by Wendy Lesser
On November 4, 1962, Kahn flew to India. Though this was his first trip to the subcontinent, it had been preceded by at least one other encounter with Indian culture. In 1959 Lou had joined the recently formed Tagore Society of Philadelphia, an organization whose aims were “to promote a knowledge of Tagore’s artistic contributions in literature, dance, music and painting” and “to promote Tagore’s ideas of peace and universalism.” Perhaps Kahn’s growing friendship with Doshi had led to his interest in the multitalented Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature; more likely, he was urged to join by Adelaide Giurgola, his friend Aldo’s wife, who had been active in the Tagore Society since its beginning. Whatever his motive, Lou remained a full-fledged, dues-paying member of the group for at least a year.
But learning about the country through one of its great writers was one thing; India in person, with its vast range of intense, sometimes disturbing, often astounding experiences, was something else. And this first trip represented a complete immersion for Lou. In between pilgrimages to the Taj Mahal, Chandigarh, and other architectural wonders, he spent a sustained period in Ahmedabad with Doshi and the two clients. His “consultant” took him around to various local places of interest—not only the four modern buildings designed by Le Corbusier, but also the most notable ancient monuments in the area. Together Lou and Doshi visited the nearby fifteenth-century Islamic complex called Sarkej Roza, where shaded, colonnaded walkways surrounded a central open square facing the mosque, while a large pond of shallow water, accumulated during the rainy season, crept up on the outermost steps. They also saw the primary mosques in Ahmedabad itself, including Sidi Saiyyed, whose extraordinarily delicate stone tracery in the shape of a tree was to inspire the IIM logo. And they journeyed northward to the Adalaj Stepwell, a lovely Hindu ruin where visitors descended from the unobtrusive ground-level entrance through five stories of intricately carved sandstone to reach the well-water at the bottom. Here, at midday, the sunlight shone directly on the water through an octagonal opening at the top (not unlike the oculus at the center of the Pantheon’s ceiling—or, for that matter, the square holes Lou had created in the peaked roofs of the Trenton Bath House). But a diffused, watery light also filtered down to every level through the oblique openings that surrounded the central staircase. It was this powerful impression of filtered light, mingled with the direct heat and the deep shadows elsewhere in the landscape, that would remain with Kahn long after his journey was over.
* * *
He returned to the United States in late November, just in time to attend the dedication ceremony for the First Unitarian Church in Rochester on Sunday, December 2. In the three years Lou had spent working on the Rochester church project, he had become increasingly interested in Unitarianism, and he and Esther had even made a $1,000 tax-deductible donation to First Unitarian in 1961. (By comparison, the American Friends of Hebrew University got only $80 that year, and the Allied Jewish Appeal a mere $50.) This is not to say that Kahn ever considered converting. Adopting any religion would have been extremely out of character for this man who, despite his apparently mystical tendencies, described himself in the 1958 Berkeley creativity study as a complete rationalist who “dislikes irrationality thoroughly.” When asked, during one of the psychological interviews, “Have you ever had an intense experience of mystical communion with the universe, life, God, etc.?” Lou responded with an abrupt “No.” And though the interviewer observed that in his work as an architect Kahn “places great emphasis on a spiritual-value approach,” he also noted that he “consciously rejects any formal religion.” Perhaps because the Unitarians seemed inclined in the same direction, Kahn found their approach congenial.
His Unitarian clients, for their part, were delighted with their chosen architect. Among other things, they derived great pleasure from seeing how much his public stature had increased since they had hired him. In the spring of 1959, when they selected this relatively unknown Philadelphian over Walter Gropius, Paul Rudolph, Eero Saarinen, Frank Lloyd Wright, and other high-profile names, their preference might have seemed a trifle idiosyncratic. By the end of 1962, though, Kahn was widely seen as belonging in that august company. There was even a new book about him, for Vincent Scully’s Louis I. Kahn—part of Braziller’s series on “Makers of Modern Architecture”—had come out just a month prior to the Rochester dedication. “He is the one architect whom all others admire, and his reputation is international,” Scully’s little book announced, contrasting this with Kahn’s obscurity a decade earlier. His buildings, Scully went on, “are hard and normally without finishes; they are exactly what they seem: not for the fainthearted, which is as it should be. Kahn therefore requires wise and courageous clients who are willing to forgo the gloss of superficial perfection in order to take part in a sustained and demanding process of which they may one day be proud.” The Rochester Unitarians were pleased and honored to count themselves in this select category.
The formal dedication, with its unveiling of the building to the congregants, only confirmed their sense of having made the right choice. Forbidding as the nearly windowless brick exterior might have seemed on that December Sunday, there were ample rewards for the people who found their way through the church’s well-concealed front door and past the low-ceilinged entrance lobby. As they walked through a low, wide, open doorway to the right, they were greeted by their first sight of the astonishing Sanctuary.
High above their heads was a concrete cruciform ceiling that reached its lowest point at the center, where the eight smooth panels that together formed the cross shape met in eight triangular points. The fact that the roof of this large and beautiful room sloped downward toward the congregants did not feel at all oppressive. On the contrary, the sensation was rather like being sheltered under a colossal set of wings. Suspended a good six feet off the high concrete walls and seemingly held in place only by thin beams and brackets, this remarkable ceiling seemed to float rather than loom, and the whole glorious effect was enhanced by the natural light pouring in from the four corners of the room, where the high-set clerestory windows, located in four tall light-towers, let in the sunlight in a way that was mysterious because not fully visible.
The worshippers on the ground could sense the vast empty space over their heads as something luxurious and exalting, and at the same time they could sense themselves as individually significant bodies inhabiting that grand space. Seated in one of the movable chairs on the Sanctuary floor, a congregant could almost feel the oppositional pull between the downward curve of the ceiling and the upward lift of the light-wells—as if the former enabled the latter, like a dancer bending his knees before taking off in a leap. There was an atmosphere of great repose, but it was a thoughtful, sometimes unnerving repose, filled with the knowledge that light requires darkness to set it off. There was something, too, about having the light delicately entering from the corners as the roof descended slightly in the middle that conveyed an entirely different spiritual quality from that of a domed or arched building. In those more traditional churches, one was meant to sense an all-powerful God drawing everything upward toward himself. Here, in contrast, the sense of power was more diffused and less focused, as if what was being worshipped was more like sunlight, say, or humanity in the aggregate, or simply the possibility of peaceful contemplation.
Kahn returned from his Sunday in Rochester to the usual plethora of tasks in Philadelphia, including more appointments at Bryn Mawr and Esherick House, a dinner with his old friend and opponent Ed Bacon, a lunchtime meeting with his young Penn colleague Denise Scott Brown, and a nine-hour architecture jury held in Penn’s Fine Arts Building. But he made sure to schedule a substantial amount of free time—five evenings and one full day, as marked on his office calendar from December 15 to 19—for a special purpose of his own.
He was using this time to pay his first visits to his son, Nathaniel Kahn, who had been born on November 9, while Lou was away in India. Shortly after the b
irth Harriet had gone with the baby to a cottage called The Twig in Longridge, Connecticut, and it was to Longridge that Lou came on those December evenings. Snapshots taken at the time show the gently smiling gray-haired father, a bit formal-looking in his suit and tie, holding his tiny son in his arms. Soon after, in the early months of 1963, Harriet moved with Nathaniel to Charlotte, Vermont, where they were to remain for the next eighteen months. Lou and Harriet kept in frequent touch by phone and letter, but except for a flying two-day visit Lou made to Vermont when his son was one and a half years old, they did not see each other again until Harriet and Nathaniel moved back to Philadelphia in the fall of 1964.
* * *
A great deal had happened in Lou’s professional life by then, and much of it involved the Indian subcontinent. To begin with, there was the IIM project, which brought Kahn to Ahmedabad at least two or three times a year. Whenever he was there, he and Doshi would spend every waking minute together. “First of all he would come, he would go to the hotel and rest,” Doshi said. “Next morning he would come to the campus.” Early on in the process Lou had unfurled his plans for the buildings, which were to be constructed almost entirely of brick. “He wanted as much brick, as little concrete, as possible. In order to eliminate the beams, you had to make an arch,” Doshi explained. So the material itself dictated the most frequently repeated motif in the design, a rectangular open span surmounted by a wide arch, with only a thin concrete lintel in between.
Brick was an obvious choice in one way: it was local and it was cheap. Everywhere in northern India, the landscape was dotted with small to medium-sized brick factories, each with a chimney rising above its kilns. According to Doshi, most of the brick for the entire IIM complex ended up coming from a single kiln, so that the color would match. For Lou, the fact that these bricks were handmade, and looked it, would have had a special appeal, despite the opposition of certain younger modernists, who felt that the Indians should have concrete and steel just like everyone else. “Why don’t you take them out of the Stone Age?” objected the twenty-five-year-old Moshe Safdie, who was working on the Ahmedabad drawings in Kahn’s office. (“I was the only nonstudent of his in the office; I was perhaps the most critical,” Safdie confessed later, while also admitting that he had been wrong about the brick: “You have to work with what people have.”)
When Kahn and Doshi were not at the site itself, they were sometimes visiting Kasturbhai Lalbhai at his house in the Old City. This was a house the mill owner used as an office, not the place where he slept, and it was located in the most mazelike section of the city, off one of the narrow streets and partially enclosed courtyards that made up the pols, as the people of Old Ahmedabad called their tiny local enclaves. Lalbhai usually spent afternoons at this office. “From 2:30 to 4:00 every day he would be at his office, in the mornings at the textile mill—Kasturbhai was very organized,” noted Doshi. When Lou and Doshi came to visit him there, they would sit on the floor in the traditional manner.
Sometimes Lou would try to explain to Lalbhai the philosophy behind his designs, and at such moments the old industrialist would turn to Doshi and say in Gujarati, “Tell him just to come to the point. Whatever he says is fine.”
“What’s he saying?” Lou would ask, and Doshi would answer, “Nothing, nothing.”
But sometimes Lalbhai would have very specific critiques of the plan, and Kahn would always pay attention to them. “It was Kasturbhai’s idea to have the classrooms in a line, not in a turning corridor,” Doshi pointed out. In typical fashion, Lou responded to the client’s request for a change by producing his best work. That long, straight classroom building eventually became the alluring centerpiece of the whole complex, and Kahn was always eager to give Kasturbhai full credit for it. “He is a man of thorough magnificence,” with a remarkable “sense of art,” Lou said of his venerable Indian patron, “and he suggested why don’t I line them all up as one. And it was infinitely stronger. It’s very unusual that a client will give you an aesthetic argument, and that he is dead right. In his case, he is made of good stuff.”
As work progressed on the construction of the IIM, Kahn found it necessary at a certain point to pay a more prolonged visit to Ahmedabad. It was the only time he stayed for a full week, and his purpose was to teach the brickworkers how to do the brickwork in the proper way. When he saw their first attempts, he was upset with the way the walls looked. Doshi had apparently instructed them to lay the bricks as Le Corbusier had wanted it done, but Kahn wanted something different—a much thinner joint, with as little mortar between the bricks as possible. He also wanted the corners of the bricks to be rubbed off so they would fit more cleanly into the arches (and perhaps, also, so they would look even more handmade). “This is like old times,” Doshi remarked, describing the scene after Lou gave his instructions. “People sitting on the floor, squatting and rubbing: you would think you were in another century.”
Later, Lou would convey his teaching approach in his own words when he talked about that training session in Ahmedabad. His aim, he commented, had been to get the brickworkers to “duplicate the work that I did, but in their own way.” He started by building a sample arch to show them how the brick and mortar should be combined; then he watched as they did it themselves. “I learned a few words in the language, and I would say to a worker, ‘This is good,’” Kahn said. “It all comes because you give a little praise to the guy, make him feel he has something worth living for.”
Ahmedabad was not the only place where Lou would find himself dealing with non-English-speaking workers in a foreign country. By the beginning of 1963 he had also embarked on a major project in Pakistan. To begin with it was actually two major projects: a presidential palace for the new capital city of Islamabad, in West Pakistan, and an entire government complex in Dacca, the country’s secondary capital, located far to the east in the poorer and less developed East Pakistan. Ever since 1947, when the primarily Muslim regions that made up Pakistan had been partitioned off from India, the smaller country had consisted of these two unequal segments gripping the gigantic mass of India from either side. To the west, in the Urdu-speaking area, lay most of the power and wealth. To the east, in what had once been part of India’s Bengal province, lay a Bengali-speaking region that was always treated as the poor stepsister.
When Field Marshal Ayub Khan—who in 1958 had become president of Pakistan during a period of martial law—resolved in the early 1960s to move the capital from Karachi to Islamabad, he also promised to do something for East Pakistan. The contract for the new government buildings was initially assigned to Mazharul Islam, a well-respected East Pakistani architect who had studied in the West and had already done significant work in his home country. Islam, however, did not think much of the two international firms, one English and one French, that had been awarded the subcontracts for the job, so he rather selflessly renounced the commission for himself and told President Khan they should seek out a world-renowned master architect for the job. He suggested three names: Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, and Louis Kahn. Corbu was too busy. Aalto was suffering from “ill health” (code for a severe drinking problem). So the commission went by default to Kahn. Mazharul Islam, who had known of Kahn from his Yale days, offered to remain peripherally involved with the East Pakistan project throughout its development. Much as Doshi had done in Ahmedabad, he took Lou around to see the local ruins, including a 1,400-year-old monastery called Shalban Bihari that was a short helicopter ride away. He loaned the American architect useful books and gave him various leads and instructions. He also showed him some of the modernist buildings that he himself had designed and built in Dacca, including the clean-lined university library and a very appealing fine arts institute. All this caused one local architect to say, many years later: “When you look at the Parliament Building in Bangladesh, you can hear Mazharul Islam whispering in Kahn’s ear.”
Lou’s first journey to Dacca took place in January and February of 1963. He returned in March and again i
n July, and then made separate trips in November and December. Some of this time was also spent in Karachi and Islamabad, where Kahn was working on the presidential palace at the same time. But that commission soon came to nought, for when the committee overseeing the West Pakistan project saw Kahn’s model, they rejected his plans and hired Edward Durrell Stone instead. The reason given was that Kahn’s design was too austere, with no minarets, no gold leaf, none of the decorative frou-frou desired by the client. Apparently in this case Lou did not want to accede to the client’s wishes, or perhaps he was not given the chance to do so. At any rate, he still had the Parliament contract in East Pakistan, and the discouragement of losing the West Pakistan assignment only made him more determined to accomplish something special in Dacca.
On that first trip to Dacca, Kahn was joined by a young American architect, previously unknown to him, who was based in Pakistan. Henry Wilcots had done his training at the University of Colorado and, after working briefly in Denver, had gone to work for an architect named Bill Perry at his overseas office in Karachi. That’s where Wilcots and his wife were living in early 1963, when he was summoned to Dacca to meet Kahn. “I was asked to tag along by the office of the public works department,” Wilcots said. “I didn’t know anything about him—maybe read something in a couple of the professional journals.” Perhaps because they were both Americans, or perhaps because Wilcots was a known quantity to the locals and Kahn was not, “whenever he would come out and I was around, I was invited to be there. Someone would call me and say, ‘Professor Kahn will be here,’” and Henry Wilcots would go.
At first Wilcots felt uncomfortable in his anomalous role. People in Karachi would ask him to look over Kahn’s drawings as they were sent in, and because he didn’t work for Kahn, he felt awkward about it. “This is not right,” Wilcots said when he reported one such incident to Kahn, confessing that he didn’t like being asked to be a supervising intermediary. “And he just smiled and said, It’s okay. He always just smiled and said, It’s okay, it’s okay.”