You Say to Brick

by Wendy Lesser

  Meanwhile, though, the currents of familial connection continued to run underground. Alexandra Tyng wrote her undergraduate dissertation on Kahn’s work, identifying him clearly as her father, and in 1984 an expanded version of her thesis was published as a book called Beginnings: Louis I. Kahn’s Philosophy of Architecture. Throughout these years Alex maintained her close relationship with Nathaniel and, in a somewhat more attenuated way, her friendship with Sue. And in 1980, when she was in her mid-twenties, she paid a visit to Lou’s relatives out west, who up until then hadn’t had a clue about her existence.

  “Alex called us on the phone when she was coming out to California,” said Lou’s niece Rhoda, who despite her surprise was instantly welcoming. She offered to have Alex picked up at the airport, and since the rest of the family was busy at the time, she sent her son, Steven Kantor, as the driver. That’s how he and Alex met. A few years later, Lou’s daughter and his grandnephew—two strands from opposite ends of the family, as it were—announced that they were getting married.

  It was during the wedding celebrations in Philadelphia that Rhoda first encountered Anne Tyng, who impressed her as “very pretty, very friendly, very intelligent.” She was also very tiny, Rhoda noted, like her house in Philadelphia’s historic district: “Everything went up, nothing was expanded. A kitchen without a stove; she used a toaster oven. It was amazing what she made on it.” Rhoda also recalled Anne’s “original ideas” about things like the Fibonacci numbers and the golden spiral and how “there was a connection throughout the universe. Her conclusions came from things that she researched. You don’t know if she’s a little strange or just brilliant,” Rhoda said. “And she was adamant about things.” During that same visit Rhoda also met Harriet Pattison, who struck her as a very different physical type from Anne—“taller, a little bit heavy, a round face”—but equally sure that she had been “the person behind the man,” the true soul mate. “At Alex’s and Steve’s rehearsal dinner, there was an empty seat beside Harriet, and I went to sit down in it,” Rhoda remembered. “And she said, ‘That is reserved for Lou.’”

  Esther Kahn, though she sent a very thoughtful gift (one of Lou’s drawings), declined her invitation to attend Steve and Alex’s wedding. This was in 1983, and emotions were perhaps still a bit raw. But a few years later, when Kahn’s Salk project was threatened by a plan for new additions to the site, Harriet Pattison, Anne Tyng, and Esther Kahn all banded together to register their protest against the changes. Their objections, though initially successful, ultimately did not prevail, and the eucalyptus grove at the entrance to the plaza was cut down to make room for the new buildings. A similar thing happened several decades later at the Kimbell Art Museum, when Pattison’s meticulous landscaping was uprooted to make room for a Renzo Piano addition. There was nothing unusual in the failure of these family protests, even if the makeup of the family itself was rather out of the ordinary. The world does not stand still, even for a great work of architecture, and one learns to consider oneself lucky if the structure itself remains intact.

  By the time the Kimbell site revisions were completed, in 2013, Harriet was the only one of the three women still alive. Esther had died in 1996. Anne lived until 2011—long enough to see the restored, newly refurbished Yale University Art Gallery building, which, as she confided to a friend at the opening, looked better than it ever had before. And Anne also got a chance, before her traveling days were over, to make one final visit to the Estonian island that Lou considered his birthplace.

  Pärnu may or may not be the actual place of birth, but no official body in that mainland city seems particularly interested in or even aware of Louis Kahn. In contrast, the town of Kuressaare (formerly Arensburg) on the island of Saaremaa (formerly Ösel) proudly claims Lou as a native son. In 2006 a group of Estonian architects chose Kuressaare as the location for a weekend-long symposium in honor of Kahn’s life and work. Anne Tyng was invited to give a talk; her daughter, Alexandra, volunteered to paint a portrait of Lou and bring it to the symposium; and her daughter, Rebecca Tyng Kantor, had already found her way to Estonia on a Fulbright fellowship. So all three generations congregated on Saaremaa for the October 2006 festivities. Nathaniel Kahn, whose 2003 film about Lou, My Architect, had first ignited the Estonians’ interest in doing the conference—and had also, not incidentally, broken the long public silence about Kahn’s additional families—came along as well.

  “The only thing missing is that I wish my sister Sue Ann was there,” said Nathaniel. “If she had played a piece of Bach on the flute, which my father loved so much, it would certainly have made the celebration complete. It would have been nice if the three of us could have walked through the streets together. On some level I think Lou would have liked that.”

  Alex agreed that “it would have been really neat if my sister had gone. But she was there in spirit.”

  Sue Ann had very much wanted to be there, but her full-time administrative job at the Mannes College of Music kept her in New York that whole fall. As part of her contribution-in-absentia, she had given her sister a necktie of Lou’s to use in the posthumous painting of their father. Alex persuaded her husband, Steven, and her son, Julian, to serve as living models wearing the necktie and, drawing on her own childhood memories as well as old photos, she painted a portrait that placed Lou in front of the finished Assembly Building in Dhaka—a fantasy of sorts, since the project wasn’t actually completed until nine years after his death. But for Alex, this backdrop made perfect sense. “There’s a dramatic contrast between Bangladesh and Estonia, and I was thinking how, as a boy, he had no idea how far he would travel and how far his influence would reach,” she said. “I also wanted to avoid putting him in a specific time frame. The capital complex wasn’t finished when he died, so in reality he could never have stood there. So the portrait represents a whole range of time from his childhood to the end of his life and beyond.”

  Alex also felt that there was a visual connection between the two places. “The massive forms of the mosque and capital building at Dhaka are to me like a modern castle, square and stark with corner towers, very much like the medieval castle at Kuressaare,” she pointed out. “I wanted to establish this link to his origins, since the portrait was to hang in Kuressaare.”

  It hangs there still, prominently displayed in a public room of the Kuressaare Town Hall. It is Alexandra Tyng’s gift to the city of Kahn’s childhood, and it is also her gift to Lou himself: placing him forever beyond time, giving him a kind of ghostly afterlife. And as you stand in front of it, looking at the bow-tied, dark-suited, white-haired man who holds his spectacles in his hand so that his slanting eyes can stare directly back at you—their blue color noticeably picked up in the watery lake and the unclouded sky that surround the oddly geometrical buildings behind him—you may find yourself mimicking, without even trying to, the enigmatic smile he wears on his face.

  * * *

  There was the man, who no longer exists, and there are the buildings, which endure. As with any artist, a question arises regarding the relationship between the two. How do the finished works, which are what draw our interest in the first place, connect to the daily life that happened to be going on in the background? The danger in any biographical examination lies in pressing too hard on the connection, for even if we intuitively sense that there must be one, our ponderous insistence may cause the fragile bridge to crumble beneath our weight. And when the artist is an architect—a collaborator, a negotiator in a commercial context, a central figure directing vast and not entirely controllable movements of people and materials—that link between the personal life and the work produced will seem even more tenuous, less visible, less necessary.

  With Louis Kahn, there were also other factors that contributed to the dissociation. People around him had grown used to protecting him from any publicity that did not contribute directly to his reputation. They felt that his secrets, however widely or informally known, were his own affair, and this wish to protect grew
even fiercer after his death. Kahn may have run his office like an artist’s atelier, but architecture is not, after all, like painting or sculpture, either in the public mind or in its own. It views itself as one of the “learned professions,” akin to medicine and the law. It has its standards—of behavior and ethics as well as of education and qualification—and it has its own regulatory societies charged with maintaining them. Architects are deemed to be “pillars of the community,” in Ibsen’s ironic phrase, and even when their personal lives are messy (as they have been from Borromini onward), their outward presentation is expected to be august and businesslike.

  Lou’s behavior, with its prolonged love affairs leading to illegitimate yet acknowledged children, did not conform to the agreed-upon professional image. His colleagues, to the extent they knew about his private life, found it mildly unnerving if not downright embarrassing, and the passage of forty years has not eroded their desire to sweep this personal material under the carpet. “Not under the carpet, and not that it didn’t exist,” protested Richard Saul Wurman, but he still felt there was something unseemly about exposing Lou’s quirks to the public eye. He pointed out that the Philadelphia of that period “was still a Puritanical society,” and even though “we all knew it was odd” for Lou to be living in the way he did, people still felt he needed and deserved their protection. “He had a battle, being Jewish and going to Penn,” and any criticism or even hint of personal exposure could have offered ammunition, Wurman felt, to the profession’s genteel anti-Semites, among whom he counted G. Holmes Perkins and Ed Bacon. But was Bacon’s opposition to Kahn really because he was Jewish? “Because he was Jewish,” Wurman insisted, “and because he spoke his truth. Bacon did not want the truth.”

  Yet even Lou’s manifest allegiance to the truth, one of his most noteworthy characteristics as an architect, risked being tarnished by the existence of his secret life. Jack MacAllister, among many others, commended Lou for “always looking for the fundamental underlying truth of anything.” Yet MacAllister was forced to acknowledge that this did not necessarily apply to his personal life. “His behavior in life was not socially acceptable, so he had to cover it over,” Jack offered as an excuse.

  Shamsul Wares put it even more strongly. “He was a mental case. He was influenced by his phallus. He had certain problems with his sexuality—a psychology based on the phallic foundation,” said this noted admirer of Lou’s humane and powerful National Assembly Building. For Wares, the flawed man who had affairs and the generous architect who gave Bangladesh the centerpiece of its new democracy were easily separable figures. “His illicit connections with women have nothing to do with his creativity,” Wares said.

  The landscape architect Lois Sherr Dubin loosely echoed this last idea when she observed, “His personal life was like an appendage.” Work, she seemed to think, was the only thing that really mattered to Kahn. And yet Dubin herself drew a connection between the public figure and the private one when she said, “I think he was a lusty, sensual man and all that implies. He wasn’t a dried-up ascetic.” This was not only what made him attractive, as a colleague, a teacher, a friend; it was also what made his whole architectural approach so alluring. Dubin emphasized how powerfully his vision appealed to design students, especially against the gray background of Fifties blandness and Philadelphia restraint. “In this uptight time and campus, the most exciting place was our architecture school,” she recalled. “Why? Because of Lou Kahn, and the people that came from all over the place to work with him. It was simply the most vital, alive place. And in that kind of place there are simply no boundaries. Anything goes.”

  Such freedoms, of course, invariably lead to problems. “Desire is irresponsible,” Lou himself commented. “You can’t say that desire is a sense of purity. It has its own purity, but in the making of things great impurities can happen.”

  He saw the danger, but he did not disown it. And this respect, if that is the right word, for desire, for the original impulse that motivates all making and taking, was essential to Kahn’s views, governing his sense not only of how life might be lived but also of how architecture might be practiced. “I do not believe that beauty can be deliberately created,” he wrote in his notebooks. “Beauty evolves out of a will that may have its first expression in the archaic. Compare Paestum with the Parthenon. Archaic Paestum is the beginning. It is the time when walls parted and the columns became and Music entered architecture. Paestum inspired the Parthenon. The Parthenon is considered more beautiful, but Paestum is still more beautiful to me. It presents a beginning within which is contained all the wonder that may follow in its wake.”

  To insist on a perpetual sense of wonder—or to argue, as Kahn did, that a great building “must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable”—is to resort continually to the same impulses that fuel desire. One must be constantly acting on one’s own feelings, one’s own responses: Is this what I really wanted to do? Does this or that element need to be altered to accomplish what I envisioned? How about this unexpected factor—can I use it to get back to my original idea, but in a new way? The process is all about beginnings, for Kahn. And it is in the beginning, of course, that every desire burns with its most searing intensity. Kahn’s wish to return there, repeatedly, was perhaps his most salient characteristic as both an architect and a man.

  The two were, in any case, probably not separable. Anne Tyng, who knew him as both lover and colleague, felt that “he really lived for his work” but also that “his work expressed his life.” Speaking for a video camera nearly twenty years after his death, she mused, “I think he was really in touch with the unconscious, the creative principle, which is usually viewed as feminine … As though you were open to all the processes of space and time, and out of that you would find order.”

  Anne and Lou’s daughter carried this same idea even further when she said about her father that he “strongly believed in principles which were similarly applied to both his work and personal life. This may seem a very strange thing to say, since many people who knew him would say that he was a very unconventional person who did great architecture but did not handle his personal life very well. But he had a sort of philosophy according to which things would simply arrange themselves in the most appropriate way, and, if one let them happen, they would turn out.” Alex Tyng did not mean that Kahn made no effort, or had no artistic intentions—“Certainly he did not just let his buildings happen”—but she felt he was focused mainly on how various elements came together to produce the right form. “If instead one tries to fit the parts together and they do not fit,” she went on, “then it is the wrong expression of the form. That was the same kind of sense that he had about his personal life; I mean, if the elements—meaning circumstances and people and feelings—were right they would fit together.”

  While admitting that this was not always easy on the other “elements” in the human equation, Alex hesitated to place all the blame on Lou. “I think you should look at the characters of the women he was with (I’m talking about his major relationships)—they’re all very strong women, and good people,” she observed. “He was very ambitious, but it wasn’t a power thing. He just wanted to create. You could say he used people, but he was also respectful of them.” If there was anger sometimes on the part of the women and children—and Alex acknowledged that there was—it was never a bitter or vindictive anger. “He was a very loving person,” she said of Lou, echoing what both of the other children (and not just the children) had said of him.

  “He had an enormous amount of love. He loved everybody,” Shamsul Wares told Nathaniel Kahn when the filmmaker came to Bangladesh in search of his long-dead father. Wares was stressing the way in which the National Assembly Building in Dhaka—“his biggest project, in the poorest country in the world”—was itself a sign of that expansive love. “And sometimes when you love everybody, you do not see the closest ones,” he added.


  But love is not the only human expression that made its way into Kahn’s work. What Lou’s architecture recognizes, and what it took from his own physical sense of himself, is the fact that we are all bodies moving through space, viscerally sensing ourselves as individuals in relation to that space. Louis Kahn, you might say, inhabited his own body more viscerally than most, and perhaps that gave him special access to the way buildings could respond to the human body, at rest and particularly in motion.

  “Motion—movement—is such an important part of our dreams,” he wrote in 1961. “I don’t know anybody who doesn’t dream of flying through space (you’ve got to move your arms a bit) and this is speed to equal any kind of speed—or to swim marvellously, without much effort at all. From this, I feel that the making of a positive architecture of movement, which I like to call a viaduct architecture—which takes into account all the aspects of movement and separates them into identities which don’t inhibit—has free exercise … So, therefore, the architecture of movement.” For Kahn, this emphasis on movement necessarily meant making provision for stoppage and rest; and that was true whether he was talking about cities, with their arterial streets and traffic-halted interchanges, or monasteries, with their ambulatories and secluded places of contemplation.

  This awareness of the body in motion is something that transmits itself to you whenever you enter a structure he designed. It is there from the very first moment, when you go into the building and discover a space you could not have imagined from the outside, and it is there as you move around from room to room, from floor to floor, always coming upon new enticements of light, shape, and texture that lead you further in. It is there, most of all, in your sense of yourself as being tenderly enclosed, or borne upward, or crowned with grandeur—all in the context of a weighty structure whose mass exists, not to intimidate the human-sized body, but to offer it protection and reassurance.