Total Recall
Nov 1, 2007 12:00 PM
Louis I. Kahn
Louis Kahn (1901-1974), through a great love of architecture, a lifelong effort, and a few years of intense activity at the end of his life, reintroduced inspirational and spiritual values to an art that had become stereotyped into anonymity and abstractions. His buildings are a luminous testimonial to his beliefs, and, like all great buildings, they challenge time as works of extraordinary beauty.
An immigrant to Philadelphia in 1905 from the small Russian island of Saarama in the Baltic Sea, he was at the same time an immigrant to a new age which slowly had come to recognize the frightening limits of industrialization and technology.
By his own account, he began making drawings by the age of 3, and continued to be recognized and appreciated for that ability among his friends throughout his youth. From 1912 through 1920, he attended Central High School and Public Industrial Art School in Philadelphia, winning numerous prizes for his drawings. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1924. During that same year, while working in the office of John Molitor, the city architect, he was appointed chief of design for the Sesquicentennial Exhibition of 1926.
In the 1930s, Kahn was associated with several architects who influenced his convictions. Among these were George Howe and Oscar Stonorov. His association with Clarence S. Stein and Henry Wright, as well, led him to an involvement in the social aspects of architecture, such as public housing and “greenbelt towns.”
In the 1950s, Kahn began to emerge as an architect of national prominence.
After the period 1948-1957, during which he served as chief critic in architectural design and professor of architecture at Yale University, Kahn divided his time between his offices on Walnut Street in Philadelphia and the school of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, except for the traveling that became extensive in his later years.
His real friends were his students, the only ones capable of questioning him, of arousing his interest. He always was ready to defend their work in review sessions, to see their potential, and to reveal hidden talent. Friends among his colleagues were few, even though he greatly enjoyed camaraderie and good parties, where he relished being at the center of attention. In every sense, Louis Kahn loved life.
The most important formal contributions to architectural language made by Kahn centered on the volumetric aspect of a building and the configuration of its plan. The first consists in the duplication of the peripheral enclosure of a building. His interest in the potentialities of this enclosure for the expression of external sun-control elements appeared as early as his design for the Psychiatric hospital in Philadelphia in 1944, where deep horizontal slabs with terra-cotta tubes produce a pattern of shading of the slate-clad surfaces of the building elevations. Later, in the project for the U.S. Consular Office in Luanda, Angola, in 1959, screen walls perforated by arched openings support a roof trellis that extends beyond the glass enclosure of the building.
Two buildings that Kahn designed for Yale were built more than 20 years apart, and are instructive about Kahn's use of materials. The Yale Art Gallery, completed in 1953, gave Kahn a sudden renown. The floor structure, made of reinforced concrete tetrahedrons, contains the air-distribution system. The northern wall facing the garden is a carefully proportioned mullioned glass wall. The south wall facing the street is of continuous masonry. The Center for British Art and Studies, completed in 1974, was constructed with a frame structure of reinforced concrete enclosed by sandblasted stainless steel panels on the exterior and by interior wood panels. In both buildings, the materials used perform an explanatory role: a strength and precise clarity in relation to structural function, orientation, light, and atmosphere. In each case, these materials assume the unique role of transforming spaces from being abstract to being human.
Much has happened in architecture since Kahn's death, but his work continues to succeed in a time of incredibly fleeting values because he gave us forms with a sense of permanency. His style gave to modern architecture a sense of maturity and a newfound sense of richness. — Reprinted from the first AS&U Architectural Portfolio, 1983
