LK

LOUIS I. KAHN
Conversations with Students

Architecture at Rice Publications

Princeton Architectural Press
Second Edition
Published by the Rice University School of Architecture; Lars Lerup, Dean
and Princeton Architectural Press; Kevin Lippert, Publisher

Copyright 1998 Rice University School of Architecture

Architecture at Rice Publications
6100 Main Street, Houston, Texas 70005
713 527-4864

Second Edition
Dung Ngo, Editor

First Edition copyright 1969

Peter Papademetriou & Ann Mohler, Editors
Maurice Miller & Rick Gardner, Photography

Special thanks to Peter Papademetriou; Cathy Ho; Lauri Puchall;

Jay Powell; Jonathan Greene; and Mark Lamster.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording,
or information storage and retrieval without the permission from the publisher.

Catologing-in-Publication Data for this title is available from the publisher.

ISBN:1-56898-149-X
CONTENTS

Introduction p. 7
Peter Papademetriou

White Light, Black Shadow p. 11

D e s i g n I s F o r m To w a r d s P r e s e n c e p. 36

Hands Up p. 69
Lars Ler up

Louis Kahns Two Careers p. 79

Michael Bell
LOU: ICON

Since that time when Lou Kahn spoke to Rice architecture

students in the spring of 1968, a year before the first edition
of this text, three decades have passed, essentially a
generation. Those kids in the photograph, so crisp in white
shirts, sitting in the Houston sun, do seem a generation
away in time; but Lou remains, timeless.

Two books had appeared about a year before this encounter,

and were the timely texts of thirty years ago: Reyner
Banhams New Brutalism and Robert Venturis Complexity
and Contradiction in Architecture. While they both
confronted the architectural assumptions of the mainstream
architects of that generation, and were divergent in terms of
their positions in architectural theory, the one commonality
was the significant inclusion of Lou Kahn, as if his presence
bridged the broad ideologies and legitimized aspects of what
were then provocative points of view.

Lou Kahn was the only American to attend CIAM X in Otterlo,

and the values embodied in the work of his admirers, Team
10, were very much the things to look at in 1968, when I
was just graduated and the youngest assistant professor In
the Rice School of Architecture. They spoke of an attitude
8

more inclusive of history, local character, and a responsive-

ness to the basic culture of society. Kahns younger col-
league, Robert Venturi, my thesis professor at Yale in 1968,
brought these ideas to suggest that the American popular
landscape could be embraced as it was re-formed, even as
he enlarged upon Kahn by seeing relevance for both Rome
and Las Vegas.

Parenthetically, it is perhaps ironic that Lou Kahns architec-

ture itself stands apart from the Houston landscape of those
days: he never built a commercial office building, and
envisioned defined spaces extending the connection between
buildings and context, prophetically speaking of civic needs
and how we may have cities without architecture, which is
no city.

Lou Kahn left the idea that Architecture must be a proactive

force, both at the scale of the environment and the scale of
human interaction; as he speaks of The Institutions of
Man, or how buildings must be true to their nature and
architects must learn that they have other rights . . . their
own rights. So, buildings must have a will, but it is
architects who give it to them: a terrible responsibility and
an indisputable challenge.

It was this transcendental aspect of Kahns view which

remains the central aspect to his progress of making the
 9

designed environment. Function had given way to ideas of

purpose and intention, and uses of history, issues of formal
representation, which were the core of the post-modernist
debate in the 1970s and 1980s, were transcended in
Kahns work. As he speaks on these pages, one can sense
the living past not as an issue of style, but as a reborn and
integral part of the process of making.

Lou Kahn speaks across three decades again, and his sensi-
bilities are ever relevant to a new generation of white-shirt
students and architects; his values and ideals remain as
normative postulations.

When I did the first edition of this book in 1969, my idea for
the text was a response to the poetic nature of Kahns
lecture, to take his unedited recorded words and reconstruct
their physical presence in the form of blank verse, or at
least somewhat of its appearance, to visually represent the
rhythm of Kahns way of expressing his ideas. I thank Dung
Ngo for retaining this format; I thank Lars Lerup and Kevin
Lippert for republishing this text in its updated form, as
Princeton Architectural Press in many ways is to this
generation of architects what our special publisher of the
first edition, the late George Wittenborn, was to us in 1969.

Peter Papademetriou
w h i t e l i g h t b l a c k s h a d ow
a month ago,
A
I was working late in my office,
as is my custom,
and a man working with me said,
I would like to ask you a question
bout

which has been on my mind for a long while . . .

How would you describe this epoch?

This man is a Hungarian, who came to this country

when the Russians entered Hungary.
I pondered his question because, somehow, it fascinates me
to answer questions to which I do not know the answer.

But I had just been reading in the New York Times Magazine of
the things that had been going on in California.
I had visited California, and I went through Berkeley,
14

and I noticed the size of the revolution,

and the great promises of the machine, and I felt,
as I had read recently,
that there were poets who were trying to write poems
without words.

I sat for at least ten minutes,

without moving,
reviewing in my mind all these things,
and finally I said to Gabor,

What is the shadow of white light?

Gabor has a habit of repeating what you say,

White light . . . white light . . . I dont know.
And I said, Black.
Dont be afraid, because white light does not exist,
nor does black shadow exist.

I think that it is a time of our sun on trial,

of all our institutions on trial.

I was brought up when the sunlight was yellow,

and the shadow was blue.
But I see it clearly as being white light, and black shadow.
Yet this is nothing alarming, because I believe that there will
come a fresh yellow, and a beautiful blue,
 What is the shadow of white light? 15

and that the revolution will bring forth a new sense of wonder.
Only from wonder can come our new institutions . . .
they certainly cannot come from analysis.

And I said, You know, Gabor,

if I could think what I would do, other than architecture,
it would be to write the new fairy tale,
because from the fairy tale came the airplane,
and the locomotive,
and the wonderful instruments of our minds. . .
it all came from wonder.

This occurred at a time

when I was to give three consecutive talks at Princeton.
I had no title for the talks,
and I was being badgered by the secretary
to give the titles for Princeton publicity.
After that night of the discussion with Gabor, I knew the titles.
(How rewarding it is to have a person who is concerned
about everything, not just little things.)

Gabor is so concerned.
In fact, he is so in love with the meaning
of word itself
that he would compare on equal terms
a piece of sculpture by Phidias
and a word.
16

He considers a word as having two qualities.

One is the measurable quality, which is its everyday use,
and the other is the marvel of its existence altogether,
which is an unmeasurable quality.

So I knew the titles of my talks at Princeton:

the first, I called,

Architecture: The White Light and the Black Shadow.
the second, I called,
Architecture: The Institutions of Man.
And the third, I called,
Architecture: The Incredible.

In the realm of the incredible stands

the marvel of the emergence of the column.
Out of the wall grew the column.
The wall did well for man.
In its thickness and its strength
it protected him against destruction.
But soon, the will to look out
made man make a hole in the wall,
and the wall was very pained, and said,
What are you doing to me?
I protected you; I made you feel secure -
and now you put a hole through me!
And man said, But I will look out!
 Out of the wall grew the column 17

I see wonderful things,

and I want to look out.
And the wall still felt very sad.
Later, man didnt just hack a hole through the wall,
but made a discerning opening,
one trimmed with fine stone,
and he put a lintel over the opening.
And, soon, the wall felt pretty well.

The order of making the wall brought about

an order of wall making which included the opening.
Then came the column,
which was an automatic kind of order,
making that which was opening,
and that which was not opening.
A rhythm of openings was then decided by the wall itself,
which was then no longer a wall,
but a series of columns and openings.
Such realizations come out of nothing in nature.
They come out of a mysterious kind of sense
that man has to express those wonders of the soul
which demand expression.

The reason for living is to express . . . to express hate . . .

to express love . . . to express integrity and ability . . .
all intangible things.
The mind is the soul,
18

and the brain is the instrument from which

we derive our singularity, and from which we gather attitude.
A story by Gogol could be a story of the mountain,
the child, and the serpent.
It could be chosen this way.
Nature does not choose . . . it simply unravels its laws,
and everything is designed by the circumstantial interplay
where man chooses.
Art involves choice,
and everything that man does, he does in art.

In everything that nature makes,

nature records how it was made.
In the rock is a record of the rock.
In man is a record of how he was made.

When we are conscious of this,

we have a sense of the laws of the universe.
Some can reconstruct the laws of the universe
from just knowing a blade of grass.
Others have to learn many, many things
before they can sense what is necessary
to discover that order which is the universe.

The inspiration to learn comes from the way we live.

Through our conscious being
we sense the role of nature that made us.
 every building must serve an institution of man 19

Our institutions of learning stem

from the inspiration to learn,
which is a sense of how we were made.
But the institutions of learning
primarily have to do with expressing.
Even the inspiration to live
serves to learn to express.
The institution of religion stems
from the inspiration to question,
which arises from how we were made.

I know of no greater service an architect can make

as a professional man than to sense that
every building must serve an institution of man,
whether the institution of government,
of home, of learning,
or of health, or recreation.

One of the great lacks of architecture today

is that these institutions are not being defined,
that they are being taken as given by the programmer,
and made into a building.

I want to give some examples

of what I mean by reprogramming.

In my classwork at the university,

20

I gave the problem of a monastery to my class,

and I assumed the role of a hermit
who sensed that there should be a society of hermits.
Where do I begin?
How do I sense this society of hermits?
I had no program,
and for two solid weeks, we discussed nature.
(Nature is such a realization part of being a hermit.)

An Indian woman gave the first remark of significance.

She said, I believe that this place should be so that
everything stems from the cell.
From the cell would come the right for the chapel to exist.
From the cell would come the right for the retreat
and for the workshops to exist.
Another Indian student
(their minds work in most transcendent ways)
said, I very much agree,
but I would like to add
that the refectory must be equal to the chapel,
and the chapel must be equal to the cell,
and the retreat must be equal to the refectory.
None is greater than the other.

Now the most gifted student in the class was an Englishman.

he submitted a wonderful design
in which he added another element,
 None is greater than the other 21

a fireplace, which was on the exterior.

Somehow, he felt he could not deny the meaning of fire,
and the warmth and promise of fire.
He also placed the retreat a half-mile away from the monastery,
saying that it was an honor for the monastery to have a retreat,
and that an important arm of the monastery
should be given to the retreat.

We called a monk from Pittsburgh

to tell us how wonderful our thinking was.
He was a merry monk,
a painter who lived in a great big studio,
and he came to his cell only reluctantly.
He was really ribbing our plans,
especially about the refectory being
a half-mile away from the center.
He said, Id much rather have my meals served in bed!
We were very dejected when he left, but then we thought,
Well, hes only a monk - he doesnt know any better.

We developed the problem,

and there were some wonderful solutions.
I tell you, it was most rewarding to have the realization
that the solutions did not come from a dead program,
one put to us in so many square feet.
The usual consideration of the nature
of the refectory, and so on, were disregarded.
22

When we held the jury, Father Roland came,

and he was a staunch supporter
of the most way-out schemes for the monastery,
but the program, as usually given,
was dead.
The original program had no sense of new,
no will to live,
and these students were highly inspired.
Each student gave a different solution,
but all had the feelings of new life, of new element.
I cant describe all to you,
but what started with just a reconsideration
emerged with the power of new beginning,
in which new discoveries
could be made in present-day context.

There was another problem I gave at the university,

that of a boys club . . . a most interesting thing today.
What is a boys club?
Somehow or other, it was necessary to establish place
and for the people in the class,
the quest for place brought about a sense
that in the neighborhood of the club it would be wonderful
if certain streets could be blocked to destroy movement,
the disinterested movement, through them.
It would make it impractical to go through,
and would give those streets to which
 Play is inspired, not organized 23

traffic was detrimental a new life.

These intersections were made into little plazas,
and, somehow or other, the boys club looked
as though it were possible there.
Merely by the simple imposition,
streets became parking places -
or even play spaces -
the way it used to be.

I know when I was a kid

we used to throw the football out of a first-floor window.
We never went to a play space;
the play space began immediately.
Play was inspired, not organized.

During our discussion about the nature of a boys club,

one student came out and said,
I think a boys club is a barn.
Another student, kind of chagrined
because he hadnt thought first that it was a barn,
said, No, I think it is a hut.
(That certainly was not a great contribution.)

The same Gabor, who attends the class,

says nothing unless he is called upon.
We were already in the third week of deliberation
on the nature of a boys club.
24

I said to Gabor, What do you think a boys club is?

He said I think a boys club is a from place.

It is not a to place, but a from place.
It is a place which in spirit must be
from where you go, not to where you go.

Its immense, when we think of

the white light and the black shadow.
Why this revolution?
It is because people are somehow confronted with things,
and are suddenly distrustful of the institutions of man.
From the revolution will come more wonderful things,
and, more simply, a redefinition of things.

Is a school a to place or a from place?

Its a question I havent quite decided,
but it is an awful thing to ask yourself.
When you plan a school,
do you say that you will have seven seminar rooms . . .
or is it something that somehow has the quality
of being a place in which you are inspired?
To somehow talk there,
and to receive a kind of feeling of talk?
Could there be those spaces which have a fireplace?
There could be a gallery, instead of a corridor.
The gallery is really the classroom of the students,
 I would like to invite Picasso to the laboratory 25

where the boy who didnt quite get what the teacher said
could talk to another boy,
a boy who seems to have a different kind of ear,
and they both could understand.

The monastery which I am doing

has an entrance place which happens to be a gate.
It is decorated in the invitation of all religions,
something which is now being started.
But they are given place only at the gate,
because the sanctity of the monastery must be kept.

In the Salk Institute for Biological Studies,

when Salk came to my office and
asked me to build a laboratory,
the program was very simple.
He said, How many square feet do you have
in the medical towers of Pennsylvania University?
I said it was 100,000.
He said, There is one thing which I would like
to be able to accomplish.
I would like to invite Picasso to the laboratory.
He was implying, of course, that in science,
concerned with measurement,
there is this will of the least living thing to be itself.
The microbe wants to be a microbe,
(for some ungodly reason,)
26

and the rose wants to be a rose,

and man wants to be a man . . .
to express . . . a certain tendency,
a certain attitude, a certain something
which moves in one direction rather than in another,
kept hammering away at nature to provide
the instruments which made this possible.
The great desire to express was sensed by Salk, the scientist.
The scientist, snugly isolated from all other mentalities,
needed more than anything the presence of the unmeasurable,
which is the realm of the artist.

It is the language of God.

Science finds what is already there,

but the artist makes that which is not there.

This consideration changed the Salk Institute

from a plain building like the one
at the University of Pennsylvania to one which demanded
a place of meeting which was in every bit as big as a laboratory.

It was the place of the art lobby,

that is to say, the place of arts and letters.
It was a place where one had his meal,
because I dont know of any greater seminar
than the dining room.
 some spaces should be completely inflexible 27

There was a gymnasium;

there was a place for the fellows who were not in science;
there was a place for the director.
There were rooms that had no names,
like the entrance hall, which had no name.
It was the biggest room,
but it was not designated in any way.
People could go around it, too;
they didnt have to go through it.
But the entrance hall was a place
where you could have a banquet if you wanted to.
You know how you dont want to go into a great baronial hall
where you must say hello to someone you dont want to,
and this is so with scientists.
Scientists are so wrapped up in the fear
that somebody a little distance away
is doing exactly the same thing they are doing.
This kills them.

All these provisions and considerations are programming.

(If you want to call it programming.)
But programming is too dull a word.
This is the realization of the nature of a realm of spaces
where it is good to do a certain thing.
Now you say there are some spaces
you know should be flexible.
Of course there are some spaces which should be flexible,
28

but there are also some which should be completely inflexible.

They should be just sheer inspiration . . .
just the place to be,
the place which does not change,
except for the people who go in and out.
It is the kind of place that you enter many times,
but only after fifty years you say,
Gee, did you notice this . . . did you notice that?
It is an inspiring total,
not just detail, not just a little gadget
that keeps shouting at you.
It is something that is just a kind of heaven,
a kind of environment of spaces,
which is terribly important to me.
A building is a world within a world.
Buildings that personify places of worship,
or of home, or of other institutions of man
must be true to their nature.

It is this thought which must live;

if it dies, architecture is dead.

Many hope architecture is dead,

because they want to take over.
But they dont have the encompassing ability, Im afraid.
So many people are prone to place too much trust
in the machine today.
 Buildings must be true to their nature 29

They must never divorce the machine from architecture,

which is the greatest power they have.
Next, we may have a city without architecture,
which will be no city.

I believe there are unexplored areas of planning.

I believe that if you just hand it over to the architects,
everything will be fine.
However, there are unexplored architectures in the city . . .
the architecture of order is unexplored.
Why must we have very distant reservoirs
that carry parts great distances?
Why are there not points
where great intersections of movement
give continuity?

Though for other civic needs

we need not be so tight-minded,
we must somehow give immediate attention to water,
because water is becoming more and more precious.
There must be some kind of order to water;
the water that is in the fountain
and the water that is in the air conditioning plant
need not be the same water that we drink.

I am to build a town in India, or at least so I am told,

and I think that the most prominent architecture there
30

will be the water towers.

The water towers will be centered at the points of civic service.
There would be water towers,
possibly, at the intersection of roads.
I could also find there the police station, the fire station.
This place will not be a building . . .
it will simply be an extension of the road.
The movement just sort of winds itself into an airplane . . .
my intersection could be a place where you catch your plane.

I think Eero Saarinens solution at Dulles Airport

is a beautiful solution of a place of entrance.
Maybe the traffic is not the same
because the pattern is not the same,
but there is the sense that you arrive somewhere,
and you go to the place in a car made for that purpose.
Dulles Airport is so far superior to these airports
in which each company has its own little house.
In these airports youre trapped. Its really a conspiracy.
They give no grace to man, and he feels so helpless.
He is here when he should be somewhere else.

We were talking earlier this afternoon

of the three aspects of teaching architecture.
Actually, I believe that I do not really teach architecture,
but that I teach myself.
These, however, are the three aspects:
 The three aspects of architectural education 31

The first aspect is professional.

As a professional you have the obligation of
learning your conduct in all relationships . . .
in institutional relationships,
and in your relationship with men who
entrust you with work.
In this regard, you must know the distinction
between science and technology.
The rules of aesthetics also constitute professional knowledge.
As a professional, you are obliged to translate
the program of a client into that of the spaces of
the institution this building is to serve.
You might say it is a space-order,
or a space-realm of this activity of man
which is your professional responsibility.
A man should not take the program
and simply give it to the client
as though he were filling a doctors prescription.

Another aspect is training a man to express himself.

This is his own prerogative.
He must be given the meaning of philosophy,
the meaning of belief, the meaning of faith.
He must know the other arts.
I used examples which I maybe have used too many times,
but the architect must realize his prerogative.
He must know that a painter can turn people upside down,
32

if he wants to, because the painter does not have to

answer to the laws of gravity.
The painter can make doorways smaller than people;
he can make skies black in the daytime;
he can make birds that cant fly;
he can make dogs that cant run, because he is a painter.
He can paint red where he sees blue.
The sculptor can place square wheels on a cannon
to express the futility of war.

An architect must use round wheels,

and he must make his doorways bigger than people.
But architects must learn that they have other rights . . .
their own rights.
To learn this, to understand this,
is giving the man the tools for making the incredible,
that which nature cannot make.
The tools make a psychological validity,
not just a physical validity,
because man, unlike nature, has choice.

The third aspect you must learn

is that architecture really does not exist.
Only a work of architecture exists.
Architecture does exist in the mind.
A man who does a work of architecture
does it as an offering to the spirit of architecture . . .
 such a building so conceived 33

a spirit which knows no style,

knows no techniques, no method.
It just waits for that which presents itself.
There is architecture, and it is the embodiment
of the unmeasurable.
Can you measure the Parthenon?
No. This is sheer murder.
Can you measure the Pantheon,
that wonderful building which satisfies the institution of man?

When Hadrian thought of the Pantheon,

he wanted a place where anyone could come to worship.
How marvelous is this solution.
It is a non-directional building,
not even a square, which would give, somehow,
directions and points at the corners.
There was no chance to say that
there is a shrine here, or there. No.
The light from above is such that you cant get near it.
You just cant stand under it;
it almost cuts you like a knife. . .
and you want to stay away from it.

What a terrific architectural solution.

This should be an inspiration for all architects,
such a building
so conceived.
99
Design is Form Towards Presence
99

What will architecture be like fifty years from now, and

what can we anticipate?
 37

Y ou cannot anticipate.

It reminds me of a story . . . I was asked by the General Electric

Company to help them design spacecraft, and I was cleared by the
FBI for this. I had all the work I could do on my hands, but I was able
to talk about spacecraft anyway. I met a group of scientists at a very
long table. They were a very colorful looking lot, pipe-smoking and
begrizzled with mustaches. They looked odd, like people who were
not ordinary in any way. One person put an illustration on the table,
and said, Mr. Kahn, we want to show you what a spacecraft will look
like fifty years from now. It was an excellent drawing, a beautiful
drawing, of people floating in space, and of very handsome, compli-
cated-looking instruments floating in space. You feel the humiliation
of this. You feel the other guy knows something of which you know
nothing, with this bright guy showing a drawing and saying, This is
what a spacecraft will look like fifty year from now.

I said immediately, It will not look like that.

38

And they moved their chairs closer to the table and they said, How
do you know?

I said it was simple . . . if you know what a thing will look like fifty
years from now, you can do it now. But you dont know, because the
way that a thing will be fifty years from now is what it will be.

There are certain natures which will always be true. What a thing will
look like will not be the same, but that which it is answering will be
the same. It is a world within a world; that is what it will always be.
When you have an enclosure, it will be different from what it is out-
side. And it will be so because its nature is such.

I think that there are men today who are prepared to make things
look entirely different from the way they look now, if only they had the
opportunity to do so, But there is not the opportunity, because there
is not the existent will of this thing floating around.

You take the drawings of Ledoux, which are very interesting. Ledoux
has this feeling of what a town is like, of what a city is like, but he
 39

projected this, and town didnt actually look that way at all, and that
was not so many years ago. He imagined this.

When a man sets out to project something for the future, It may turn
out to be a very amusing bit of history, because it will be only what
can be made now. But, actually, there are men today who can make
what is an image. It is what is possible today, not what will be the
forerunner of what things will be tomorrow. Tomorrow you cannot pre-
dict, because tomorrow is based on circumstance, and circumstance
is both unpredictable and continuous.

The very secret of Cartier-Bressons art is that he looks for the criti-
cal moment, as he puts it. This is like saying that in circumstance,
which is both continuous and unpredictable, he sets the stage for it.
He knows what will happen, but he waits and waits for it. I know when
he was taking photographs of me some year back that I used to enter
the drafting room, not knowing he was there. he was in a corner
somewhere; perhaps he had waited for hours in a corner, and I did-
nt know he was waiting for me. I used to go around the room while
he was waiting for me to stop at a certain board. And I did stop, too,
because the board was occupied by a beautiful Chinese girl, thats
why. I went over to the board and I started to draw, and I heard the
camera go clickclickclick. He was ready, you see; he was waiting for
the very moment, but he was setting the stage for it. He was a mar-
velous photographer. He dealt with that subject, you see. In fact, I
learned very much about the meaning of one art and another through
him, just by coming to the understanding that his art was different
only because he was giving the circumstance.

opposite: Sketch for the Rice School of Architecture, 1969; unbuilt.

40

To what do you relate the fine aspects of your problems?

 41

I really look for the nature of something. When I am doing

the school, I would try to solve it by school, rather than a school.
First, there is the aspect of why school is different from something
else. I never read a program literally. This is a circumstantial thing.
How much money you have, and where it is to be, and the number of
things you need have nothing to do with the nature of a problem. So
you look into the nature, and then you are confronted with the pro-
gram. Look at the nature of it, and you see in the program that you
want . . . a library, for instance. The first thing that is done is the
rewriting of the program. Now this must be accompanied by some-
thing which interprets it. Your program alone would not mean any-
thing, because you are dealing with spaces. So you would send back
your sketches which encompass your thought about what the nature
of it is. Invariably, more spaces are required because every program
written by a non-architect is bound to be a copy of some other school
or some other building.

Its like writing to Picasso and saying, I want my portrait painted

. . . I want two eyes in it . . . and one nose . . . and only one mouth,
please. You cant do that, because youre talking about the artist.
He is not this way. The nature of painting is such that you can make
the skies black in the daytime. You can make a red dress blue. You
can make doorways smaller than people. As the painter, you have the
prerogative. If you want a photograph, you get a photographer. If you
want an architect, you deal with spaces . . . spaces which are
inspired . . . and so you need to reconsider the requirements for the
nature of the environment which inspires the activity of that institu-
tion of man. You see in a school or an office building, or a church, or
a factory, or a hospital an institution of man.
42

Do you approach your analysis of the site of a building the

same way, and try to understand the nature of the sur-
rounding area?

Considering form and design -- is one the maker of the

other?
 43

Often the character of it, the nature of it, must be explored

because it is there. You just dont plunk a building somewhere with-
out the influence of what is around it. There is always a relationship.

Form has no shape or dimension. Form merely has a nature

and a characteristic. It has inseparable parts. If you take one part
away, form is gone. Thats form. Design is a translation of this into
being. Form has existence, but it doesnt have presence, and design
is towards presence. But existence does have mental existence, so
you design to make things tangible. If you make what could be called
a form drawing, a drawing which somehow shows the nature of some-
thing, you can show this.

When asked by the minister how I would make a Unitarian Church, I

merely went to the board and told him, without having known one
before. But I didnt make an architectural drawing. I made a form
drawing, a drawing which indicates the nature of something and
something else. I can show you what the drawing is like. I said here
is an ambulatory, and here is a corridor, and here is a school. The
ambulatory is for the man who is not so sure. I want to think it over.
I dont want to be in the church yet. he might be a Catholic, or a Jew,
or a Protestant, you see, and he only goes to the Unitarian Church
when he feels he wants to listen, and thus, the ambulatory. This is a
form drawing. It shows the nature.
44

What stimulated your design at Dacca?

 45

This is a very broad question, but since I went through about five or
six buildings, I had about five or six different stimuli. It is more or less
a recognition of a single element. The stimulation came from the
place of assembly. It is a place of transcendence for political people.
In a house of legislation, you are dealing with circumstantial condi-
tions. The assembly establishes or modifies the institution of man.
So I could see the thing right from the start as the citadel of assem-
bly and the citadel of the institutions of man, which were opposite,
and I symbolized the institutions of man. (Earlier, I symbolized the
institutions of man by making a school of architecture - a school of
art and a school of science. Disciplines that are different, complete-
ly different, although they were both made by man. One is truly objec-
tive, whereas the other is truly subjective.) And then there are build-
ings which are called the place of well-being, where one begins more
and more to consider the body as the most precious instrument, and
to know it, and to honor it.

My design at Dacca is inspired, actually, by the Baths of Caracalla,

but much extended. The residual spaces of this building are an
amphitheater. This is residual space, a space that is found, a court.
Around it there are gardens, and in the body of the building, which is
the amphitheater, interiors, and in the interiors are levels of gardens,
and places which honor the athlete, and places which honor the
knowledge of how you were made. All these are places of well-being,
and places for rest, and places where one gets advice about how to
live forever . . . and so that is what inspired the design.

I made a mosque an entrance. I was setting the nature of it, because

I noticed that the people prayed five times a day.
46

In the program there was a note which said that there should be a
prayer room of 3,000 square feet, and a closet to hold rugs; that was
the program. I made them a mosque which was 30,000 square feet,
and the prayer rugs were always on the floor. And that became the
entrance, that is to say, the mosque became the entrance. When I
presented this to the authorities, they accepted it right away.
47
48

Do you feel that with large urban problems, with five or

six architects trying to solve specific areas, it is valid for
an architect to seek and express inner nature as the dom-
inant understanding when there is the large scale which
requires an outer nature?
 49

Actually, the inner space justifies the outer space, even

though you may give one portion to civic needs. I think the advantage
is that one man can do it. I dont think a committee can do it. I dont
think a committee can set the nature. One man does it; what this one
man does is not design the thing. He simply programs it, you might
say. He gives it its nature. One man can do this, and not do the build-
ing. If you separate this thing without saying its nature, you have
nothing which holds together. It holds together physically, but in spir-
it, very little. As times goes on, that which this building really needs
to express itself is absent. You see, when you go into the department
of, say, city planning, it should show the promise of the city as you
enter. It may be a great hall, in which the city shows its aspiration,
and conveys it to the public. If you took the program as given, you are
saying that a city hall is, after all, only an office building now. Then a
great loss would occur.

The nature is to inspire, and to give inspiration is probably too strong

an expression. I would say that you present your aspiration, some-
thing in which you believe, something which you are not afraid to
expose. We are trying to say something which is better than an ele-
vator, and a lobby, and a door with a name on it that says, City
Planning Commission, and then a counter, and a secretary, and a
spittoon. If you think of the city, you think of the realm of spaces,
because actually, one must think of the city as having a treasury of
spaces. Do you think you can relegate this to any architect who gets
a commission?

No - there are some who can think in this manner, and some who can-
not. And it cannot be done by committee, or you would be voted
50

down. You would be voted down by every inferior person. . . This is

not necessary . . . too much money . . . This or that. But it blocks
the presentation of a potentiality. So if you entrust to a man the
nature of each institution of man which wants to express itself, how
do you see these buildings?

One man, not a committee, is there to try to make it exist. Therefore,

how they make it must be that a mans work appears, and then you
know what is worthy, and what is not. It belongs in the fold of social
influence, because expression was possible. An emergence comes
from that, and then society comes from that. From society, you would
get nothing but finality.

opposite: Plan sketch for the Rice School of Architecture, 1969; unbuilt.
52

Would you comment on the education of an architect, and

how to achieve the integration of craft and design? If you
were head of an undergraduate school, how would you
begin the training of architects?
 53

I think that one method can be quite as good as another.

I would say it this way: You have professional obligations in all
buildings, since you are dealing with other men and their various
interests. You must know the obligations of dealing with money
problems, that clients have costs for buildings, the paying of bills,
specific space requirements, and so on. You must know obliga-
tions like this, and understand the supervision, the honesty, that
must be there to see that the man is given the full value. We have
the profession, but there is man, and there is spirit. To teach the
man, one is in the realm of philosophy, in the realm of belief, in
the realm of the other arts.

The forms of expression are here . . . this is not expression; this

is preparation for what you must know. Your obligations as a pro-
fessional are those of a man who is entrusted to do a work which
is of interest for the people, for, after all, an architect doesnt dish
it out of his pocket.

Also, I would say there is the obligation of proper programming. In

the professional, I would say that we were talking about finding
the nature of something. The architect finds in his building a cer-
tain nature which belongs to a certain activity of man.

If I were a musician, and I were the first person to invent the

waltz, the waltz doesnt belong to me at all, because anyone can
write a waltz - once I say that there is a nature of musical envi-
ronment which is based on three-four time.

Does that mean that I own the waltz? I dont own the waltz any
54

more than the man who found oxygen owns oxygen. It was simply
that one finds a certain nature, and as a professional, we must
find that certain nature.

Our profession is shabby only because we do not change the pro-

gramming. If you change that programming, you release wonderful
forces because the individual then never makes the mistake of
making something which just pleases himself. You please society
in your programming, not in the way you do your lousy building. The
 55

architect trains himself in expression which is true.

It is the spirit of architecture which says that architecture does

not exist at all . . . thats what the spirit says. It knows no style,
no method. It is ready for anything. And so the man must develop
the humility of offering something, an offering to architecture. An
architect is part of the treasury of architecture in which the
Parthenon belongs, the Pantheon belongs, in which the great
lyceums during the Renaissance belong. All these things belong
to architecture and make it richer; they are offerings, you see.

Now I think this is a kind of basis of teaching. And this has to do

with design, or paintings, or sculpture, whatever you do. It is your
personal expression. It is not only technology. It is the rewriting of
programming so that architecture can be detected, you see, and
it is not just a manipulation of areas. In merely manipulating
areas, there is nothing which belongs to the architect, even
though he may contribute to the makings, like a guy who writes a
very fine specification. But that still doesnt make him a good
architect. It makes him a good professional, but not a good archi-
tect - right?

In any school which makes clear this difference, the method will
also be clear.
56

In programming for our building for the School of

Architecture at Rice, we found that such elements as the
library, the slide collections, the lecture center, and the
history of art area could be a bridge between painting,
sculpture, graphic arts, and architecture. We felt that this
bridge would influence the form of the building, and cre-
ate an interchange which is very important to the educa-
tional process. Would you discuss this, and perhaps talk
about what you feel to be the essence of architectural
education?
 57

I cannot talk about specific problems, but I can talk about

buildings in general, and in what way they become par ticular. What
you said about a bridge and about the seeming relationships between
one department and another might be very interesting to talk about,
but I cant do it hurriedly. Ive got to think about it, to satisfy your
thoughts.

Suppose you had a great kind of alley, or gallery, and walked through
this gallery, and connected to this gallery are the schools which are
associated in the fine arts, be it history, sculpture, architecture, or
painting, and you saw people at work, in all these classes. It was
designed so that you felt always as though you were walking through
a place where people are at work.

Then I present another way of looking at it, say as a court, and you
enter this court. You see buildings in this court, and one is desig-
nated as painting, one as sculpture, one as architecture, another as
history. In one, you rub against the presence of the classes. In the
other, you can choose to go in if you want to. Now, without asking you
which is better, which is a very unfair question, let me tell you what
I think is better. I think the latter is the greater by far. In the halls that
you go through, you will absorb by some osmosis . . . you will see
things. If you can choose to go there, even if you never do, you can
get more out of that arrangement than you can of the other. There is
something that has to do with the feeling of association which is
remote, rather than direct, and the remote association has a longer
life and love.

So it is the court. The court is the meeting place of the mind, as well
57

as the physical meeting place. Even if you walk through it in the rain,
it is the fact that you are associated with it in spirit greater than your
actual association. So I have asked the question and answered it
too, havent I? Thats the best way of giving an examination that I
know. You get the best mark and everything.

You make the bridge and invent it. The bridge is not physical; It has
to be in spirit, though; its lasting quality depends on it. Now there are
other reasons as well. We must not assume that every teacher is
really a teacher, because he can be a teacher only in name. You can-
not depend on something that is frozen in this architectural arrange-
ment . . . where actually the connection can be made in far reaching
ways. One does not assume that even a good student can become a
successful practitioner, or that a teacher is necessarily a good
teacher. One who is just beginning to sense things may emerge to be
the best teacher.

Now we take each element in a school of architecture, and compose

these elements. One of the most important that I know, since art
involves the eyes, involves vision and the mind. You see it through
association and in other ways. you can close your eyes and see a
philosophic realization. You can see it in a way that you can listen to
it, something philosophic you can see . . . with your mind. You are
passing things that dangle before your eyes, and they tempt you in a
way to stop your mind. But there are things that happened a long
time ago that have been done with great love, and are just a wonder
in general.

As for the library, in a school of architecture the library is not a place

 59

where you are thumbing through the files and catalogues and dis-
covering books. Architects have hardly any patience with a cata-
logue. An architect invariably gets disgusted with the first block of
the library, which is the catalogue. You know this yourself. Now, if you
had a library where you just had broad tables . . . very broad . . . not
just how big is a table . . . Maybe the table is a court, not just a
table, but sort of a flat court upon which books lie, and these books
are open. They are planned very, very cleverly by the librarian to open
at pages that humiliate you with the marvelous drawings . . . things
that have been recorded, finished and spread before you, buildings
that are magnificent. If a teacher could make comment on these
books, so a seminar is spontaneous, this would be marvelous. And
so you have a library which has just the long tables, and plenty of
room to sit to one side with a pad and pencil, and the books are out
in the middle. You can look through them, but you cant take them
out. They are simply there to invite you to the lesson of the library.
The library is really just a classroom, and you can make it so, and
looking at this element, library is different from library. The man
who is studying and writing his Ph. D. has his catalogue. Its there,
and it is his religion.

In his catalogue, he might see sparks come out, which are books,
and the association of the catalogue and the books is very precious
to this man. He makes a log of recordings of the books he is going
to swallow up, and he finally writes what the other fellow wrote, only
in a different way. But our library is very different in the school of
architecture, for you are really treating your minds in a very different
way. Every book is really a very, very personal kind of contact, a rela-
tionship. You know what I mean. Youve gone through it, and you
60

know what I mean exactly. The location of the library comes from this
nature. If you put it on the first floor, second floor, third floor, I think
it tests against its nature. You shouldnt be forced to put people
through the library. It should be just something in its structure which
says, What a wonderful place to go, and of course, the location has
much to do with it, and its convenience has much to do with it, but
essentially, it is its nature which you are after to convey. Glare is bad
in the library; wall space is important. Little spaces where you can
adjourn with a book are tremendously important. So you might say
that the world is put before you through the books. You dont need
many . . . you need just the good ones. And there is no such thing as
looking for a book through the catalogue. You dont just ask for a cat-
alogue book . . . it would die in the library.

A student of philosophy who is writing his degree knows how to deal

with books that are stacked away. He learns books in a different way.
The Avery library at Columbia is not a true architecture library; you
have it on various floors. It is one of the best libraries of architecture
that there is. They have the best architecture books, editions that are
ancient, but you have to bother to get them, and the impatience of
the man who must see something immediately is too great . . . he
doesnt read the thing anyway. If it is in Latin, it is just the same as
if it was in English, because he will see the pictures. He will see what
he sees, what his mind tells him it is. Then, when you read it, you
probably find something totally different from that which it is. What
you think it is, is absolutely as important as what the man writes it
is. Its how you feel it and give service to it. You plan the library as
though no library ever existed, and you say the same things with the
classroom. You know how dirty classrooms get, and how full of pas-
 61

sion the whole room is, quiet passion, violent passion, whatever it
may be, but the room is full of it. and you have no patience to clean
up anything. In fact, when the classroom is orderly, you lose every-
thing . . . that is to say, you really dont find anything. So the class-
room is not a pretty room, but it is a room which is dedicated, with
light, and plenty of space to work in. You cant mete out the square
foot area for a mans work, because some people require a great
deal of room, and others require little room. Youve got a series of
desks, and youve got to hang your drawings on the back of your
shirts, if there is no room for anything. You just have to see a place
which is very broad, and full of light. And there must be high spaces,
because the whole lesson of measurement and association with
dimension must be part of the room. I think you just feel that you are
in a room that is 60 by 60, and from this you can tell what a room
80 by 80 would be, because you know what 60 by 60 is. You dont
have to have that big a room; your mind can take care of many things.

Man can work in seclusion, but, you know, when you have an idea, if
youre a really good person, you just cant help telling that idea to
somebody else. You want to share it immediately, and you dont want
to hide it. In a sense, thats our nature. If you had stolen that idea,
you would be hated for the rest of your life, but to convey it is just an
urge which everyone has. You cant help it. Any one of us, in a sense,
is a teacher, because we want to share that idea, and because shar-
ing the idea has another meaning. The other meaning is that you
know its validity through sharing the idea. The confirmation by one
man with a sensitive feeling of its validity is like getting the approval
of a million people. This would not be true if you were dealing with a
mathematical problem, but it is true when the problem has to do with
62

aesthetics, with art. If that man is honest, and will tell you what he
feels, then you have a tremendous approval, that of feelings which
strike the soul. The location of the classroom, of course, is impor-
tant. but it will not influence anybody. I think that the power lies in
working on your own. If it is an inspiring place to work, you see, the
greatest service is given to the campus by its just being there. There
is a point about a meeting, and there should really be classes, like
seminar classes, and they are mandatory things. You just dont go
out and have a seminar because the mood strikes. I do not think that
there should be rooms designated for seminars in a row on a certain
floor, because a seminar is really an inspired thing, and you hold a
seminar like this one, and you sit around and hold it. As soon as you
make it on the second floor, with all the seminars lined up, it is no
longer a seminar. There isnt the spontaneity in back of it, and in this
sense I think you might ask, Shouldnt the school of sociology and
the school of architecture have a meeting?

Yes, there should be a meeting - if either one is prepared for the

other. If you groom yourselves in the motives and the objectives of
the sociologist, and you know this before you enter a seminar, and if
the sociologist is willing, also, to understand the essence and the
spirit of architecture, then the seminar would be tremendously bene-
ficial. Otherwise, you will have a cockfight. One would just not under-
stand the other. Each one would go away thinking well, he doesnt
understand me. And the other fellow would say, He doesnt under-
stand me. I find it so.

Now there is this to consider: I think the teacher is essentially a man

who does not only know things, but feels things. He is the kind of
 63

man who can reconstruct the universe by just knowing a blade of

grass. That man can bring anybody together. He can bring a sociolo-
gist together with the archeologist or the metallurgist. Somehow in
him he has a sense of the laws of the universe. Because of the way
this man was made, he senses it, and through this sense, he does-
nt say, The hell with sociology. No . . . he respects all parts. With
such a teacher, the meeting would be wonderful. It would be a great
benefit to the architects, and also to the sociologist.

I think every building must have a sacred place. I found what I think
is a sacred place in a theater which I am designing for For t Wayne,
Indiana. It went through a great deal with that; I didnt know much
about theaters. I knew dressing rooms had to be, but as long as I had
to know all about dressing rooms, I knew I would never have been
able to do the problem, because, you see, I didnt know the spirit. It
has come to the point at which I didnt care how many dressing
rooms. I just knew their position, and their position could be here, or
could be there, they will tell you, and you might end up with some
space left over, then, well, we need a few more dressing rooms. But
it is all built around the most incomplete plans that have been offered
to theaters, because there isnt anyone who is the leader who can tell
you the spirit of one quality or the other. To look for the spirit and find
it is the key, I think, to serving the realm of spaces known as the the-
ater. Now Ill tell you the result, instead of tantalizing you with all
kinds of things. The sacred space here is the place of the actor, the
dressing rooms, the rehearsal room. The dressing room has its bal-
cony overlooking the stage. There is a relationship between this and
the stage, you see. As soon as I bunched everything together, it
became a sacred space, and it wasnt just left-over space.
64

The stage itself was just like a plaza. I designed it as a plaza. If you
look at it, there are buildings where people are, but you look out from
here to the plaza. The traps were made so that you could have seats
there, and the forestage would give you a theater in the round, the
background of which would then be this building. You wouldnt see it,
but at times you could see it. This was the sacred place. After that,
I didnt care how big a lobby it was, really, just so it was big enough.
It was so important to have found this not in this dead way, you know,
with a sort of debris of left-over spaces.

This was a real building. It really was so important to find the idea.
We found the theaters own sacred self, and that theater came
absolutely alive. It was an honest place, an invitation, you see. The
theater is not a place to say, Im sorry we dont have any seats. You
must always have seats there, and thats a common thing a man
should recognize. A man comes early to the forum and he finds a
seat that befits a king, but there is always a place for the king, even
when he comes late. We are here, and there is a gallery here, and it
all has a very distinct kind of architecture. I have used brick arches,
and I have used the same old stuff, because its absolutely magnifi-
cent. Why shouldnt I use it . . . the old stuff? What I am using here
is just an order which is completely clear. Its not phony, and it costs
less. I would make the same theater, if I wanted to, in the damnest
beautiful concrete structure, but I have no fascination for it. What Im
interested in is to build this . . . If I build this . . . I know that I have
revived a theater. The presence of this architecture is a fact . . . and
now, when this lights up, the theater is complete. The theater is sort
of held together, and that is the religious place. What is the sacred
place in a school of architecture? It could be the lobby, but it could
 65

also be the place where you gather together for reaction. Reaction to
your work means approval of millions, even through only a few are
present. Its the kind of thing in which you learn that what you pre-
sent you can believe in, and that is a tremendous thing.

So you call it a jury room, if you like, but it is a room where you meet,
where classes all meet, for a kind of review of an experience in doing
a building . . . starting with a piece of white paper.

It could be the most valuable lesson to call on people and get some
reactions - maybe violent reactions from persons of certain beliefs.
You dont have to take their marks, you see. Marks are the teachers
concern. I thing to have this person who comes in give you a mark
would be asking him too much. He is reacting, and his reactions
shouldnt be marked.

I am against marks in juries. I really think it shouldnt be considered

just a grading session. If a teacher says a man could enter the jury,
thats the end. I think a student shouldnt stand there shaking like a
leaf, before people he doesnt know, and say his piece, after he has
worked all night, and maybe two nights ahead. He is nervous as a
cat, and he gives it his best, so I think a jury never has a mark. It
should just be a place where you know you are not going to be called
down. Youre just going to get a spirit, and the atmosphere should be
cheerful.

Around this, I think, you can build a school. You have so many rooms.
The rooms can have rough walls; it doesnt matter. You can pin things
up any place you want to. you can throw paint on the floor. The class-
66

room can be like a Jackson Pollock, but when you come to the jury
room - no. There should be something wonderful about it. It should
be a place where you can have tea . . . and it should always be a
friendly room. Its always a sanctuary, you see. It is not a room where
you sit around as if you are on trial. It is just a great room. It is the
sacred space in the school of architecture.
 69

HANDS UP
Lars Lerup

Kahns hand, held halfway between him and us, is a mythic

vinculum between the architects imagination and his built
work. (The hand of the carpenter and the mason are also
implied by professional propinquity.) But Kahns hand is open,
emptied, and liberated from the labors of constructionfree
from the pencil and the T-square. Like a bird (Le Corbusiers
own Open Hand?), the hand-in-gesture springs forth as a
promise: not of a building but of the built in use, a synoptic
liaison of subject and object. Such architecture itself is but a
bleak facsimile of the hand. In the hand lies the ultimate dream
of an architecture vivantean architecture alive.

As illustrated hands go, those of architects are no longer in

fashion. Gone are professional hands in gesture: hands holding
architectural models, pencils, or cigarettes (for affect and style).
Instead, hands are held close to the body, are hidden in pockets,
or, like soft crutches, prop up (weary) heads. Hands appear in
other places, disembodied, fleeting, mere synecdoches of
human presence; or more interestingly, as shadows; as contact
prints on machinesgripping levers, clicking computer mice,
70

channel surfing with remote-control devices, or (on Sundays at

the shooting range) squeezing the trigger of precision rifles.

Inside the machine, within its working parts, in its very

intelligence, even the hands shadow is nearly forgotten. These
machines . . . are our best wishes for our hands, writes Charles
Seiber for the New York Times Magazine in an article in which
he describes his fathers affection for old tool-and-die devices.
In the end, even these old machines were too complex. In
describing them, his father was reduced to miming the various
motions by which each one, with its mounted precision tool,
shapes a piece of metal against a molded die. . . .1 In working
at the machine, the hands are reduced to miming the very
machine they invented; and worse, to miming a machine that,
in turn, merely replaced the labor of those same hands. The
operative word here is not miming but reduced, since it is not
the hands that have been reduced but the machines. Hand
surgeons and robotics engineers can attest to this. Hands still
hold an enormously complex intelligence whose secret has yet
to come to light.

In industrial labs, particularly in the silicon alleys and valleys of

the world, hands are either in the way of or on the way to,
computers. Ranging from high-five recognition systems, hand
 71

gestures that tell machines what to do, to keyboards, and

electronic pencils, hands are still doing a lot of the work. But
the signals do not travel in one direction only. In his Users
Guide to the Millennium, J. G. Ballard implies that machines
are powerful and mesmerizing, but their feedback, however
faint, reveals sinister limitations:

Typewriter: It types us, encoding its own linear bias across the free
space of the imagination.2

One referred to the typewriter operator (before the invention of

the personal computer) as the person writing the type.
Subsequently, the typewriter came to write the operator; but
now, in spite of the keyboard, the linear bias is not fully carried
over to the computer. Thanks to new word processing editing
capabilities, the writer is now in a field whose linear furrows
can be arrested, retraced, erased, displaced, and reversed. Now
the hand hovers both above and beyond the keyboardthe
Digital (as in the digits of the hands) and the Binary (as in the
computers Os and 1s). The hands ten digits are now capable of
a digital complexity that very few of us will ever comprehend.
Yet, in this new play of digits, does the body exist at all...
and, as Ballard asks, will it accept its diminished role?3 After
all, our hands are typing with all ten digits, yet their message
72

gets collapsed into the two index digits (at least in the
computer beyond the keys). Will the remaining eight gather
their peculiarities (pinkie/lazy, ring/faithful, middle/rude,
thumb/happy) and start a rebellion? No longer just a working
tool or symbol, the hand reemerges full-fledged. Without tricks
up their sleeves, our hands will navigate the complete digital
menu with dizzying biotechnological wizardry, and bit for bit
coincidence in a parallel universe. Until now, the hand
designing our various universes (modernist, postmodern,
deconstructive, minimalist) has been far from parallel but rather
constrained, colonized, and tied down by the universe itself.
With a lighter touch, more ease, more directness, more
parallelism, other universes will doubtless appear dexterous,
liquid and alive.

If science fiction is the bodys dream of becoming a machine,4

are our hands-in-gesture the bodys dream of becoming archi-
tecture? Is there something more in Kahns hand than the archi-
tects calling-card or a stylized suggestion of some great archi-
tectural event? Is the new handless puppet in the
theater of technology the puppeteer herself, a biotechnology
spawning one of the million nanotsunamis of the metropolis?

The era when cathedrals were white5 and held their citizens in
 73

subdued awe with their muffled dramas are long gone.

Education is slowly but surely undoing all forms of authority,
expertise, and authorship. Although still star-struck, architects
are joining designers in team efforts that produce designs with
neither clear pedigree nor single origin. Although still under the
banner of a single star designer, everyone knows that the office
has become a nebula whose inner workings are so complex and
dispersed that, for all intents and purposes, the author is dead.
Spawned and buoyed by nonhierarchical inertia, swarms of new
interests may soon be moving toward organized coincidence:
a democracy of hands making a new metropolitan space.

What I have in mind is an architectural space that does not

suffer from name, place, or timea hyperreality in which we
see all people, all facades and the entire interior at the same
time (as in Jorge Luis Borges The Aleph).6 This may seem
implausible for now, but perhaps not for long. The ultra-
dynamic simultaneity of the twenty-four-hour metropolis
already demands a new spatial vision for itself.

In an authorless world, specific designs, old and new, belong to

the public realm. But to include Kahns (and Frank Lloyd
Wrights, Paul Rudolphs, Aldo Rossis, Frank Gehrys, Peter
Eisenmans, and John Hejduks) projects in this vision, one
74

must overcome a major obstacle: the pervasive and relentless

amnesia of the American architectural psycheour tendency to
bury and forget our stars, often before they are gone. The
tendency to switch our star adoration to loathing, or to just
plain forget, may be a form of mass revenge, or more interest-
ingly, the acknowledgment that creativity is a free agent,
operating amongst us rather than emanating from one of us.

The works of Kahn have already been processed and

reconfigured and are now effectively consolidated in the brain
of the metropolis. Time has come for their recalllet the
intense solar wind from the metropolis illuminate and gather all
design under its own auspices. But since the major propellant
of the metropolis is no longer its architecture but, as Felix
Royathyn has said, gas and gunsas one of its extra-
bodiesas one of the phantasms of the city. To relegate design
to an urban perversion may finally allow it to live out its
fantasy, and find a new and greatly expanded audience. We
have yet to see Kahns shadow in every facade and plan in
the metropolis.

Kahns hand. The hand is the bodys dream of architecture; the

dream is one of the phantasms of the body; and finally, design
as one of the many perversions of the metropolis (Rem
 75

Koolhaas Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for

Manhattan, New York, Oxford University Press, 1978), is one
of its extra-bodies, a hand.

Speculations about Kahns hand are predicated on body

languagethe parallel between the body and language, between
the reason of language and the gestures of the body. In
pantomime, the body reasons, but more unsettling is the fact
that language may also mimic the bodywho is to know?
Gilles Deleuze, whose century we are soon leaving,7 suggests
that the mixed messages (from body and language) stem from
the repeated hesitation built into the workings of body and
reason.8 Thoughts proceed in fits and starts, just as the end of
an arm decides to be a hand before it knows whether it is the
left or the right hand. How many times have I seen my plans
designing another house, my writing constructing its own
reason, or my body stumble over itself? These potential
bifurcations threaten reason itself, while liberating both
language and body.

The unsettling of reason and pantomime allows an abundance

of marginalities. Deleuze calls them phantasms. Be they
theological, oneiric, or erotic, our hands have performed them
all. The believer crossing himself; the hand as the bodys dream
76

of architecture; or the clandestine hand seeking a site to

perform the unmentionable. What kind of phantasms hide in
Kahns gesture? Is his hand inviting the students to join him on
the other side, to find out what his building materials want to
be? Or is it protecting him, defending his privacy, his fear of
the other, or his own dark side? Disjunctive syllogisms! in
which the middle and common term is the hand. But what,
precisely, is the positivity of the hand, its ambiguity, or its
suspended gesture?9

In the end Kahns handall handsare probably not copies of

reason, but simulacra of the surface, parts of a Dionysian
machine that, when allowed to wander and to fabricate, will
free us from our imagined destinies.10
 77

1
Charles Siebert, My Fathers Machines, The New York Times Magazine
(September 27, 1997), p. 91.
2
J. G. Ballard, A Users Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews, (New York:
Picador, 1996), p. 276.
3
Ibid., p. 276.
4
Ibid., p. 279.
5
Refers to Le Corbusiers book on America of the same title.
6
Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph, The Aleph and other Short Stories: 19331965,
(New York: Bantam Books, 1971).
7
Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews,
ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p.165. Foucault suggests
that we may eventually refer to the twentieth century as the Deleuzian century.
8
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. C. V. Boundas (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1990), p. 280.
9
Ibid., p. 285.
10
Ibid., p. 263.
 79

THE TWO CAREERS OF LOUIS KAHN

Michael Bell

The first fundamental truth is that he survived.1

Introduction

At Bretton Woods, Vermont, in the summer of 1944, more

than forty nations signed treaties that established the
framework for the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The
seeds of the Bretton Woods agreements were sown in 1939 as a
preemptive effort to stabilize international trade and world
currencies at the anticipated conclusion of World War II. That
year, the United States Treasury considered ways to leverage
mounting gold holdings in economic warfare and postwar
reconstruction2 and formulated the principles of an inter-
governmental bank that would lead to the creation of the IMF.
President Roosevelt aggressively linked the possibility of
sustained peace with international economic stability, launching
the campaign to enact the Bretton Woods Treaties in earnest.
80

The year 1944 also marked the publication of Louis Kahns

essay Monumentality in New Architecture and City Planning,
A Symposium, edited by Paul Zucker (New York: Philosophical
Library). This essay signaled the final stage of Kahns first
careera practice that was largely based on the design and
advocacy of publicly-funded housing, often financed through
government initiatives. The public criticized such government-
assisted programsas it did the IMFas quasi-socialist and
contrary to free-market principles. In his essay, Kahn laid the
groundwork for a renewed practice that would derive
architectures symbolic and spiritual potentials from what
Kenneth Frampton calls a struggle between modernization and
monumentality. In Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of
Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture,
Frampton contrasts Kahns adherence to structural rationalism
and tectonic geometry with Sigfried Giedion, Jos Luis Sert,
and Fernand Lgers sociopolitical goals, outlined in their 1943
essay Nine Points on Monumentality.3 David Brownlee simi-
larly notes the dichotomy between these two approaches to
monumentality.4 Here I offer an alternative interpretation that
is partially derived from the clear architectural evidence that
Framptons text eloquently parses, yet gives greater weight to
the time and energy Kahn spent in the arenas of housing and
advocacy. Kahns struggle with monumentality and moderniza-
 81

tion laid the groundwork for his later masterworks, and marked
a phase of Kahns work characterized by an attention to
geometry and structure as the embodiment of architectural
symbolism. His synthesis of tectonic goals and modernization
inserted architecture into the mechanisms of a democracy that
was increasingly derived within technology and its processes
economic, machinic, numeric, or sociopolitical. The period
around 1944 signaled a turning point for Kahn, and marked
the emergence of a more politicized architecteven in the
later stages of his careerthan our profession has historically
recognized.

The New York Times termed the policies established at Bretton

Woods a new conception of world order, and the Economist
proclaimed an entirely new and dynamic conception of post-
war world relations.5 By the conclusion of World War II, the
Unites States, poised to exert pressure on all world markets,
held nearly two-thirds of all monetary gold and accounted for
50 percent of the global gross national product.6 The goal of
the Bretton Woods Treaties and the IMF was to link currency
values to a gold standard with a slight band of adjustment
around a pegged value; the standard aimed to thwart rapid fluc-
tuations of currency values and dissuade short-term apprecia-
tion or devaluation of currencies to stimulate demand or trade.
82

The IMF hoped to secure the stability of global trade and allow
an acceleration of the cartographic dimensionsthe geometries
of capitals liquidity. Modernization, as part of this market
dynamism, would be permitted to transgress the cartographic
borders of national concerns and likewise achieve unprecedent-
ed dimensions. In this global economic climate, the social and
political advocacy of Kahns early careerhis attempts to create
a stable environment for housing within a system of govern-
ment fundinghad to be either abandoned or folded into a
renewed practice. Seeking a monumental architecture allowed
Kahn to reconcile a professed desire for structural rationalism
with the dynamism of the new, postwar economy; Kahn, in
effect, required a system that would account for both the fluidi-
ty of capital and the Cartesian, and essentially stable, dimen-
sions that had previously domesticated his works. An archi-
tecture derived within such a system would conflate geometries
of building with movements algebraic functions, fixing the
aspirations of the collective while unanchoring them from their
Cartesian grid. The local divisions that characterized a pre-war
site of architecture would become, quite literally, enmeshed
with a newly active international site of economic dimensions.
 83

Motion

Louis Kahn, at the blackboard, both arms in a motionone

moving clockwise, the other counter clockwise, tracing two arcs
or perhaps a cycloid. This image of Kahn, pervasive and
unquestioned, has become a testament to the master architect
in thought and actionin movementat the height of his
career.7 The image is a compelling indication of Kahn's ability
to hold an audience in rapture, yet the gestalt-like quality that
it has acquired over time has diluted the complexity of Kahn's
intentions and diminished the appreciation of the staggering
breadth of his long career. Though familiar, the image still
generates new questions: What kind of movement was Kahn
indicating and what dimensions did his geometry hold?

The famous photographs of Kahn at the blackboard are

evidence of a master architect at work, but Kahn probably
learned to use the blackboard for large-scale drawings as an
elementary school student in 1913 while taking supplemental
classes at The Public Industrial Art School in Philadelphia. The
director of the school, J. Liberty Tadd, well known for using
the blackboard for large-scale hands-on drawings,8 befriended
Kahn and became his mentor. As Philadelphia entered its
twilight as an industrial leader during the first wave of
84

modernization in American cities, Kahn began an education

that would culminate at the University of Pennsylvania under
the guidance of Paul Cret. For Kahn, whose youth was spent
within tuition-free public institutions such as the Industrial Art
School and the Graphic Sketch Club, Crets impact was certain
and strong. Cret taught that new buildings and social programs
would require a new architecture and he believed that modern
democracy would consequently achieve its own architectural
expression.9 Under Crets influence, the University of
Pennsylvanias curriculum focused on planning and Beaux-Arts
design. Kahn never relinquished these foundations.

Kahns succession of works after 1951 were characterized by a

classical stability and monumentalityproducts of Kahns
Beaux-Arts trainingand shaped by Crets call for new
democratic forms of architecture. Yet the dimensional attributes
of these works, particularly those incorporating geometry as
structure, gave his learned classicism an infusion of multi-
valency. Kahns architecture, and the geometries that assembled
its components, developed a type of movementa vectorial
qualitythat can be historically related to his collaboration
with Anne Tyng. But in this context it may also be understood
to represent Kahns response to the extrapolated scale and
accelerated, logarithmic growth of the new economy. While
 85

Kahns later interest in geometry did indicate his choice to

premiate structural rationalism and architectonic
expressivity in the search for a new monumentality, this
choice, however, did not eclipse the sociopolitical concerns
that were the hallmark of his housing projects completed before
the war with Oscar Stonorov. Kahns dissolution of his partner-
ship with Stonorov and movement toward monumentality
parallels the emergence of new economic and trade ideals
whose properties and mechanisms adopted authority in a
postBretton Woods environment.
86

Twenty-seven Years

Kahn spent the first twenty-seven years of his career designing

and managing the construction of publicly-funded housing
projects. After 1951, however, Kahn altered the way he sought
to engage in the economics of building; this shifted his focus
from housing and advocacy to monumental institutional works.
His politicization as a housing consultant to numerous federal
and local agencies gave way to a professional practice supported
by the patronage of institutional clients who sought the talents
of a master architect. As the conclusion of World War II
approached, Kahn formulated the means by which he sought to
insert the prerogatives of architecture into the mechanisms of a
society that, to an unprecedented degree, would follow a course
determined by economic initiatives. Prewar housing projects
that had been the staple of Kahns practice were composed as
additive, static assemblies of housing unit against housing unit;
the form of the collective was simply the aggregate assembly of
individuals. In the postwar period, Kahn did not abandon his
methodology, but ceased applying it to housing. His public
works transformed simple mathematics into algebra, affording
his architecture with an exponential qualitya morphological
growth and geometric evolutionthat indicated a more
rhythmic deployment of materials and structure. Such numeric
 87

properties allowed Kahn to reference the dimensions of people

and components as fundamental units of construction, yet still
assign to these disparate elements a generative or enzymatic role
in completing an integrated whole. In works such as the Yale
University Art Gallery (1951); the City Tower (195257) done
with Anne Tyng; the Richards Medical Research Building
(195765); and the Kimball Art Museum; Kahn displayed a
tendency toward structural geometry that developed within an
additive as well as exponential taxis. These structures developed
in time, marking an exfoliation of number, distance, and scale
that transformed the Cartesian and essentially fixed geometries
in algebraic equations, or more accurately, analytic geometry.
This geometry would be essential to Kahns work for the rest of
his career.
88

Born in 1902, Kahn lived through both the Depression of

1929 and the new economies during and after World War II.
According to Vincent Scully, Kahn survived into his early
fifties, without ever achieving any particular success at all.10
Scullys remark was intended to show Kahn's spirithis stead-
fast belief and determinationbut the comment enunciates
how little the design profession really knows about Kahns early
career and how distinct yet intimately connected these two
phases of Kahns work are. Monumentality was published as
the United States embarked on proving that economic might
secured by a massive gold surpluscould be used as a tool of
war. Kahns works after 1951 secured their value in the
magnificent deployment of building materials, echoing his
1944 essays call for an architecture of symbolic and spiritual
value. Monumentality appeared a year after Sigfried Giedion,
Jos Luis Sert and Fernand Lger met in New York to discuss
redirecting the course and concerns of modern architecture.
They wanted to steer modernisms energies away from the
realm of domestic architecture and private art and toward
institutional works that could satisfy the eternal demand of the
people for translation of their collective force into symbols.11
In 1944, as the United States government established itself as
the worlds most powerful economic and political force by
allowing the nationalistic concerns of government to follow
 89

economic initiatives, Kahn steadfastly adhered to a career-long

search for the civil and spiritual potentials of architecture. After
1944, as the international effort to enact the Bretton Woods
Treaties began, Kahn began to formulate an architecture to
sustain the initiatives of the individual within the emerging
autonomy of deterritorialized and global economic procedures.
The scalar quality of postwar economic systems, if not
unprecedented, was unmatched in its omnipotence and
authority. Kahns architectural development parallels these
economic trends and, in doing so, challenges their authority in
the construction of civil life. Kahns buildings developed a
mathematics that reverberated with capitals surplus-seeking
functions.

Two Movements/Fast and Slow: The Cycloid

The cycloid employed in the Kimbell Art Museum at Fort

Worth is an example of Kahn's final work in geometry; it
indicates an architecture measured by a variable ratio of fast and
slow movements. According to Michael Benedikt, the form of
the structural shells of which the museum is composed is
generated by the curve traced in the air by a point on a rolling
disk.12 As a circle rolls along a baseline, a point on the circle
describes the outline of the resulting cycloid. While the circle
90

rolls at a constant velocity, the point moves at varying distances

and speeds in relation to the baseline. The cycloid is, in effect, a
simple but multivalent geometric machine. It produces both a
range of constant dimensions and variable proportions which
when combined become monumental. Still, it can be described
reductively with two elemental geometric forms: the line and
the circle. The cycloid emerges in movement, describing both
the fast movement of the point in relation to the baseline as
well as slow and reverse motion. At the Kimbell, Kahn sought
to contain this machinic movement in the monumental form of
a classicized and essentially Roman taxis. His tendency toward
classicism remained with him throughout a fifty-year career, but
the dimensions of that classicism, and how he imagined it
spoke to an emerging nation profoundly changed during those
years. Kahn gave the Kimball literal motion and essential still-
ness, creating architecture that synthesized the timeless and still,
and the movement of the machine.
 91

Survived

Kahn worked aggressively during the survived years to insure

the potential for architectural practice according to the preroga-
tives of the public realm. Kahn's early clients were a succession
of bureaucratic agencies, and at times he and his partner Oscar
Stonorov became entangled in contentious disputes between
organized labor unions and private industry. Kahn worked for
the City Architect of Philadelphia; federal agencies such as the
Reconstruction Finance Corporation; the Public Works
Administration; the Division of Subsistence Homesteads; and
The Resettlement Administration; state and city agencies
including the Northeast Philadelphia Housing Corporation;
and the City Planning Commission of Philadelphia; and labor
unions such as the International Ladies Garment Workers
Union. His projects were federally funded by the United States
Housing Authority, the Philadelphia Housing Guild, the
Fashioned Hosiery Workers Union, the Labor Housing
Conference, the United Auto Workers, the Independent
Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, and
the Federal Public Housing Agency. Kahns patrons did not
arrive until he was in his fiftieshis clients, however, were
there in force from the moment he graduated from the
University of Pennsylvania until the final years of the war.
92

Between his college graduation in 1924 and his emergence in

1951 as a leading architect in the United States, Louis Kahn
worked almost exclusively in the realm of public housing.

Today, the problems of housing remain although they take new

form amidst new governments; China recently released plans
for a new mortgage system that would allow the private sale of
former public housing, and the United States Department of
Housing and Urban Development has embarked on an
expansive down-payment voucher program that nearly ends its
fifty-year history in subsidized public-rental housing. If Kahn
did sense the scalar shift in Americas postwar economy and
sought a new architecture to compensate for its magnitude,
what dimension and what vectorial quality does architecture
require today to insert itself into what the economist John
Kenneth Galbraith calls the classical trinity of productive
forces: land, labor and capital.13 If architecture is to be a fourth
factor that acts at the entrepreneurship level to organize or
manage proportional relationships among the other three
dimensions, what new scalar and numeric movements must it
seek? Kahns buildings tell a story of architectural mastery and
genius, but the survival of Kahns driven soul and his late, hard-
won success cannot be underestimated. His life and his struggle
to find a form for its concerns may, in the end, offer more to a
young architects than his works.
 93

1
Vincent Scully, What Will Be Has Always Been: The Worlds of Louis Kahn, ed.
Richard Saul Wurman (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), p. 297.
2
Alfred E. Eckes, Jr., A Search for Solvency: Bretton Woods and the International
Monetary System, 19411971 (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1975), p.
35.
3
Kenneth Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in
Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture, ed.John Cava (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1995), pp. 209210.
4
David B. Brownlee and David G. DeLong, Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of
Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), p. 42.
5
Eckes, A Search for Solvency, p. 7.
6
Georg Schild, Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks (New York: St. Martins
Press, 1995), p. 106. See also R. G. Hawley, Bretton Woods: For Better or Worse
(New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1946), p. 9.
7
A series of photos of Kahn at the blackboard appeared in the introductory pages
of Scully, What Will Be.
8
Brownlee and DeLong, In the Realm of Architecture, p. 20.
9
Ibid., p. 21.
10
Scully, What Will Be, p. 284.
11
Brownlee and DeLong, In the Realm of Architecture, p. 42.
12
Michael Benedikt, Deconstructing the Kimball (New York: SITES/Lumen
Books, 1991), p. 65.
13
John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics and Art, in The Liberal Hour (New
York: Mentor Books, The New American Library of World Literature, Inc.,
1964), p. 53.