Louis I. Kahn: Light, Pastel, Eternity

Summary

The lecture by Michael Lewis delves into the architectural journey of Louis I. Kahn, highlighting his transformative trips to Europe and the evolution of his design philosophy. Lewis explores Kahn's early struggles and the pivotal moment when Kahn integrated his classical and modernist influences, leading to the creation of the iconic Bryn Mawr dormitory. The talk underscores Kahn's unique approach to architecture as an expression of feeling, culminating in his renowned works like the Kimbell Art Museum and the Salk Institute, which redefined modernist principles by reintroducing the significance of rooms and walls.

Takeaways

• 🎨 Louis Kahn's travel sketches significantly influenced his architectural development, reflecting a deep exploration of volume, form, and the essence of architecture.
• 🌈 Kahn's use of pastels in his later sketches indicated a shift towards studying architecture in terms of color and light, which was a departure from traditional methods focusing on solids and voids.
• 🏛 The Kimbell Art Museum, a unique work in Kahn's portfolio, showcases his ability to create a structure that appears effortless and free, akin to poetry or music.
• 📈 Kahn's design process involved a struggle to harmoniously integrate small and large spaces into a coherent whole, reflecting his training at the École des Beaux-Arts.
• 🔄 Kahn's architectural journey was marked by a split between his poetic, emotional paintings and his rational, objective architectural designs, which later converged into a unified approach.
• 🏗️ Kahn's early work focused on functional buildings, such as social housing, during the Depression era, which was a shift from the monumental, civic buildings he was initially trained to design.
• 🌟 His second trip to Europe in 1951 was a turning point where he confidently drew major monuments, indicating a maturation in his architectural philosophy and a move away from modernist orthodoxy.
• 🏢 The design of the Richards Medical Research Laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania marked a pivotal moment where Kahn began to integrate his love for pictorial form and mathematical order into his architecture.
• ⛓ Kahn's architecture is characterized by a return to the expressive use of the axis and the reintroduction of the enclosed room and solid wall, elements that had been minimized in modernist architecture.
• 🧱 The use of brick and the emphasis on the thickness of walls in Kahn's designs contributed to the expressive nature of his architecture, which was a departure from the modernist trend of dematerialization.
• 🕍 Kahn's architecture is not just a solution to a problem but an expression of feeling, often reflecting a sense of the sacred or the poetic, as seen in his late works like the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad.

Q & A

Who is the speaker introduced by Nancy Edwards in the script?

The speaker introduced by Nancy Edwards is Michael Lewis, the Faison-Pierson-Stoddard Professor of Art History at Williams College.

What is the subject of the exhibition 'The Power of Architecture: Louis Kahn'?

The exhibition 'The Power of Architecture: Louis Kahn' is focused on the architectural works and sketches of Louis I. Kahn, organized by the Vitra Design Museum and displayed in the Kahn Building.

What is the significance of Louis Kahn's travel sketches according to Michael Lewis?

According to Michael Lewis, Louis Kahn's travel sketches are fundamental to the development of his architecture, as they represent his exploration and understanding of volume, form, color, and light in relation to architectural structures.

How did Louis Kahn's architectural approach evolve from his first to his second trip to Europe?

Kahn's approach evolved from tentative and restless drawings during his first trip in 1928, focused on volume and form, to bolder and more ambitious pastel drawings during his second trip in 1951, where he studied architecture in terms of color and light.

What is unique about the Kimbell Art Museum designed by Louis Kahn?

The Kimbell Art Museum is unique because it represents Kahn's work at the top of his game, with a kind of unshackled freedom typically associated with poetry or music, and it is referred to as a 'unicum', a one-of-a-kind work.

What was the impact of the Great Depression on Louis Kahn's architectural career?

The Great Depression led to Kahn being let go by his employer, Paul Cret, and experiencing a period of unemployment. It also shifted the architectural landscape, with society demanding functional buildings in a modern style rather than the classical style Kahn was trained in.

What role did Anne Tyng play in the Bryn Mawr College dormitory project?

Anne Tyng, a co-designer with expertise in modular geometry, produced a design for the Bryn Mawr College dormitory with octagonal dorm rooms. However, Kahn was initially dubious about her design and eventually developed his own design for the project.

How did Louis Kahn's architectural style differ from the modernist architects of his time?

While modernist architects like Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier focused on functional buildings with minimal ornamentation and historical references, Kahn was more interested in the expressive potential of space and the integration of classical and modernist elements in his designs.

What was the turning point for Louis Kahn in integrating his artistic and architectural sensibilities?

The turning point for Kahn was his second trip to Europe in 1951, where he confidently drew major monuments using pastels. This trip allowed him to embrace his artistic side and integrate it with his architectural work, leading to a unified approach.

What is the main architectural lesson Louis Kahn learned from his travels and studies?

The main lesson Kahn learned was that a building is not just a solution to a problem but an expression of feeling. He brought back the concept of the room as a fundamental unit of architectural expression and the solid walled room as a dignified space for human action.

How did Louis Kahn's early struggles with the Bryn Mawr College project contribute to his architectural development?

The struggles with the Bryn Mawr College project led Kahn to experiment with different designs and eventually integrate geometric order with the expressive potential of space. This process contributed to the development of his signature architectural style.

Outlines

00:00

🎨 Louis Kahn's Artistic Journey and Influence

Nancy Edwards introduces the esteemed architect Louis Kahn through the lens of his European travel sketches, which played a pivotal role in shaping his architectural philosophy. The talk highlights two significant trips: the first in 1928 as a young man, where his drawings were exploratory, and the second in 1951, characterized by bold and ambitious pastel sketches. These experiences with color and light were instrumental in Kahn's architectural evolution, as he moved away from conventional architectural studies towards a more expressive and poetic approach to design.

05:02

🏛 The Kimbell Art Museum and Kahn's Architectural Evolution

The speaker delves into Kahn's design process for the Kimbell Art Museum, emphasizing its uniqueness among Kahn's works and attributing its qualities to Kahn's travel sketches. The narrative explores Kahn's struggle with the design of a dormitory for Bryn Mawr College, illustrating his indecisiveness and the influence of Anne Tyng's modular geometry. The summary underscores the significance of Kahn's sketches in developing his architectural language, which eventually led to the distinctive design of the Kimbell.

10:04

📚 Kahn's Struggle with Architectural Coherence and the Impact of Modernism

This section discusses Kahn's challenges in creating a coherent design for Bryn Mawr College's dormitory, highlighting his struggle to reconcile large and small spaces into a unified architectural statement. It also touches upon Kahn's educational background at the University of Pennsylvania and his early career under Paul Cret, which was heavily influenced by the Beaux-Arts system. The summary points out the seismic shift in architectural paradigms due to the Great Depression and the rise of functional modernism, which left Kahn grappling with an outdated classical approach.

15:05

🌍 Kahn's European Journey and the Influence of Expressionism

The script details Kahn's extensive European study trip in 1928-29, focusing on his fascination with Expressionist architecture in northern Europe and his detailed studies of brick construction. Kahn's architectural sketches during this period were not merely aesthetic but served as a professional tool for learning and potential reuse in his future work. The summary captures Kahn's exploration of architectural forms beyond classical training, revealing his openness to modern styles and techniques.

20:07

🏰 Kahn's Architectural Insights from Italy and the Rediscovery of the Room

The narrative explores Kahn's time in Italy, where he was captivated by the simplicity and monumentality of the architecture, particularly the fortified tower houses of San Gimignano. His use of a carpenter's pencil allowed for a more intuitive and expressive drawing technique, leading to a deeper analysis of architectural forms. The summary highlights Kahn's evolving understanding of space and form, which would later influence his architectural designs that emphasized the importance of the room as a fundamental unit of expression.

25:08

🏙️ Kahn's Vision for Modern Architecture and the Integration of Past and Present

This section discusses Kahn's approach to modern architecture, emphasizing his desire to create buildings that addressed contemporary social issues while also reflecting historical and cultural depth. Kahn's designs for social housing projects are highlighted as examples of his ability to adapt European modernist principles to an American context. The summary underscores Kahn's belief in the transformative power of architecture to elevate the human experience.

30:09

🖌️ The Synthesis of Kahn's Architectural and Artistic Identities

The speaker describes Kahn's artistic and architectural development, illustrating how his love for color and painting influenced his architectural designs. Kahn's struggle with the dichotomy between his poetic, emotional paintings and his rational, objective architectural work is explored. The summary explains how Kahn eventually integrated these seemingly disparate aspects of his identity to create a unified architectural language that combined classical and modernist elements.

35:10

🛕 The Bryn Mawr Dormitory and the Emergence of Kahn's Signature Style

This section focuses on the Bryn Mawr dormitory project, which was a turning point in Kahn's career. The design process involved a synthesis of geometric order and human scale, leading to the creation of three distinct cubes that housed monumental spaces. The summary highlights how this project marked the beginning of Kahn's signature style, characterized by the interplay of solid and void, and the expressive use of light and shadow.

40:12

🏛️ Kahn's Architectural Philosophy and the Restoration of the Room and Wall

The final paragraph examines Kahn's architectural philosophy, particularly his belief in the importance of the room and the solid wall as fundamental elements of architectural expression. Kahn's work is contrasted with the modernist trend of open spaces and minimal partitions. The summary emphasizes Kahn's contribution to modern architecture by reintroducing the enclosed room and the expressive potential of space, culminating in his poignant and dignified late works.

🏗️ The Enduring Legacy of Louis Kahn's Architectural Vision

In conclusion, the speaker reflects on Kahn's legacy, celebrating his ability to infuse architecture with a sense of nobility and timelessness. The summary encapsulates Kahn's belief in the building as an expression of human action and emotion, highlighting the tragic dignity and poignancy of his late works, which serve as a testament to his enduring influence in the field of architecture.

Keywords

💡Architecture

Architecture in the video refers to both the profession and art of designing and constructing buildings and structures. It is central to the video's theme as it explores the evolution of Louis Kahn's architectural philosophy and style. The script discusses Kahn's journey from his early struggles with design to his mastery, as seen in the Kimbell Art Museum, highlighting his unique approach to creating spaces with 'unshackled freedom' akin to poetry or music.

💡Louis Kahn

Louis Kahn, or Louis I. Kahn, is a central figure in the video. He was a prominent 20th-century architect known for his distinctive style and philosophical approach to design. The script delves into Kahn's architectural journey, his travel sketches, and how these experiences influenced his work, particularly his ability to imbue his buildings with a sense of timeless elegance and profound spatial quality.

💡Travel Sketches

Travel sketches are drawings made by Kahn during his trips to Europe, studying and interpreting historical buildings. These sketches played a fundamental role in Kahn's development as an architect, as they allowed him to explore and understand the essence of architecture beyond mere form and structure. The script mentions how these sketches were not a tangent but integral to his architectural evolution, influencing his designs and approach to space and light.

💡Modernism

Modernism is a movement in architecture characterized by the rejection of historical styles and the embrace of new technologies and materials. The video discusses how Kahn initially embraced modernism, learning to compose and think like its leading figures such as Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. However, he later sought to integrate modernism with classical elements, aiming for a synthesis that would bring back the expressive and poetic potential of architecture.

💡Bryn Mawr College Dormitory

The Bryn Mawr College Dormitory project is a significant case study in the video, illustrating Kahn's design process and struggles. It serves as an example of Kahn's early challenges in reconciling modernist principles with his emerging architectural vision. The script describes how Kahn grappled with the design, seeking to create a harmonious order that would express a single, elegant thought.

💡Anne Tyng

Anne Tyng is mentioned as Kahn's co-designer, particularly for the Bryn Mawr project. She was a champion of modular geometry, which was an important aspect of Kahn's work during those years. The script highlights how Tyng's modular design for the dormitory, with its octagonal rooms, influenced Kahn's thinking, even though he ultimately pursued his own design direction.

💡Sketching

Sketching in the video refers to the act of drawing quickly and freely to explore and communicate design ideas. Kahn used sketching as a tool for understanding and analyzing architecture, as evidenced by his travel sketches. The script describes how his sketching evolved from tentative and restless drawings to bolder and more confident works, reflecting his growing assurance as an architect.

💡École des Beaux-Arts

The École des Beaux-Arts is a renowned French institution that has had a significant influence on architectural education. Kahn studied under this system, which focused on organizing spaces into a unified whole. The script contrasts the Beaux-Arts approach with modernism and highlights how Kahn's training influenced his early work, including his ability to design buildings like the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington.

💡Space

Space, in the context of the video, refers to the three-dimensional areas that architecture creates. Kahn's conception of space was influenced by his study of historical buildings and his evolving设计理念. The script discusses how Kahn moved away from the modernist notion of 'flowing space' towards a more defined and enclosed room, which he saw as a fundamental unit of architectural expression.

💡Pastels

Pastels are a绘画媒介，used by Kahn in his later travels to capture the essence of architecture through color and light. The script mentions pastels as a medium that allowed Kahn to work decisively and forcefully, reflecting his mature style and confidence. His use of pastels signifies a departure from his earlier, more tentative sketches and represents a more expressive and intuitive approach to drawing.

💡Rooms

Rooms, in the video, symbolize the enclosed spaces that Kahn believed were fundamental to architectural expression. The script discusses Kahn's shift from the modernist concept of open, flowing space to the reinstatement of the room as a 'fixed and definite poetic enclosure.' This reflects Kahn's belief that a building should not only solve functional problems but also express feelings and create meaningful experiences.

Highlights

Introduction of the exhibition 'The Power of Architecture: Louis Kahn' and its significance.

Discussion on Kahn's travel sketches and their role in shaping his architectural vision.

Kahn's first trip to Europe in 1928 and his exploratory drawings of architectural forms.

The evolution of Kahn's drawing style from tentative to bolder and more ambitious during his second trip in 1951.

Kahn's unique approach to studying architecture through color and light, rather than traditional solids and voids.

The design of the Kimbell Art Museum and its distinction as a unicum in Kahn's body of work.

Kahn's struggle with the design of Bryn Mawr College dormitory and his indecisiveness in early drafts.

The influence of Anne Tyng's modular geometry on Kahn's work, particularly for the Bryn Mawr project.

Kahn's shift from classical to modernist architecture and the impact of the Great Depression on his career.

Kahn's fascination with Expressionist architecture and its influence on his own work.

Kahn's time in Italy and his focus on buildings with no detail, such as the tower houses of San Gimignano.

The use of the 'magic pencil' technique by Kahn to create expressive and analytical drawings.

Kahn's secret 1932 proposal for a monument to Vladimir Lenin in Leningrad, reflecting his desire for revolutionary expression.

The contrast between Kahn's architectural commissions and his personal artistic desires.

Kahn's philosophical journey and his struggle with his cultural identity as an architect.

The integration of Kahn's poetic and rational architectural sensibilities in his later work.

Kahn's breakthrough with the Yale Art Gallery and the introduction of the expressive poetic skyline in his designs.

The Bryn Mawr project's significance in Kahn's development of geometric order and the alignment of spaces.

Kahn's restoration of the power of the axis and his contribution to modern architecture beyond just the axis.

Kahn's philosophy that a building is an expression of feeling, not just a solution to a problem.

The enduring influence of Kahn's early drawings and the concept of the room as a vaulted unit in his architecture.

The tragic dignity and poignancy of Kahn's late works, exemplified by the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad.

Transcripts

- Good evening,

and welcome.

I'm Nancy Edwards, curator of European art,

head of academic services

here at the Kimbell.

I'm sure everyone in this audience

has been enjoying the rich

and extremely rewarding exhibition,

“The Power of Architecture: Louis Kahn,”

which was organized

by the Vitra Design Museum,

on view in the Kahn Building

until June 25th.

As you know, there is also a small

and glorious exhibition of Kahn's pastels

that were lent by Kahn's three children,

but if you haven't had the opportunity

to bask in the color and the poetry

of these works, better yet displayed

in a Kahn space, I'm sure you will

after hearing tonight's talk.

I'm delighted to introduce

our speaker tonight, Michael Lewis,

who's the ideal person to talk about

the role of Kahn's travel sketches.

Michael's written an essay

for the Vitra exhibition catalog,

and he also contributed to a catalog

for the 1996 exhibition: “The Travel Drawings

of Louis I. Kahn” that was at

Williams College Museum of Art.

Michael is the Faison-Pierson-Stoddard

Professor of Art History at Williams College,

which is in Williamstown, Massachusetts,

where he has taught American art

and architecture since 1993.

He received a BA from Haverford College

in Pennsylvania,

was awarded a Fulbright fellowship

and a DAAD fellowship—-

that's from the German academic

exchange student, to spend two years

at the University of Hannover in Germany

in the ‘80s, and then he received his PhD

from the University of Pennsylvania in ’89.

As a scholar and critic of architecture,

he has a very full portfolio, writing

and speaking on a very wide range of topics.

His books include “Frank Furness:

Architecture in the Violent Mind”;

“The Gothic Revival,”

which has been translated into Japanese;

“American Art and Architecture”;

and “August Reichensperger:

The Politics of the German Gothic Revival,”

for which he won the Hitchcock Book Award

from the Society

of Architectural Historians in 1995.

In 2008, he received a Guggenheim

fellowship to support the completion

of “City of Refuge: The Other Utopia,”

a study of millennial town planning.

In addition, he's written many essays

and reviews for publications,

including the Wall Street Journal,

New York Times, and Architectural Record.

Please join me in welcoming Michael Lewis,

who tonight is speaking on “Louis I. Kahn:

Light, Pastel, Eternity.”

(audience applauds)

- Thank you, Nancy,

and thanks for coming.

I guess I don't have to stand by this thing.

I've got one.

I've never worn one of these before.

Feels peculiar.

Twice Louis I. Kahn traveled to Europe

to draw the great buildings of the past.

Once as a young man, 1928,

part of a year-long forensic investigation

of European architecture conducted

by means of pencil, watercolor,

and pen-and-ink drawings.

The drawings are tentative, restless,

and more than a bit impatient.

Here Kahn is grappling searchingly

with volume and form, the essence

of architecture.

Then comes a second trip in 1951.

This time the drawings are bolder,

furiously ambitious.

One after another, Kahn confronts

the central monuments of antiquity:

the Parthenon,

the Temple of Apollo at Corinth there,

the Great Pyramid of Cheops,

this time working confidently

in radiantly vibrant pastel.

Again he is studying architecture,

but not in the customary way,

in terms of solids and voids,

but rather in terms of color and light.

Such, in a nutshell, is the graphic legacy

of Kahn.

And our question is what, if anything,

does this have to do with the architecture?

Fifty years ago,

Kahn designed your splendid building.

This is Kahn at the top of his game,

creating with the kind of unshackled freedom

that we normally associate with poetry

or music, where we're not troubled

by such trifling matters as gravity

or the strengths of materials.

And the Kimbell looks like nothing else Kahn did.

It is a unicum,

and it is startling to recall that this is the work

of a man in his late 60s,

long past the age

where most of us start repeating ourselves.

Now, I believe that the qualities

we cherish in the Kimbell

cannot be understood without reference

to Kahn's drawings.

Would not even have been possible

without the drawings.

Because Kahn's travel sketches are not

a tangent, a digression, a divagation.

They are fundamental to the development

of his architecture.

Let me explain.

To look at the Kimbell

is to look ...

There?

No.

To look at the Kimbell is to look

at an architect working

with self-assurance and quiet mastery,

who knows exactly what he's doing,

but the truth is until recently, Kahn was not

at all sure what he was doing.

Just five years earlier,

we find him struggling mightily.

In May of 1961, he was commissioned

to design a dormitory for Bryn Mawr College,

just outside Philadelphia.

A women's college which is graced with

perhaps America's loveliest dormitory buildings,

each one with its own dining hall,

this one suspended right above

the campus entrance and guarded

by four delightfully preposterous turrets,

gorgeously illuminated

by those leaded glass windows.

Kahn's task was to design a modern version

of this building

for a hundred and thirty modern women,

a dining hall, living room,

various smoking rooms, tea rooms.

Now watch how he handled it.

First, he made a block diagram

so he could see graphically

all the spaces he needed clearly laid out.

Next, he worked to shape all those spaces

into a coherent design.

And look at him struggle.

Does he want to line the dorm rooms

up on an axis?

(Down here as on the lower left.)

But the problem is, an axis is unmodern.

It's classical.

So does he bend the axis?

Or does he dispense with the axis all together

and make the rooms fit together

like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle,

as up here?

Kahn has no idea.

That's what this drawing tells me.

And it is in this indecisiveness,

which made it only natural that he turned

for assistance to his co-designer, Anne Tyng.

Not merely because she was a woman,

the only one in his office who had actually

lived in a women's dormitory,

but because she was the great champion

of modular geometry,

which was so important to Kahn

in these years.

And so for Bryn Mawr, Anne Tyng

produced a design that was

as modular as can be,

with octagonal dorm rooms,

each one nesting in the other,

as snugly interlocked as the cells of a beehive.

Now as an exercise in three-dimensional

geometry, this is very timely.

This comes just seven years

after Watson and Crick had discovered

the double helix of DNA.

And yet,

Kahn was dubious.

He seems to have found Tyng's design

too additive, too shapeless, too sprawling.

Behind her back, he mocked it cruelly,

calling it algae.

So at the very last minute,

he inserted his own design,

where he struggled to give expression

to those big spaces of the living room

and dining hall

wrapped in a cocoon of the dorm rooms.

It was a very undistinguished, blocky affair.

I believe it was a space holder.

It put his foot in the door to give him time

to come up with a solution on his own.

And so he continued to work.

Here trying to segregate the big public spaces

of dining and recreation

from the small private spaces of the dorm rooms.

This one's from early 1961.

Here's one from later that year, October.

Yet another rambling essay

with separate pods

of dorm rooms in pavilions.

Little episodes of flickering geometry

in the rooms,

but no resolution of overall order or coherence.

None of these projects satisfied Kahn.

And so he continued to fidget,

preparing plans, taking them

to the monthly job meeting,

only to discard them and start all over again.

Sisyphus in a bowtie,

rolling the stone up the hill,

only to watch it roll down again.

And this went on for 18 months,

right up through December 1961,

and at the end of it, Kahn was no closer

to a solution than when he started.

And we can see the nature of his struggle.

He had a great many small spaces,

and a very few big spaces.

And he wants to bring them together

into a harmonious order

that has the quality

of one single elegant thought.

Now why was this so hard to do?

After all, this was what he was trained to do.

He spent four years

at the University of Pennsylvania,

studying architecture according

to the system of the École des Beaux-Arts.

The whole brunt of that system was

to teach you how to organize large

and small spaces into a logical, unified whole.

He was quite nimble at it.

Here is his plan for an army post

for an entire regiment.

Headquarters, hospital, barracks

for some 4,000 men, designed at the end

of his senior year.

All of them brought together into elusive,

collective, single expression.

It showed he was talented enough to find ...

It proved to his teachers he was

talented enough to give him an instant job

upon graduation designing

the exhibition buildings for Philadelphia's

sesquicentennial exhibition of 1926,

right after graduation.

In fact, Kahn's own teacher, Paul Cret,

recognized his gifts and offered him a job,

but before Kahn took it, he embarked

on his fateful one-year study trip of Europe

in 1928-29.

When he returned, Cret would put him to work,

helping him on the design of the great

Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington.

This is the modern classicism

that Kahn learned from Cret.

Classical but modern.

The forms refined and decanted

into abstraction.

Symmetrical.

The ornament simplified, reduced to simple

incised linear bands.

And you can imagine if things had not changed,

Kahn would have poured forth

a steady stream of such buildings,

but things did change,

and change catastrophically.

Just five months after Kahn returned

from Europe into Cret's office

came the stock market crash of October 1929,

the Great Depression, as we see here

in Dorothea Lange’s emblematic breadline.

Kahn didn't fall quite this far,

but he came close.

Cret let Kahn go, and for much

of the next decade, he would be out of work.

And it wasn't only that he couldn't find work.

The whole architectural terrain

had shifted beneath his feet.

Everything he had learned about architecture

was no longer true.

He had been trained to make monumental

civic buildings, such as museums

and libraries, in a classical style,

but what society now demanded

was functional buildings

such as social housing blocks

designed in a modern style,

such as the famous Weissenhofsiedlung

in Stuttgart, with its model apartments

by the leading modernists of Europe.

The building is flat-roofed, radiantly,

gleamingly white,

purged of all ornament,

purged of all history.

Now this was the functional architecture

promulgated by the Bauhaus,

whose innovative buildings would have

been just two years old in 1928,

when Kahn first set foot in Europe.

Now any American architect in 1928

curious about European modernism

would have made his way to Dessau

to look at this.

And of course this is the exact same moment,

1928, that Le Corbusier was building

his own essay in purity——geometric purity,

chromatic purity——the Villa Savoye

in the suburban town of Poissy,

just outside of Paris.

This is the apogee of the modern villa,

the same way Palladio's Villa Rotunda

is the apogee of the Renaissance villa.

It would make perfect sense

that Kahn would make Paris

the first destination in Europe.

In fact, it was his last.

Kahn's study trip of 1928, 1929 traced

a long clockwise arc through Europe,

up, down, and around.

Up through northern Europe,

up through the Baltics

to his birthplace in Estonia

(he emigrated at the age of three

to Philadelphia), and then down to Italy

where he spent the winter.

He would not see Paris till the final days

of that study year.

Instead what he did was to make a beeline

for northern Europe,

for Holland, Germany, and Sweden.

What he wanted to see first

was the agitated architecture

of Expressionism,

with its passionate angularity,

nearly medieval in the tenseness

of rhythm and silhouette.

This is the Chilehaus in Hamburg

by that master of brick construction,

Fritz Höger.

Alas, a Nazi, but there we go.

This building could not be farther removed

from the immaculate clarity

of the Villa Savoye,

but this is the architecture that excited Kahn,

and he drew it,

carefully and in detail.

These are the brick moldings here

that he's enlarging in his drawing.

He drew it carefully, just as he drew

the Expressionist housing blocks

of Rotterdam and Amsterdam,

studying how the brick was bonded,

the specifics of moldings and profile.

And he wasn't sketching for his own pleasure.

He was drawing the details

as a professional might draw details,

to purloin for reuse in his own work.

Kahn continued to the northeast,

visiting Stockholm,

Helsinki, then down to Riga,

and as we saw, Estonia.

But then we have another surprise.

Kahn passes through

Berlin, Prague, and Vienna,

those cauldrons of modernity.

And he spends only a few days in each.

It is Italy that summons him.

And here,

he'll spend five months.

Why so long?

We get a sense in an enigmatic postcard

that he wrote to two friends

known only to history as Laura and Goldie,

and which he never sent.

That's why we have it.

It is an excited and strangely garbled postcard.

"Compared to other countries

"this is to the architect - artist -

"Italy certainly stands alone ..."

That's a run-on sentence.

There's no grammar check in 1928.

But he goes on.

"Up until now I arranged my trip to take in

"those countries that are going in

"for the modern -

"Now I am in the land that is the source of ..."

And the postcard stops right there

in mid-sentence.

The land that is the source of what?

Was Italy the source

of the great architecture of the past?

Is Italy the source of the great architecture

that's to come?

He could not end the sentence.

And in any event, two decades would pass,

I think, before he could

end the sentence,

because the striking fact is while in Italy,

Kahn never drew any

of the major classical monuments,

such as the Pantheon or Trajan's forum,

any of the classical columns.

Four years of studying classicism

under Paul Cret seem to have been more

than enough.

Why should he bother to measure

the capitals and the moldings?

After all, Cret was vigorously dispensing

with such detail,

making an abstractly contemporary classicism.

So Kahn had no interest in detail.

Archaeological detail, that is.

The buildings that fascinated him

were the buildings

that had no detail whatsoever,

such as the fortified tower houses

of San Gimignano,

that lovely Tuscan hill town.

Kahn drew these again and again.

He drew them in watercolor.

This is a lovely drawing that's part

of the collection of Williams College.

After drawing it in watercolor, though,

he drew it again in pencil

with an extraordinary technique.

On the way down to Rome,

passing through Bologna,

he acquired a carpenter's pencil

with a very broad lead

that he could turn sideways

to make a long, flat, emphatic stroke,

giving contour lines that look

as if whittled with a knife.

And I think because of the forceful,

physical nature of the drawing act,

this technique invites a kind of intuitive,

kinetic identification

of the object being drawn.

No wonder Kahn called it his magic pencil.

It liberated him from the tight illustrations

he made at the start of the trip

when he landed in England.

This one with its luxuriant,

staffage of vegetation.

Drawings like this were merely

the scenic recreation of a view,

but the magic pencil didn't just describe;

it analyzed.

And with a glorious economy of means,

all by simply changing

the degree of pressure

and the angle of the stroke,

such as this extraordinary room

in the Villa Rufolo

in Ravello.

Kahn was so ravenous to soak up

as much of this architecture as he could

that he sometimes cheated.

In 1996, we held an exhibition

of Kahn's drawings

at the Williams College Museum of Art

where we showed this drawing

of the communal palace in Piacenza.

And we had the crazy idea

to send a photographer to Europe

to recreate Kahn's trip, to take a photograph

of every building he drew

to try to find the angle where he sat.

And our friend Ralph Lieberman was

already en route when we got

a rather chagrined phone call

from Sue Ann Kahn, the architect’s daughter,

who told us that she had found a shoebox

full of old postcards,

including this one.

In fact, out of that shoebox came

quite a number of postcards that showed

Kahn was merely drawing postcards

in his hotel room at night.

Now this is revealing.

Kahn is not a lazy man.

It tells us he's not there to make your

conventional pretty pictures on a Grand Tour.

His purpose, his agenda was more purposeful.

He wanted to enrich his own professional

repertoire by studying the accumulated . . .

accumulated,

concentrated product of two millennia

of European architecture,

however he could do it.

And he did it in curious ways.

Here are the famous Twin Towers of Bologna,

the Torre degli Asinelli on the right.

I forget the name of the one on the left.

Two upright prisms,

slightly cockeyed.

The one to the left has leaned a bit.

And you could see why Kahn

would want to subject them

to the magic pencil,

but look how he simplified the detail.

He gives the crenulated balcony

here the quality

of a quasi-Art Deco zigzag,

which reminds us that 1929, after all,

is the year that the Chrysler Building

began construction.

So any American architect,

looking at the towers in Bologna,

might have looked at them sentimentally

as proto-skyscrapers,

but few would have done what Kahn did,

which is to consummate the process

and turn the drawings into actual

skyscraper designs,

right down to the rusticated base

of the one on the left and that

crenulated balcony of the other,

now turned into a Jazz Age cornice.

Weirdly, he even paraphrased

the shadowy band in the corner,

making it into something that may be a boat

on the East River in New York.

I can't quite tell.

So even while Kahn is looking at Italy,

he is thinking of America.

He never got to build this,

but he did make one curious design

shortly after he returned,

which tells us how he could apply

the lessons of the past

to the problems of the present.

And the project is a shocking one.

In 1932, he submitted to the Soviet Union

a proposal for a monument to Vladimir Lenin

to be built in Leningrad.

It would have consisted

of two glass brick towers.

Not just brick but glass bricks.

So they could have been illuminated

from within at night, blazing red

over the harbor of the Neva River.

A blazing beacon of revolution,

which is, I think,

what Kahn wanted to offer them.

The whole thing a promenade for the public

to watch aerial shows, nautical displays,

in a kind of sublimated

hammer and sickle there.

But at another level it invokes the most

celebrated work of art

to come from the revolution.

Look at that wedge.

Look at that circle.

You're looking at a quotation of Lissitzky's

“The Red Wedge Beats the White.”

This is the most revolutionary bit

of political art ever to come from Kahn.

No wonder he kept it secret,

beginning in about 1939.

Something we discovered only

in the 1990s,

but this is actually a pathetic sign.

It tells you that Kahn is looking

anywhere in the world

for someone who might hire him.

I said the terrain has changed underneath

his feet, and this is the year it happens.

1932 is the year of the famous “Exhibition

of Modern Architecture”

at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,

which gives us the word

the International Style.

It's there that you see this model

of the Villa Savoye,

right in the center.

It is this exhibit that gave us the manifesto

of the International Style, written

by the architect Philip Johnson

and the historian Henry Russell Hitchcock.

The burden of the show was to tell you

that the world had changed

and architecture must change.

And above all,

in a time of international economic crisis,

what was needed were not

sentimental displays of the past,

but buildings that could solve

the problems of the present,

particularly social housing.

And this is what Kahn did.

This soon became the mainstay of his career.

Throughout the Depression,

throughout World War II,

the making of efficient, intelligently laid out

social housing projects,

these here at Mill Creek

and these at Carver Court,

Coatesville, Pennsylvania,

middle of nowhere,

where Kahn took the forms,

the ideological forms of European

social housing and rather gently

Americanized them.

Now these things are highly idealistic.

They take for granted that the provision

of humane housing is a high calling,

but if they humanely house the human body,

they did not stir the human heart.

Not the way suggested by Kahn's drawing,

say of Positano.

Strange image that he left unfinished.

I'm not sure what that black arc is

behind the highest towers.

Is that a starry night sky?

Whatever it is, it tells us that for Kahn,

the city is a mystical thing where nature

and architectural forms swirl together

in rapturous unison.

And the point is this.

Kahn had thoughts he wished to utter

that exceeded the expressive range

of the buildings he was assigned.

This is the nature of architecture,

unlike any other art.

The novelist, the poet, the composer,

the painter can go home right now

and write the novel or make the painting.

The architect, the architectural project

is always the return of a serve.

First the client, then the building.

So architects are at the mercy

of whatever commissions they receive.

An architect cannot create autonomously.

And this was a source

of great frustration to Kahn,

but it made Kahn restless in a creative way.

And that trait, I propose,

was there from the beginning.

This is Paul Cret,

that elegant and jaunty French architect,

that prodigy of the Beaux-Arts,

star of the École who taught Kahn

and who hired him and formed him.

Towards the end of Kahn's life, he attended

an exhibit of the late Cret's drawings,

where he gave an off-the-cuff talk

about Cret's importance

as an inspirational teacher.

And Kahn reminisced about the first project

he was ever given to design,

which was nothing more

than a niche in a garden wall.

I don't know if it was this Kahn student project.

We only have a few.

Might have been,

but I think it would have been simpler.

At any rate, Kahn was assigned

a niche in a garden wall.

Very basic elementary one.

An opening projecting into space.

But Kahn at this off-the-cuff talk

said something curious.

He said it was difficult

to design the niche, quote,

"because we had no courses before.

"We had no great courses in philosophy."

Now this should strike you as strange.

Why do you need a course

in philosophy to design a niche?

Do Plato and Aristotle tell you

about the plan and section of a niche?

We had no courses in philosophy.

What a revealing statement.

What it reveals is insecurity.

Kahn's acute, burning awareness

of his outsider status:

a Jewish émigré into waspish

Quaker Philadelphia.

A poor Estonian émigré whose birth name,

that was very quickly changed,

wasn't Louis Kahn.

It was Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky.

He felt at Penn he was designing

in a cultural background.

He did not have behind him the cultural roots

that would have underpinned

even the simple making of a garden niche.

He needed to fill that vacuum.

As it happened, modernism

gave him a philosophy.

And Kahn embraced it for a time.

He learned to compose

like Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier.

He learned to think like them.

He even learned to draw like them,

as here, in his project

for the Jersey homesteads

in Hightstown, New Jersey, 1935.

And here you see the scorn with which

modernists held the pretty picture

that Beaux-Arts architects had made.

This was the modernist attack on the École.

Students at the École des Beaux-Arts

spent all their time making ravishing

ink-wash drawings when they should have

been planning.

The modern architect

makes a blunt drawing that is empirical,

parched of any chromatic pleasure.

Now Kahn learned to do this fairly well.

He was a gifted renderer.

He even learned to imitate

Le Corbusier’s squiggly trees.

All the tricks of modernism.

Still, it must have required an act

of tremendous will to make such

pragmatic drawings

when we know of his intense love of color.

Here's a painting made at the same time.

And he made paintings

like this throughout the 1930s,

exhibiting them regularly

at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

I love these blazing red, agonized trees.

What we see happening right before our eyes

is Kahn's artistic mind splitting violently

into two lobes:

a poetic mystic sensibility, highly emotional,

that lives only in the paintings,

and a rational objectivity

that flourishes only in the architecture.

This was Kahn in his Buckminster Fuller

phase of the early 1950s,

when when he had high hopes

for a geometric architecture that would be

as pure, as elegant and spare as, say,

the architecture of a spiderweb

or of a rock crystal

or of a strand of DNA.

Incidentally, forms that are not at all

especially emotional.

It is at this moment that Kahn returns to Europe

for his second trip.

Once again, he looks for an emotional

means of expression,

not the magic pencil now,

but pastel,

where he can work decisively and forcefully.

Kahn no longer feels insecure

about not having studied philosophy.

This time,

he doesn't avoid the major monuments.

He seeks them out,

and he draws them carefully.

The Parthenon, the Acropolis, Corinth.

Pushing back from Rome to Greece

and then finally to Egypt,

where he looks at the mortuary monuments

of Hatshepsut and Ramesses,

drawing them.

The mighty masonry, blazing in sunlight.

Robust, big, hefty, bulky forms of masonry.

The buildings are confident,

but we see a confident Kahn drawing them,

mano-a-mano,

eyeball to eyeball.

What you see is Kahn

who no longer feels he needs to defer

to the modernism of his European peers.

Kahn returns in 1951 after his three months

at the American Academy in Rome

and goes to work.

Now doing two things.

He will now bring together

his two architectural pedigrees,

the classical and the modernist, and make

a productive synthesis out of them.

And he will take back into his architectural

production that separate channel

of artistic thought that had become

a tributary into painting.

It will all pour back now into the mainstream

of a unified architecture.

The breakthrough building is the first

Yale Art Gallery of 1953.

Still a bit troubled by Buckminster Fuller

in that roof, but you see that Kahn

is looking for, is looking yearningly

for tragic space.

A few years later, he added another element,

and that is something that modernism

up to now had banished authoritatively:

the skyline, the expressive poetic skyline.

The dynamic calligraphic signature

of a building against the sky, which tells you

about its huddled energy and forces.

The whole conception of the Richards Laboratory

at Penn is pictorial.

And it's an uncanny reminiscence

of what he drew at Bologna

and San Gimignano.

So here Kahn is at the threshold,

but he hasn't crossed yet.

We have an architect with a strong sense

of pictorial form, a predilection

for mathematical order of some sort,

and an as yet unrealized feeling

for the poetic potential of space,

but he hasn't integrated them yet.

This is why I believe the Bryn Mawr project

was filled with so many false starts.

Kahn was so perplexed by this commission

he did something he never did

throughout the rest of his career,

that is he showed up at every successive

job meeting with two projects:

his own and the geometric project

of Anne Tyng.

His addressing concerns of human gathering,

hers addressing Platonic geometry,

the order of the universe.

Heaven and earth, above and below.

No wonder Kahn was perplexed.

And then Anne Tyng inadvertently

made a design that caught Kahn's attention.

It was the idea of wrapping the big

monumental spaces within a surrounding

mantle of dorm rooms.

For the first time, the lively rhythm

of the little spaces is reciprocated

in the bold rhythm of the big public rooms.

Kahn saw this as having potential,

but I think he was put off by the nervous walls,

with their faceted intricacy.

It was just too fussy.

But what he loved was that alignment

of a trio of three heroic spaces.

So he took those three spaces,

reshaped them as cubes,

and swiveled them 45 degrees.

And now, for the first time, the geometric order

of the parts resonates persuasively

with the order of the whole.

Three detached cubes touching lightly,

only at their corners,

and each concealing within

a great space of immense ceremonial gravity

with light wells, little monitors in the corner

that peak above the roof like a periscope

to bring in the sun.

This is the Kahn we know and value.

This is the Kahn we know from the Kimbell.

But the question is why

it took him so long to do it,

until 1961.

Here, Kahn knew

he had done something remarkable.

He was euphoric.

Now much is made in the scholarship

of Kahn, of his achievement in restoring

to architecture the power of the axis.

This is the Salk Institute in La Jolla.

And that's true.

But I want to leave you with this thought.

This is not really Kahn's great accomplishment

in bringing life back to a modernism

that had become formulaic.

Here's what his achievement was.

If you think of what modern architecture did,

it was to conceive of a new kind of space.

Classic example is IIT,

Illinois Institute of Technology.

Mies van der Rohe at Crown Hall

creates a heroic roof truss,

a kind of exoskeleton

above the building hoisting the roof aloft.

So the interior has no partitions whatsoever.

We, we don't have rooms.

All we have is space.

Flowing space.

No walls, but a plane.

No room, but space.

Mies had abolished two elements of architecture

that had been there from the dawn of time:

the enclosed room and the solid wall.

And Kahn brought them back.

He brought back the room

as the fundamental unit of architectural

expression, not flowing space

without shape or boundaries,

but a fixed and definite poetic enclosure.

And of course it was there from the beginning.

It was there in 1928,

when he drew these

mournful little chambers in Italy.

It was there when he went to Ostia, Antica,

and drew the brick wall,

chunky brick walls

with relieving arches here.

Uncommonly deep reveals.

He drew them, taking pleasure

in the thickness of walls, which he stresses

here by the the black shadow.

This is the source of the expressive brick

architecture that blossomed

in his final decade, as here

at the Indian Institute of Management

of Ahmedabad.

So for Kahn, the main lesson was this.

That a building is not merely the solution

to a problem, but it's the expression

of a feeling.

Throughout his graphic career,

he is haunted by the idea

of a glowing white shrine in a town.

It could be a white church in New England.

It could be a gothic church in central Italy.

It could even be a mute stair hall

in the center of a Yale gallery.

It doesn't matter, but each of these

is a surrogate for the sacred.

As cryptic and as implacable as that obelisk

in the movie 2001.

So the truth of the matter is

Kahn's buildings look nothing like

his drawings and paintings,

but the lessons he learned are imbedded

in a building like this.

For thirty years of his career,

Kahn struggled and tried to suppress

an entire lobe of his identity, driving it

underground, where it lived a shadow existence

in the drawings.

But that idea was there all along,

the idea of the room as the vaulted unit.

The idea that it could be 200 years old

or 2,000 years old, but the solid walled room

is a noble and beautiful thing,

the creation of sculpture and space,

and the dignified locus of human action.

This elusive quality, purged from modernism,

comes thundering back

in the tragic dignity of the poignant

late works of Kahn, of which this is as splendid

an example as we have.

Thank you.

(audience applauds)