You Say to Brick

by Wendy Lesser

  That same summer, Lou wrote a letter to Harriet and Nathaniel containing a sketch of his current ideas for the FDR monument. The August 1973 letter, handwritten and undated, was sent to Harriet’s summer place, a lighthouse on Indian Island off the coast of Maine. This was where Nathaniel and Harriet retreated to every summer, hoping that Lou would visit them there as promised, though he never did. The single-page note was filled with affection (it was addressed to “My dearest ones” and referred to Nathaniel as “our little hero”), but it also hinted at a slight, perhaps momentary sense of despair. “The little little little looms so full of joy in the depressing state of big trying to be bigger bigger all bigger emptiness and unhappyness—bladderesque,” Lou wrote. Then he seemed to recover his spirits, adding, “I know you are having fun and above all feeling that a part of the world is your domain … Have made a scheme of the monument all in stone.” He marked up his sketch with a few tiny handwritten phrases about his plans for the granite structure, including several “gaps” that were indicated with arrows.

  Nathaniel was to have his own direct encounter with those gaps a few months later. It was during the design’s final phase, in the fall of 1973, and the eleven-year-old boy had been brought to the office at night because both of his parents were hard at work on the FDR project. Lou was fiddling with a model of the Room, in which the different sections of the wall came apart to leave a space in between—an almost literal rendering of his oft-repeated idea that “the walls parted and the columns became.” As he pulled the wall apart and brought it back together, over and over but with a slightly different gap each time, he said to Nathaniel, “How far apart do you think it should be?” Nathaniel the child was delighted to be asked; Nathaniel the adult, reflecting back on the occasion, thought it offered a crucial insight into how his father worked. “He liked to talk as he worked,” said Nathaniel. “And it didn’t matter whether you were young or old or an architect or not. He wasn’t necessarily interested in your solution, but he was interested in what a conversation with you might bring out for him.”

  * * *

  The FDR memorial wasn’t the only project on which Kahn was working with Pattison in 1973. He also enlisted her to do the landscaping on Korman House, the final private residence he designed. Lou’s clients in this case, Steven and Toby Korman, had money to spend, and they were both very particular. They wanted a modern family house composed of glass and wood (Steve’s lumber business made him an expert on various kinds of wood), and they insisted on having Kahn design it, despite his repeated insistence that he was too busy with larger projects. “He turned me down seven, eight times,” said Steve Korman. “I just showed up and kept asking.”

  Weekend after weekend, once he had agreed, Lou would go out to the piece of land the Kormans had selected in rural Whitemarsh Township, a few miles northwest of Philadelphia, and talk with them about their specific needs. Toby wanted a window she could look through when she was doing her laundry, and she wanted a private dressing area all to herself, away from her husband and their three boys. Steve wanted a lot of light, even in the basement (“I’m a scared person,” he said, “I don’t want dark places that will scare me”), and because of his allergies, he also wanted to be able to see the outdoors from behind walls of protective glass. All of this Lou ended up giving them, in a beautifully scaled, lovingly constructed house that looked more like an Architectural Digest ideal than anything he had built before.

  When it came time to landscape the extensive grounds—to shape the view that one saw from the glassed-in breakfast area and the glass-walled living room and the upstairs window over Toby’s dressing table and the downstairs one in her laundry room—Lou brought in Harriet. “You would have thought they were a typical married couple,” commented Steve, who got to know them both well. “They’d be out there arguing, and then they’d say let’s go have lunch. He was very comfortable in his relationships.”

  He must have been, because he also suggested Harriet as a landscape architect to the Shapiros, for whom Anne Tyng was in the midst of building a major addition. Lou and Anne had worked together on Shapiro House from 1958 to 1962, when the first phase of construction was completed. Even before it was finished, Norma Shapiro—a lawyer, later a judge—and her husband, Bernard, a doctor, suspected that their house would eventually need to be larger to accommodate their growing family. By 1972 they had three children, and they asked Lou to do the addition. He instead recommended Anne, who at that point was teaching in the architecture department at Penn (also on Lou’s recommendation) as well as pursuing her own practice. Lou knew that Anne would take as much care as he would have in making the new rooms of the house fit with the old, and he also knew that she and the Shapiros would get along, since they had worked together in the earlier phase. “When Lou brought her into it, he showed her great respect,” Norma Shapiro said. “I would never have known about their relationship if she hadn’t talked about it. And he never did mention it.”

  But Anne talked about it quite freely to Norma, and it was through Anne that Norma learned about Lou’s involvement with Harriet. “She told me about Alex, about Sue, about Nathaniel. She told me how often Lou visited,” said Judge Shapiro. Anne also told Norma how much she wanted the three children to get to know each other. Norma, who had only ever been with Bernie, couldn’t really identify with Anne over the love affair itself—“it was out of my realm,” she commented—but she liked and respected Anne very much. “I was tremendously impressed and admired Anne because she was so accepting of the illegitimacy of her child and Harriet’s,” Shapiro said. “She may have felt sad that he had left her, but she didn’t resent it—and she liked Harriet. She would say, ‘When someone is an extraordinary man, you don’t hold him to ordinary standards.’ To the last day I saw her she was sure she was the preferred mistress, and part of it was how much she contributed to his work. In my view she was still in love with him, and I think she felt she was the love of his life.”

  When Lou recommended Harriet Pattison for the Shapiro House landscaping, Norma asked Anne if she minded, “and she said no, she just wanted what was best for the house.” Norma confessed to enjoying the complexity of the situation (“It was kind of fun to have two women associated with him involved in my house”), but in the end she couldn’t use the plan Harriet came up with. “The design she gave us was very formal, Victorian—concentric circles, a maze—very beautiful but totally inappropriate for our house,” Judge Shapiro explained. “This is a tree house in the woods. And it cost as much as the house! We told her we were not interested. We offered to pay for her time; she refused. I think it’s fair to say she did not enjoy working for us.”

  Norma Shapiro’s outspoken sympathy with Anne Tyng sometimes put her at odds with those colleagues who openly sided with Esther Kahn. For instance, Eddie Becker, one of Philadelphia’s leading lawyers, was “very prejudiced” in favor of Esther “and resented this whole situation,” Norma recalled. It would appear that Lou’s secret life was not very secret, if even people in the legal community, totally outside his sphere, were discussing it with each other. And the lawyers were not the only ones. “Philadelphia was a very small town,” Sue Ann Kahn observed, “and everyone knew about the affairs.”

  Steve Korman agreed, acknowledging that the broad facts about Lou’s private life were widely known in Philadelphia. But Steve also felt that he himself had a special kind of access, having gotten unusually close to Lou during their months and years of working together on Korman House. “I spent a lot of time talking to Lou about his personal life, Esther and all that,” Korman said. “Marriage to him was something you were supposed to do. He really cared about all the people he was involved with. He wasn’t conventional. He didn’t want to hurt people. He did, but he didn’t want to.”

  * * *

  Shortly after Korman House was finished, Steve and Toby invited Lou and Esther to come have dinner with them in their beautiful new residence. The couples spent most of the evening in the long, do
uble-height room that served as both living room and dining room. On that cold February night, a fireplace warmed the seating area at the far end, a grand piano stood next to the elegant dining table, and the floor-to-ceiling windows brought together the reflected light from indoors and the darkness outside. Everyone had a great deal to drink. Lou played the piano. There was a lot of laughter and a sense of joyous occasion. “It was one of the most wonderful dinner parties,” said Toby. “I remember Esther writing me a note telling me it was one of the great evenings of her life.”

  On this everyone agreed. But Toby and Steve Korman (who subsequently got an amicable divorce, remained close during their respective remarriages, and eventually handed on their beloved house to their oldest son) had very different memories of the events of that evening. Toby, for one, recalled that another couple had been present as well—Suzanne Binswanger, who designed the furnishings in the house, and her husband, Frank. None of the conversation from that evening stuck with her, and she might have missed part of it when she was out in the kitchen, but she didn’t think there had been any prolonged or emotionally charged discussion.

  Steve, though, remembered an intense conversation between Esther and Lou that lasted for a long time, possibly even an hour. (“Steven tends to exaggerate a little bit. He does get a little carried away,” advised Toby. “It doesn’t mean there wasn’t a line or two said, but an hour?”) As far as Steve was concerned, the bystanders just faded away during it—“blacked out,” he said, “as if we weren’t there.” He didn’t mention the Binswanger couple: from his perspective it was just Toby and himself, watching and listening as if they were the audience to a play. And what they heard was an extremely intimate, warmly affectionate conversation about the relationship between Lou’s marriage and his other loves. “He says to Esther, I care about you because I care about others,” Steve recounted. “You’re my rock. But I care about each person differently. The other people I care about, I care about.” From Steve’s perspective, “the whole conversation was: I care about you.” That was the context in which Esther was hearing what she was hearing. And that, according to Steve, was what made her write to the Kormans several weeks later about how significant the evening had been for her.

  In any case, it remained a major event in her life—in her and Lou’s shared life—because of the timing. The dinner party at the Kormans took place on the last weekend in February, 1974. Two weeks later, Lou set off on his final trip to India.

  IN SITU: INDIAN INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT AHMEDABAD

  Main plaza of Indian Institute of Management

  (Anonymous photograph from the author’s collection)

  It would be possible, if you were so inclined, to view this entire campus in terms of the influences upon it. Looking at the broad expanses of the Institute’s softly faded brick walls, intermittently broken up with arches and other cutout shapes, you could imagine you were seeing the ruins of Trajan’s Market in Rome. The vast open-ended rectangle defining the central space between the classroom wing, the faculty wing, and the library wing might make you recall the mysterious grandeur of the desolate, abandoned piazzas at Ostia Antica. On the other hand, this same central plaza could remind you of something much nearer: Sarkej Roza, a fifteenth-century Islamic structure located just south of Ahmedabad, whose series of mosques, tombs, and covered walkways were built around open squares of heat-filled light. Yet another local ruin, the beautiful Adalaj Stepwell, built in 1499, could have influenced Kahn’s design by suggesting the ways in which rays of filtered light could penetrate deep into the cooling darkness. And then there are the pols of Old Ahmedabad itself, those closely clustered neighborhoods in the oldest part of the city, whose gated courtyards and narrow alleys lead continuously from one into another. These mysteriously interlinking compounds seem to be echoed in the winding pathways, unexpected courtyards, and abruptly terminated views of the Institute’s campus, where everything finally connects up, though in ways that cannot be predicted from a distance.

  Then again, perhaps the whole complicated design, with its brick-paved walkways and irregular cut-throughs and medium-height brick buildings, makes reference not to Rome or Ahmedabad, but to another city entirely—that is, the early-twentieth-century Philadelphia of Louis Kahn’s youth. Or maybe the influence is even closer in time. Maybe Kahn was borrowing from Le Corbusier, the only other foreign modernist to design a significant amount of work in this part of India. Kahn certainly saw the four buildings Corbusier built in Ahmedabad in the decade before his own arrival, including two private houses, the City Museum, and the headquarters of the Mill Owners’ Association. Though one cannot trace exact echoes, one could point to the brick cladding of the City Museum, the long approach by ramp to the Mill Owners’ center, the use of concrete as both a structural and a decorative material in all four buildings, the fiercely geometric shapes that define their outer surfaces, and the continuous play of light and shadow from within the internal courtyards, all of which Kahn could have been reusing or reinventing when he came to design the Indian Institute of Management.

  “I don’t think there is any influence from anybody,” says Balkrishna Doshi. “It is all what the brick wants to say.” At eighty-six, Doshi is still vital and active; he is also generally acknowledged to be Ahmedabad’s pre-eminent living architect. Yet he retains a youthful sense of admiration for the friend who has been dead for forty years, that master architect whom he still views as a kind of yogi. “There are higher sensibilities by which people discover the traditions of the past,” he insists, and in his view Kahn possessed those intuitions. “Deep inside, he must have connected himself to the classics period. If one is able to connect with things far beyond, either in time or space, you connect with your soul—no, not soul, with your inner self. So the relationship is not physical. A building is no more a building, it’s a sacred space.”

  There is perhaps some irony in the fact that the inner self of a man as notoriously unbusinesslike as Louis Kahn should have manifested itself in an Institute of Management. And yet if the irony is there, it is not a damning one, but a gentle joke of the sort Kahn himself enjoyed. The gods of management may be money and efficiency, but this campus’s sacred space seems dedicated to something else besides: to a sense of community founded on like-minded aims, to the possibility of tranquil contemplation amidst a chaotic world, and to a notion of education that goes back to the original idea of a school as Kahn always formulated it, something which “began with a man under a tree, who did not know he was a teacher, discussing his realization with a few who did not know they were students.” Even the specific goals of an economic institute would not necessarily have been alien to Kahn’s nature, for as he said in one public lecture, “Economy has nothing to do with money. Economy is doing the right thing, and money is just what money can buy.”

  * * *

  The IIM campus encourages exactly the kind of meandering that the classical students under a tree—Socrates’ pupils, say—would have associated with their peripatetic education. Kahn’s plan creates room for serendipitous encounters, frequent small discoveries, and approaches to light-filled endpoints through shadow-filled corridors. The heuristic method is invitation, not coercion, and until a few years ago anyone could have just walked in off the streets of this well-heeled collegiate neighborhood to enjoy the lushly landscaped grounds. Now the heightened security that prevails all over India requires you to stop by the guard station and leave your ID in exchange for a pass. But after that you are free to wander the campus on your own, passing from the parking lot at the front to the pedestrian precincts beyond.

  Immediately to the right of the parking lot sits a Kahnish-looking auditorium building—complete with perfectly round cutouts and mottled brick—conceived and executed by another architect, Anant Raje, who helped finish the campus after Kahn’s death. Ignoring this for the moment, you will find yourself drawn instead to the strangely angled staircase that sits at a diagonal to the building it leads up to. At the top of the b
road granite stairs, and visible from some distance away, is a square opening in the brick façade, surmounted by a semicircular arch; the two openings are separated by a quirky cement lintel, whose outer edges lift in a kind of angular smile. This, you will soon discover, is the most frequently repeated pattern on the campus: the square, the arch, and the concrete strip between them. You will see it everywhere. And yet you will never tire of it, because it appears in so many variations: small or large, with an open arch or an arch filled by glass or brick, the lintel usually present but sometimes absent or with brick replacing the concrete, and the arch occasionally appearing on its own, mirrored by a reflecting arch below, or even turned into a circle crossed by a cement band. The square openings, too, will wander away from their arches, becoming doors at the corners of a brick room, or ground-level windows, or stacked rectangular shapes in differing or matching sizes. But wherever you turn you will eventually come back to that pattern of the arch and the rectangle and the smiling concrete lintel. And it will please you each time you see it, not only because it is rather lovely in itself, but because it will give you a sense of familiarity and firm location in this otherwise slightly confusing place.

  The confusion is not severe. You can cover the whole campus in a few hours of casual strolling, and you can pretty quickly get a sense of how the various parts—the classroom building, the library wing, the student dormitories for men and women, the faculty offices and the faculty housing, not to mention various functions strewn over the regions beyond—relate to each other in a kind of mental map. It is not possible to get seriously lost. And yet there are always local surprises. Before you round a corner, you will not know whether the path ahead of you is to be a set of steps or a bridging walkway. Until you descend into a tunnel and follow its shadowy route, you cannot be positive where it will take you, though you can be sure it will take you somewhere. Courtyards appear suddenly before you and have multiple exits, some of them sliver-thin, as if inviting you to squeeze between buildings. Concentric ground-level arches lead your eye into a distance that is light-filled but otherwise indecipherable until you get there. Buildings turn out to have whole extra stories that are only visible from one side. But none of this is permanently disconcerting or in any way frightening. On the contrary, it gives you a sense of pleasure to be mildly tricked in this way, to be sent on a picaresque journey that is somehow guaranteed to end happily.