from Angola. In particular, the Africa project had caused him to come up with two new design possibilities. One involved having windows face a sunlight-reflecting wall across a space that was open to the sky; this would cut down on glare while still allowing an abundance of natural light into the room. The other entailed placing a “sun roof” at a six-foot distance from a sturdier “rain roof,” so that breezes could waft in and cool the space between. Perhaps most tellingly, Kahn’s consulate design gave rise to a phrase that would not only define that particular project, with its inner walls protected by outer walls, but would also echo down the years of his future work: “I thought of wrapping ruins around buildings.”
But on the occasion of Doshi’s visit to Philadelphia, it was the Richards Building—first the drawings and models, then the site itself—that most impressed the thirty-one-year-old Indian. It was here that Kahn had produced what Doshi considered “the new idiom of a modern skyscraper … manifest in the service tower made of bricks, juxtaposed with the glass windows without any mullions at the corners. The stark contrast between the stoic brick towers and the transparency, reflections and details of glass windows even today haunt me,” Doshi wrote in one of his commentaries on Kahn’s work.
The other thing that stuck in his mind from this first encounter was that when Kahn offered to take his young visitor out to dinner, he had to borrow cash from his secretary to do so. That Louis Kahn was someone who didn’t think much about money was evident from the beginning, and it was to remain central to Doshi’s view of him. “Till the last day he remained a generous person. He only gave,” Doshi noted, “and all he wanted in return was to know more about others and their pursuits.”
(Others did not necessarily share Doshi’s take on Lou, at least in this regard. “He was very worried about not having any money,” commented Richard Saul Wurman. “He was not a giving person. He was not particularly nice in a lot of ways. He was bitter about other people getting jobs he didn’t get.” And yet even he acknowledged that doing things the right way was far more important to Kahn than earning money. “He almost purposely would shoot himself in the foot, he so much didn’t want to compromise,” Wurman said. “He would give up a building rather than compromise.” So Wurman’s Kahn turned out in some ways to be as much of a self-denying saint as Doshi’s, despite the rather unsaintly selfish streak.)
After his initial visit to
Philadelphia, Doshi returned to Penn in 1961 to teach for a few weeks in the architecture school, and it was then that he and Lou solidified their friendship. When he got back to India from that trip, he met with two important clients, Kasturbhai Lalbhai and Vikram Sarabhai, about their plans to develop an Indian Institute of Management along the lines of Harvard’s famous business school. Lalbhai, a textile-mill owner whom Doshi described as “the grand old man of Indian industry and a great patron of architects,” had already hired Le Corbusier to design two major buildings in Ahmedabad. Dr. Sarabhai, a prominent scientist and industrialist, was to be the director of the new management institute; he was also a member of an important local family for whom Corbusier had designed a private house. Both men, though they wanted Doshi to take responsibility for the IIM project, also wanted him to collaborate with an international architect comparable in stature to Le Corbusier. (Corbu himself was unavailable for this job, since he was by now busy with Chandigarh and other new projects.) They proposed the names of a couple of American architects they thought would fit the bill. “I said no, I will get you someone as good as Corbusier,” Doshi recalled, and that’s when he contacted Kahn. According to their informal arrangement—Lou being Lou, there was never a formal contract—Kahn would be the official architect and Doshi his local consultant. The project was to be run out of the National Institute of Design offices in Ahmedabad and subsidized, in part, by the Ford Foundation, which gave a grant to cover Lou’s travel and accommodation costs.