Let there be light: The forgotten genius of Louis Kahn

Plenty of art, in every medium, never finds its way outside the inner circle of experts. But Louis Kahn’s public invisibility is particularly unfortunate. Architects revere his buildings, but outside the profession his work, even his name, remains little known. The reasons why are obvious. Inept at self-promotion, Kahn never had the chance to write a book before his death—a fatal heart attack in the men’s room of New York’s grand old Pennsylvania station—in 1974. For every commission he landed, he lost another: a restless perfectionist, he was always revising designs, even long after clients had approved them. He was often disastrously behind schedule. Drawings for his largest building, the National Assembly in Dhaka, Bangladesh were three years late, and the client for one of his very few private houses waited seven years to move into the house that Kahn designed for him and his young family. And of the comparatively few buildings Kahn built, none are invitingly situated. Most of his greatest projects sit in more or less pedestrian American towns and cities—New Haven, Connecticut; Rochester, New York; Exeter, New Hampshire; La Jolla, California; Fort Worth, Texas. The rest, like his Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, India, and the National Assembly complex in Bangladesh, are not located in popular holiday destinations.

We’ve all seen nice, even beautiful buildings, but it is extremely rare to see unforgettable ones: places you remember approaching or stepping inside for the first time; where you recall their warmth, their textures and colours, their hush, the way light fell inside, the sound of your footsteps on the floor. Buildings so powerful that, for a few moments, time stopped.

Kahn’s Exeter Library (New Hampshire), British Art Museum (at Yale University), Kimbell Art Museum (Texas), Salk Institute (California), and parliament building and housing complex in Dhaka are all like that. These muscular buildings manage to be simultaneously primitive and refined. Through geometry, repetition and variation, they combine the modernist technique of decontextualising familiar elements with the serene balance of classicism.

Even today, Kahn’s buildings remain touchstones for contemporary architects. His work has pointed in many directions: David Chipperfield and early Norman Foster picked up on his marriage of modern technology and classical motifs. James Stirling adopted Kahn’s penchant for reinterpreting familiar architectural elements like arches and windows. Herzog & de Meuron and Renzo Piano’s almost romantic emphasis on lush material surfaces can be traced back to Kahn—and so can the technology-overdrive aesthetic of Richard Rodgers. Architects the world over claim a debt to him—with the exception, that is, of those inclined to theatricality or irony, for example Zaha Hadid or Rem Koolhaas. For them, Kahn’s highly earnest work holds little appeal.

What makes Kahn’s work so great? An exhibition at London’s Design Museum, the first major show devoted to his work in over two decades, helps to illuminate. Admittedly, architecture exhibitions are usually tiresome. Buildings are complicated creatures, involving floor plans, vertical sections, façade elevations, and so on. Just exploring the factors that the architect must consider when placing a building on its site is difficult in a fine-arts-type exhibition—topography; patterns of urban development; the pre-existing built environment; the strengths of local industry and craftsmanship. And so much more information is needed to understand most buildings. For non-specialists, floor plans are difficult to read, and other commonly-used drawings, like sections cut through buildings to show how spaces are vertically stacked, are almost incomprehensible.

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Yet Kahn’s work is unusually well-suited to a museum show. Architectural models remain the most effective way to convey the overall design of a building, and the Design Museum exhibition contains over 40 models of major projects; few of which are the soulless, white-polymer kind spit out by 3D printers: like Kahn’s buildings themselves, they are hand-built, delicately crafted centimetre by centimetre. Kahn often drew freehand, and with virtuosity—one famous picture shows him at a chalkboard, drawing a perfectly symmetrical circular pattern with two hands—and the exhibition contains 70 drawings for projects from many different stages of his career. The best are fluid and expressive, and they help to convey the authenticity and inviting, humanistic emotional tenor of Kahn’s buildings. (And through his handwritten notations, the inner clatter of his thoughts as he drew.) Since Kahn also travelled widely, and liked to record what he saw in pastel and charcoal sketches, the exhibit contains his compelling interpretations of familiar places: the Parthenon, the towers of San Gimignano, the clamshell-shaped piazza in Siena.

Kahn’s architecture emerged from a prodigious artistic sensibility mixed with deeply felt (if not sophisticated) political convictions. As a young child, Kahn had emigrated from Estonia to Philadelphia with his family and profited from the support of the tightly-knit Jewish community in which he was raised. America had offered his family freedom and opportunity: in gratitude, Kahn became the kind of fervent, democracy- loving patriot that only an immigrant could be. This personal experience prompted him to develop the notion that striking, appealing public landmarks serve two social purposes. They help people to orient themselves spatially, becoming part of one’s mental map of a place. They also nurture one’s sense of connection, or affiliation, with the other members of the community for whom the landmark is significant.

From these ideas, and inspired by both modernist abstraction and historic precedents (the Pantheon in Rome was one of his favourite buildings), Kahn spun out an architectural language that relied on unusual combinations of basic geometric forms—circles, squares, triangles, cylinders, cubes, pyramids, prisms. To confer such familiar forms with a sense of permanence, he worked primarily with masonry and concrete, materials he liked because they are literally extracted from the earth.

Then he beautified them through fanatic attention to detail: construction workers in La Jolla poured countless mock-up samples for the concrete walls of the Salk Institute before Kahn found the velvety texture and colour he sought. Once, a journalist asked him if he would ever consider designing in steel, and Kahn replied that he would need another lifetime to develop the proper expertise. Besides, he added, “we’re not building aeroplanes, are we?” Steel symbolised modernity and modernisation. Kahn embraced modernity, but he was also determined to build for the ages.

Kahn’s buildings are so effective, and affecting, because they balance monumental gravitas with subtle artistic touches directed at each individual’s particular, moment-by-moment experience. Finding the entrance to the Exeter Library, or the Unitarian Church in Rochester, takes work: Kahn wanted people to experience his buildings as journeys. By the time one stepped inside, one was psychologically prepared for his “world within a world,” elevating, ennobling spaces that expressed humanity’s highest ideals.

Even for his largest building, the parliament in Dhaka, he insisted that everyone, from elected officials to office workers, deserved to inhabit spaces illuminated by natural light. To accomplish this in the enormous parliament he made it a kind of sieve, puncturing light channels from the ceiling to the ground floor, and specifying a seven-story, 100-foot-high ambulatory raked with skylights through which every user needed to pass.

Kahn rhapsodised about natural light’s changeability, the way that it registers not only the time of day but also the season. At the galleries in the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, light creeps in unexpectedly, from underneath the curving, low-slung concrete beams and from the apexes of the barrel-vault-like ceilings.

Kahn was also a master of climatic surprise. Coming upon the Salk Institute in La Jolla, one is confronted by a stark, richly textured, concrete and travertine limestone installation that frames the ocean’s horizon in the distance. At the Yale Centre for British Art, one enters off the street on the corner, diagonally, happening into a tall, skylit, cube-shaped atrium in which a thin concrete grid structure is softened with light wood panels and rectangular openings showing the galleries upstairs. From here one proceeds into a second atrium, similarly refined, but occupied—invaded, really—by an enormous, mute concrete cylinder.

The cylinder houses a staircase leading to the upstairs galleries, but that’s not really its point. It provides an enigmatic, geometric presence in a space otherwise so refined that it evokes the drawing room of an English manor house. “We must express dichotomous things,” Kahn insisted. A little of this, and a little of that. Why? “Because dicho- tomous things inspire.”

Kahn’s dichotomous architecture combines the serenity of classical architecture with the restlessness of modernist abstraction. It emerged from his belief that good design mattered to people’s lives, as individuals and as members of social groups. “If you look at the Baths of Caracalla,” Kahn once said, “we all know that we can bathe just as well under an eight-foot ceiling as we can under a 150-foot ceiling. But I believe there’s something about a 150-foot ceiling that makes a man a different kind of man.”