by Wendy Lesser
* * *
Even after Alex’s mother stopped working with him, Lou continued to see his daughter regularly. But now another child, Nathaniel, entered the picture as well, for shortly after Anne Tyng left Kahn’s firm, Harriet Pattison returned to town. After spending a year and a half apprenticing with Dan Kiley’s office in Vermont, Pattison had decided to earn a formal degree in landscaping. She enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania’s master’s program in landscape architecture, and in the fall of 1964 she and Nathaniel moved back to Philadelphia.
Around the time she began her first semester at Penn, Lou set up a tiny office for Harriet on the fourth floor of his building. “He was on the fifth floor in the corner,” said David Slovic, who worked at Lou’s firm throughout the three years Pattison was studying at Penn. “Harriet was downstairs. They had made a little place for her in a storage room—a place for her drafting table and her things. She would work on her schoolwork, and Lou would give her crits.”
David didn’t know whether or not she was involved in any of the firm’s projects, but “we all knew who she was, and that she was Nathaniel’s mother. In the office it was known about Lou’s various adventures, and we all protected him.” One of the ways his employees did that was to make sure Harriet and Esther never encountered each other during Esther’s unannounced visits to the office. “I can remember times when they would say, ‘Esther is in the lobby; she’s coming up.’ I don’t know how they knew—maybe the elevator operator,” said Slovic. “They would make sure that Harriet’s door was closed. Esther would just stop by and leave. It happened maybe every couple of weeks, not in any overbearing way, just because she needed to connect with Lou about something.”
For Harriet, being shut away in an eight-by-ten-foot windowless storage room, sometimes with the door locked from the outside, could not have been a pleasant experience. Years later, when her son suggested that her position must have been very uncomfortable, she acknowledged, “It was humiliating in some ways.” But when Nathaniel asked why she always protected Lou, why she didn’t express anger at the situation he had put her into, she denied feeling any anger. In the end, she said, the deal was worth it: what she got in exchange for whatever she had to give up was more than enough.
As for Esther, she endured her own form of humiliation, though the people at the office tended to underestimate her awareness, regarding her instead as some kind of oblivious battle-ax figure in a rollicking marital comedy. “We always used to say that Lou’s wife was one mistress behind,” chuckled Ed Richards. Neither he nor anyone else at the office seemed to know that Esther had learned about Harriet’s pregnancy before Nathaniel was born. And if the shutting of the storage-room door had its farce-like aspects, the theater piece was one that Lou helped to perpetuate by performing his expected role. Ed recalled one day, for instance, when he and a friend were returning to the office after lunch, and “Lou comes down the steps with a big smile on his face. Usually he would have taken the elevator, but he was coming down the steps. We get up to his office, and there was Esther; somehow he had got around her, and that’s why he was smiling.”
For the most part, the men who worked with Lou had no problem with his various lovers and his children out of wedlock. On the contrary, they seemed to get a kick out of it, as if it proved something about how special he was, or maybe how unspecial he was. “We just thought, here’s this very famous person, but on the side he’s just a guy that had mistresses,” said Ed Richards. Jack MacAllister took it as a symptom of the times. “It was the age of Henry Miller,” Jack pointed out. “We were all reading Henry Miller.” Jack recalled hearing from David Zoob, Lou’s lawyer, about a client of his, or maybe it was a client of someone else’s, whose invention was going to revolutionize the world; that turned out to be the Pill, which was finally approved for general use in 1960. “In the Fifties and early Sixties, everyone was screwing everybody,” MacAllister remarked. “It was a giant free-for-all.” In this atmosphere, to be critical of Lou’s behavior was seen as a sign of prudishness, or perhaps excessive religious zeal.
One of the few men in the office who openly disapproved was Carles Enrique Vallhonrat. Vallhonrat was a Spanish-speaking, Argentine-trained architect who worked with Kahn for most of the 1960s, starting with the Salk project. An intelligent and capable man much respected by Lou, he struck some people as austere or arrogant; others characterized him as honesty and rectitude personified. Observing that most of his colleagues didn’t comment one way or the other on Lou’s extramarital love life, Fred Langford recalled, “The only one definitely had an opinion against it was Vallhonrat. He was very much against it.”
As for Harriet’s presence in the office, Fred himself simply took it in stride, the way most others did. “They were certainly not lovey-dovey, kept it pretty businesslike,” he said about Harriet and Lou. “Everyone knew that she was Lou’s paramour, and everyone knew there was a boy involved.”
Not everyone learned it at the same time, though. Balkrishna Doshi recalled how, on one of his fall stints at Penn, where he came annually to give a short course of lectures in the architecture department, Lou took him over to Harriet’s place without telling him where they were going. Once they were there, Kahn introduced the little boy to Doshi as his son. Doshi had not heard a word beforehand about the relationship with Harriet or the birth of Nathaniel; now the child was simply being presented to him. He felt he had been allowed this sudden peek into Lou’s private life because “I was an outsider, and yet family to Lou.” Nor did he wish to make anything of the revelation. “A sage may have other affairs, but you don’t want to know about that,” Doshi pointed out. “You wanted to know what he was talking about.”
* * *
When Henry Wilcots first mentioned to Louis Kahn, around the middle of 1964, that he was planning to move back to the United States from Pakistan, Lou suggested that he stop by for a visit in Philadelphia on his way home. As it turned out, however, Wilcots wasn’t staying on the East Coast long enough. “I called him and said I won’t be able to get to Philadelphia because there’s a family event in Des Moines, and then I’m going on to Denver,” Henry recalled. He and his wife had missed Colorado, and they wanted to return there even though Henry had no firm offer of employment. But Lou had other plans. “He asked for an address where he could reach me in Des Moines,” said Henry, “and then I received a cablegram at my parents’ address in Des Moines: Welcome when ready. Lou. So I changed my ticket and went to Philadelphia.” Henry started working at Kahn’s office in September of 1964, and meanwhile he began looking for a place to house his family, which ultimately included two sons as well as his wife, Eileen.
One day, soon after his arrival, he got a phone call from Esther Kahn. “We met on the telephone,” he said. “When I first came to the office, she called and wanted to speak with me. Lou must have told her about me. We just chatted on the phone.”
Then Esther asked him a pointed question: Where was he looking for housing? And Henry understood right away why she was asking. As an African-American, he was well aware that although landlords and realtors might pretend to show him their available places, only a limited number would actually be willing to rent to him. There were relatively few black professionals in Philadelphia at the time, and even fewer black architects. “I think there might have been a couple,” Wilcots guessed. “I never got a chance to talk to them, we were so separate.”
So Esther’s phone call really made a difference to him. “The good thing about her, she was very straight,” Henry said. “She told me about the neighborhoods where I would be welcome and where I would not be welcome.” After their conversation he just stopped looking in the hopeless places, and his family ended up settling permanently in Germantown. Someone of a different temperament might well have been taken aback by Esther’s direct, not to say brash, approach, but Henry found it enchanting. “Wonderful woman,” he emphasized, and it was an opinion from which he never deviated.
The other person wh
o made Henry feel welcome was Dave Wisdom, the architect who ran Lou’s office. “When I came here, other than Esther, he was the one who—he and his wife invited me to dinner at their house,” Henry explained. In fact, the Wisdoms invited both Henry and Eileen to come have dinner with them. “So we got out there, to Swarthmore, and had Sunday dinner with he and his wife, and he introduced me to his daughters,” said Henry. In other words, the evening had all the earmarks of a casual social event between work colleagues, which is precisely what made it so unusual in the genteelly segregated Philadelphia of 1964.
“His house was filled with magazines and books and New Yorkers and artworks,” Wilcots recalled. “He had the Smithsonian collection of jazz work on vinyl—maybe some of it on shellac records.” Dave was a big reader, Henry discovered, and so was his wife, Helen, who volunteered at a local library. And they were both Quakers. “Helen attended services, but Dave as far as I know didn’t,” Henry observed. “He practiced it in his own way. He never flaunted it, never pronounced it. He was an old Pennsylvanian. He was a terrific guy, and he and I got along.”
Actually, there was no one in Kahn’s office who did not get along with Dave Wisdom. That was one of his essential qualities, part of the means by which he had been holding the place together for more than twenty years. First at Stonorov & Kahn, then at Lou’s solo offices at 1728 Spruce and 138 20th Street, and finally at 1501 Walnut, Dave supervised all the employees and coordinated an ever-growing number of projects. It was Wisdom—“the well-named Quaker,” as Jack MacAllister called him—who had the calmness, the intelligence, and the steady practicality needed to keep the firm going. “Dave was different. Dave was benign. Dave was agnostic,” said Richard Wurman. “Nobody disliked Dave. Dave was glue. You needed glue to keep the packing case together.”
“Dave was the office,” said Henry Wilcots. “Of course everyone knew that there was only one architect in the office, and that was Lou. Yet Lou was in and out. Dave held things together. He was the day-to-day person.” According to Henry, “he was involved in every project that came through that office. Often times when a new job came in, the first person that Lou talked to was Dave.” And as the project progressed, Wisdom’s role became even more important. “During the working drawing stage, he was consulted by everyone who was in charge of a job,” Wilcots said. “They would go to Dave about things: ‘How should this work?’ He would sit down and work out the detail. When you had a problem, you went to Dave. Sometimes Lou would come in and say to Dave, ‘What do you want me to do? You tell me.’ And Dave would say, ‘Do such and such.’”
This is not to say that the relationship between Kahn and Wisdom was uniformly placid. Dave, unlike many others, was always willing to raise objections to Lou’s ideas. (“Dave was not a rah-rah man,” Wilcots pointed out, and in Kahn’s firm “there were a lot of those.”) Although Lou had once told Henry that Dave was his best critic, he would still resist the criticism if he didn’t like it. Gary Moye, who came to work at the firm a few years after Henry Wilcots, remembered a time when he and Henry had felt that the project they were working on, Temple Beth-El, needed to be redesigned if it were to work. “We brought this matter to Dave’s attention,” said Moye, “and he arranged for us all to meet with Lou. I remember that at a crucial point in the meeting, David, knowing the status of the work and the amount of fee left, suggested that we ‘couldn’t afford to back up.’ Lou got very angry and said, ‘We can’t afford not to!’ That was where it was left, and Henry and I revisited and reconfigured the structural elements so they were buildable.” But Moye, despite the fact that he himself had advocated the reworking, took away from the occasion “great respect for David’s point of view (as Lou’s financial straits affected all of us) and for his willingness to speak up to Lou.”
“Dave’s details were all very practical,” said Wilcots. “He would say, ‘I don’t know, Lou. What’s this for? What’s it going to do? It’s meaningless!’ Sometimes Lou would get angry with Dave and would go storming out.” But he would always come back sooner or later, and generally sooner. To Henry, it just seemed as if their relationship was that of “old-time friends. You know how you can live with your friends, you can get angry at your friends. Sometimes Lou would get angry at Dave, and then he’d turn around the next day and appreciate him.” Henry felt that an underlying feeling of mutual respect bound them together. It also helped that Dave’s own strong sense of self allowed him to remain calm in the face of Lou’s outbursts. “Nothing bothered Dave,” said Wilcots. “He didn’t appear to get upset, and others would get upset that Dave didn’t get upset.”
Some of the others took this composure as a sign of weakness on Dave’s part. “Dave Wisdom was a wonderful, sweet man, very smart, but not aggressive, not individually strong,” commented David Slovic. “Dave Wisdom was a kind of saint,” said Ed Richards. “He loved Lou, but Lou treated him badly like everyone else.” Fred Langford called Dave “a real nice person, a very cooperative guy,” but felt that Lou didn’t really rely on him for design input. “He did rely on Dave for construction details—the flashing, the way the building was put together,” Langford observed. “He’d say to some young guy, ‘Go ask Dave, he’ll know.’” And as Langford and others pointed out, Dave was never too busy to answer questions: he was always available, and he used his availability to guard Lou’s time. “He’d say, ‘Don’t bother him, he’s busy.’ He was like Lou’s protector,” Fred recalled. “Dave was always respectful of Lou. And we knew that there was respect from Lou toward Dave, but it didn’t show. They’d been together so long, there was no warmth there. It was sort of like antagonistic brothers,” Fred concluded.
Wisdom’s privileged position at the office did show in one way, though, and that was in the hours he worked. Everyone else put in the same crazy hours Lou did. “Day or night made little difference to Lou,” Gary Moye pointed out. “If the work needed to be done it had to be done, even if it couldn’t be achieved within conventional working hours. Keep in mind that the office was operated more as an artist’s studio than as a professional business.” But Dave Wisdom kept strictly businessman’s hours. “He was there in the morning, 8:30 or whatever, and would quit about 5:30 or 6:00,” said Fred Langford. “Sometimes, if things were really busy, he would come in on a Saturday or Sunday. But for the most part he did not work the long hours everyone else did.” Henry Wilcots agreed: “Right. That’s true. He’d go home.” One time, Henry remembered, they were all working around the clock, “weekends and everything. And Dave told Lou he wouldn’t be in that Saturday or Sunday. And Lou said to him, ‘Oh, you mean because of your religion?’” Henry never knew for sure if that was supposed to be a joke or not. (Neither, apparently, did Dave. Years after Lou’s death, Wisdom was to say to an interviewer, “To the end of his life, Kahn led himself to believe that certain Quakers had religious scruples against working on Sunday.”)
During regular hours, at any rate, Dave Wisdom presided over an office that, despite its elements of chaos, had definite patterns and routines. Dave himself sat at a desk that was just to the left of the fifth-floor entrance, the first desk you came to in the main drafting room. If instead of going left you turned to the right, you would come to Louise’s desk, which was parked just outside Lou’s enclosed office and immediately next to the bathroom. Louise kept the office calendar open on her desk and facing outward, so that anyone who wanted to know where Lou was—or had been, or was shortly going to be—could come by and consult it, and Lou often added his own handwritten additions and corrections to the schedule.
On the days when Lou was there and planned to stay a while, he would go into his own office, take off his jacket, and put on one of the cardigan sweaters he kept there. Then he would walk around the drafting room looking at the projects, speaking to the architect who had lead responsibility for each, and finally ending up at Dave’s desk, where they’d talk over various issues. Sometimes, especially later in the day, Kahn would spend time in his office with the door
closed, either on the phone or napping. Occasionally he would be in there sketching, and then he would come out with his roll of yellow tracing paper and show the new design to the person working on that project, explaining what he wanted changed. “He would come to your table and say, ‘Could you move this…’ He always had the yellow paper handy, the cheap tracing paper,” said Langford. Kahn also had a little sketchbook that he always carried with him, so that if he got an idea on a train or a plane, he could capture it in a quick drawing and then bring it back to the office. But mostly he seemed to come up with his ideas on the spot. “The beauty of watching him work out a sketch,” Wilcots recalled. “He would come and push you off your stool and start sketching: putting it down, rubbing it out. And he would be talking about the second floor, wipe it out, do the third floor—and you had to follow that.”
Of course, there were many days when Kahn didn’t come into the office at all, usually because he was away on a work-related trip. Louise made all his travel plans, and over the years she learned to avoid the kinds of calamities that had plagued her job at the beginning. One of her first travel mistakes occurred soon after she began working for Lou, when he had to go up to Rochester for the Unitarian Church project. “Never having traveled by train, I knew nothing about the accommodations,” Louise recalled. “I reserved a roomette for him, which proved a disaster. His comment to me: ‘I may be only 5'6", but even a midget couldn’t dangle his feet in one of those.’ I got the message.”
After her second travel mistake—sending him off on an overseas trip with an expired passport—Louise had offered to resign, but Lou insisted she stay on. “Even baseball players get three strikes,” he told her. “I can’t let you go yet because I want to see if you can top this one.” She never did, and by the mid-1960s she was handling more travel for him than ever.