Part 3 - Lou Kahn lecture transcript

In his essay “Laughing with Kafka”, David Foster Wallace outlines the pitfalls of literary analysis. “We all know that there is no quicker way to empty a joke of its peculiar magic than to try to explain it.” Some subjects are hard to communicate. There’s a futility in analyzing writing with writing. “This is a lot like the teacher's feeling at running a Kafka story through the gears of your standard undergrad-course literary analysis-plot to chart, symbols to decode, etc. Kafka, of course, would be in a unique position to appreciate the irony of submitting his short stories to this kind of high-efficiency critical machine, the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty.”

If you think writing about writing is hard, try writing about architecture. It's hard to write about concrete wall construction without boring yourself or your readers. That’s why when I set about analyzing an architect to digest their ideas for my own work, I try to understand them in as direct manner as possible from multiple angles. I visit their buildings, I photograph and draw their works directly and meditate on them. I look at what they drew, I read what they read, I listen to what they said, I read what other contemporaries wrote or said about them, I look through their most personal letter correspondence, I study their work habits, and figure out where they traveled and when... I figure out what they eat for breakfast, what color their underwear is, so on and so forth. In other words, I become some sort of a creepy archi-stalker creature.

When I analyze a building or ‘architectural rose’ in David Foster Wallace speak, I research the conditions it grew up in, look at its genetic makeup and all its descendants, listen to gardeners to see how it was watered and nurtured, read books on their forms and patterns of petal growth, I visit the rose in all seasons and sketch and photograph it in all types of daylight, I write about it…. Only then do then I proceed to grind all of its petals off, break it down into bits of data regarding circulation, program, mechanical, structural, proportional systems into a special goo send it through a mass spectrometer to explain what makes the rose so great so I can integrate their 'magic' into my designs.

Lou Kahn is an especially hard rose to deconstruct. His travel drawings are like colorful Chagall fantasies, his design evolution is meandering and non-linear, and his correspondences are messier. Even his own son, Nathaniel, made a film trying to figure out who his father was. He was a father who designed some of the greatest modern buildings in the world, yet lived with his in-laws for decades while fathering 3 kids from 3 different women in and around Philadelphia… He was a mystery to the closest people around him.

Lou Kahn died before I was born, but I’m separated by 2 degrees of separation from him since I worked for 2 people that were taught directly by him at Yale. James Polshek and Peter Gluck. When I looked at interviews of my former employers looking for insight into Kahn’s impact on my former bosses, these are the humorous dead ends I found:

Polshek interview:

You studied architecture at Yale while Louis Kahn was there. What did he teach you?

One day, he looked down at a drawing I was doing, and he said, “Mr. Polshek, trees don’t grow in rows.” I said, “They do if you plant them in rows.” He didn’t speak to me for six weeks.

Polshek told me about the day he found out Kahn died unexpectedly. He was dean of Columbia’s architecture school when he got a call asking him to escort Kahn’s wife Esther to the morgue so she could identify the body. “It was a macabre reintroduction to Lou.”

But you came to admire him?

We became friendly. What I learned from him was modesty. Personal modesty—he never cared about publicity. And the modesty in the expression of the building.

Peter Gluck interview:

“Lou Kahn… his students would sit at his feet “what is a school?” “a school is a bench under a tree.” Everybody would go “Woo hoo”. I don’t think he was an incredibly good teacher, his buildings were incredibly good each one was a course in architecture. Rudolph was an incredibly good teacher but his building were not so good. Never developed professionalism. All his projects were in deep trouble.”

I don’t think [Louis Kahn] was a really good teacher, but on the other hand, his buildings were incredibly good. Each one of them was like a course on architecture. Whereas [Paul] Rudolph, who was the Dean at Yale, was an unbelievable teacher, but his buildings were not so good

After listening to Kahn’s lectures, I understand Polshek and Gluck’s reaction to Kahn. Kahn’s lectures are like abstract bumbling mystical sermons in metaphysics (the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space. the question of the initial conditions for the universe belonging to the realm of metaphysics or religion)…

Kahn collaborator and noted sculptor Isamu Noguchi wasn’t exaggerating when he called Lou Kahn "a philosopher among architects."

A typical architecture lecture involves showing some slides, talking about ideas, and maybe a funny anecdote. A Kahn lecture runs like a philosophical stream of consciousness... a sermon in philosophy where architecture is elevated to religion. The ideas are like precious jewels that are waiting to be mined. My brain can’t comprehend metaphysics, so I replay his lectures at 25% speed over and over on youtube and transcribe it and read it to try to understand it. Kahn speaks with a peculiar ‘Estonian immigrant who moved to Brooklyn young but lived in Philadelphia’ accent.

I’ve typed this particular Kahn sermon Louis I. Kahn, "Architecture", 1971-04-14 - YouTube to gain understanding on his unbuilt Temple of Hurva design. To understand the architect philosopher, you have to understand his philosophy.

Lou Kahn:

It sure it is a surprise, well I thought I was going to a coffee klatch, but it turns out to be a clambake... it’s great. I hope everyone can hear me. I have 2 microphones and a lot of batteries up here I think maybe you can make out what I say. you know it’s very difficult to speak to many people. I’ve done it before, but I must say that almost invariably what happens is that it becomes a kind of performance rather than an event. Because I think when you speak to just one other it can be extremely eventful. Somehow the lectures of one person to another can manage to come to a single point and it becomes generative. That when you speak to just another person you don’t feel as if your lines are necessary. That you feel like saying something like you never said before. And though I will try just to amuse myself not to put the first act first and the second act second, I’ll try to scramble it a bit. Because that’s only thing I can do. The memory leaves you of course, to a great extent because there are many people. But I’m very certainly gratified everybody is here. It seems as though, if you left anybody out, I think all of this college seems to be here.

In saying this also, I’d like to give you a sense of my recent thoughts. As the old ones sort of get worn by such performances when you begin to hear yourself say the say the same thing over and over again. Which one is prone to do. You just make up your mind that it probably it isn’t true at all. Because it doesn’t grow. If it doesn’t grow, it needs fortification.

I think everyone is tempted to define architecture and I won’t dare to define it because it is really a too all comprising of a thing… too wonderful a thing to try to nail down. I do believe it kind of begins with a room. A room. Which has a relation to a person. It seems walls when they’re far away and the walls when they’re close, they make you say different things. I’m sure that at a large place, you say something differently than you do in a small place. If you’re near a fireplace just with one other person as I mentioned a little while ago. I think it is truly generative time. And especially if it’s with a person you don’t know too well that you feel that you feel a remoteness in your personal relationship. Then it becomes even more sharply generative. Because you feel the necessity of renewing yourself. And for that reason, that which has been dormant, that which has never been said, somehow occurs to you.

The room I feel is also defined by the way it’s made. It is invariably an incomplete place if the way it is made this room is not made is not evident in the room itself. There is a kind of completeness about it. It isn’t just a partitioned off place where you feel other parts of it are somewhere else. It’s so important to think that a room is a great thing to have happened and to become part of the everyday, you know. It is while on the one hand when people tell you of free-wheeling spaces that I go back to the feeling of the room per se defines not easily partitioned off, something which is like an extension of self. Something that which is kind of piece of self… was made that it has in the end a superior position in the record in your mind of your past through circumstance than one in which you have just freely moved and tried to feel freedom. As sometimes you don’t feel it all. You just feel a kind of liberty, but maybe there’s a distinction between freedom and liberty. I think very much the room as religion.

Now a poet, an American poet who studied architecture and had it deeply ingrained in him though he became a writer… just in honor of his previous considerations of where his past expressions would be wrote a poem about architecture in which he said many things, but out of it I drew something I thought tremendously significant. He said, “what slice of the sun does your building have?” And also, “What slice of the sun enters your room?” when I thought of the sun striking the jamb and the sill of a window and that you’re acquainted with this place that you enter either in the morning, or get up in it, or walk into it. That you feel the marvel of it. In a room with another you forget the wind the rain and the trees and the birds and the sky. There is something about the world the within the world that has an effect on the mind. In fact the room is a place in the mind. It is very seldom that your mind flowers on Times Square. You endanger your life so much walking on any city street anyways that one thinks first of his life than of thought. But it is something that I think tremendously significant. that kept growing and growing in significance.

The sense that you are making a room. That you are making a society of rooms when you’re making a building. And if you think of it as a freewheeling space. Which I think is also of great importance today. In fact, it recalls a beautiful time in architecture during the Greek thought and realizations which were new… an emergence… a time of beginning, and I don’t know of anytime more important than that time of beginning. All the extensions that still recalls the beginning are certainly less than the beginning to think that something can happen when there’s no precedent. And something that forms a kind of an agreement in the mind which says “this is something that it must be”. When it was thought about it must be considered as being always there. It’s a confirmation which comes out of the I commonality of man which is tremendously important. And so a building is a society of rooms. You have absolute freedom to say what this society of rooms are. The function of the building is only a kind of start of what these spaces should be. That society of rooms. You honor the function without question. But it is only the stimulus around which things gravitate to try to glorify the sense that something must be. This poet who said, “What slice of the sun enters your room?” is almost like saying. “Sun, well you never knew how great you were do you… until you saw a building.”

And it must be considered in another light. I don’t want to lose a thread of thought of the room and if I was to deviate from it, then you just remind me because I’m going to fly over to a different kind of consideration.

That of silence and light. Silence is this feeling one gets in the presence of the pyramids, and not only isolated to the pyramids I would say many a great work has the same feeling. You felt this silence today, at least a few of us did when we heard this music. And this sum total of it all is a kind of silence. When Rachmaninoff used to play on the piano, and I heard him, I had the great privilege of hearing him, when he was finished with his work. It seemed as though the entire thing was locked in a cloud above you. Complete… the completeness of it was never lost. It wasn’t just a passing thing. And there you thought it had the quality of silence. A kind of wordless voice that simply reflected the inner nature of man which has this will to be to express. I say this manifestation of ourselves on this earth or anywhere we really are is the will to be to express. As though that’s the only reason for man. To express. And light that tremendous phenomenon I consider that all material is spent light. As though light was not light but was a kind of prevalence of the luminous. That it is non-material before it becomes material and the luminous. The prevailing luminous grouped in a wild dance of flame and a flame congealing spending itself into material. 

So the mountains are spent light, the streams are spent light, the atmosphere is spent light. You are made of spent light. That part, that generative part or that you might say that ambient of soul or spirit from which emanates the will to be to express sweeps towards material or spent light and spent light sweeps to the will to be to express and meets in a kind of threshold which you call the inspirations as if to say the will to be to express meets the possible… meets the means to express the material the laws of nature are the means to express. You are a product of the laws of nature which made an instrument to express out of the kind of thing that you wanted to express in the same way as a microbe wanted to express something and became a microbe and wanted to express something. you as a man and the record of your odyssey through in the making is recorded in you like in everything in nature is a record of how it’s made. In the rock is record of the rock. In the man is a record of a man. It must be considered that you know everything really except that you may have a dumb instrument in the brain that can’t quite manage it. The brain is one thing the mind is another. The mind is the soul in the brain. The will to be to express is what makes the mind. And the brain is the instrument you got pot luck from nature because nature is non-conscious and you possess consciousness which is a demand on your part. Consciousness is that germ which makes the awareness that gives you the instrumentation for the will to express or the will eventually is the will to be to express.

Now I was asked to illustrate light you know. This is fascinating people and they wanted me to illustrate this. Now how do you illustrate light? Well you start like a dumb bunny. Well if one gave me a white piece of paper what could be whiter than that? Right? I thought that way myself. And I found that saw nothing. A white piece of paper is a white piece of paper. but I noticed drawings made by wonderful people that really knew what they were doing. I noticed the stroke of pen is where the light was not. And that was an important discovery where the light is not. You make a drawing with strokes where the light is not. So therefore, I had found that which could express light. Of course you know that meant the less strokes you made it with the more light. That probably is very true. I probably put too many lines on paper. I was very very cautious how many strokes. I put down. it did give a clue how to express yourself.

In the building that is being made, there is a tremendous spirit a will to be in the building when it’s beginning. In fact, you know just by the process of building itself. Not a blade of grass can exist around a building site. It is relentlessly aiming in the tremendous spirit to be. I’m talking of course of good ones not bad ones. But nevertheless they all start with a great deal of hope because the best is at that very stage when the final evidence isn’t there. But this will to be is very great. When the building built it is locked in servitude and the building wants to tell you about the story it was made. It wants to. “Hey look at my marble it took me a lot of money to do this marble I can’t, we had a lot of trouble with this. But I conquered it. It wants to say all this but nobody listens. Of course the building is going up the stair elevator going to laboratories and doing your work and all that kind of thing. When the building turns to ruin again, the building’s spirit emerges again. You see many buildings where it’s just ruins in which the branches and leaves grow in and out of the windows. I’m talking about old fashioned ruins. I’d hate to think of a ruin of concrete with a reinforcing rebar rods sticking out in all directions, rusting, various hues of red as being anything good as somebody said “a building is only good if the ruin is a promise to be good.” And I’m afraid we have a long to go to make buildings of today have the character but you know it did have that character you have that feeling that the spirit of its making comes back because it’s free of servitude. When people speak about the thing being functional that means it’s really suffering. It must feel the unmeasurable quality of this building must be felt and not the function… not the plumbing and all that kind of stuff. It is something spirit it’s made out of man. Something which nature hasn’t got. It could over turn 75 million times and couldn’t make a building without the intervention of man. Who says something which is inexpressible I express through a building or I express through a piece of music or in man playing cards. It is man’s paroxysm playing cards.

I’ll just throw in a little barb what is the sociologists think of this. It’s fine when one thinks of the nature of man through sociology yes but I go through history to extract let us say from history or crystallize all the circumstances out of it. It’s simply put that evaluate nature man through what through circumstances has revealed and this is like a golden dust that falls and you finger through this golden dust and if you can, this distillation away from circumstance and read history throughout your discovery as to the nature man you then have power of the artist cause that’s what he does. circumstance are of little importance to him. Subject matter is transcendent in there are kinds of thing in which has its own life and doesn’t have anything to do with the circumstance that led to it. You know painters of the most gory scenes of history do those gory scenes enjoy because you cannot make a work of art except in joy. it has nothing to do with the subject matter as it has which it what induces you to make of a portrait of the nature man. Another thought… is that in the same line of history. Or let us say when a work of art was made and what significance it has in relation to the way of life then as it is now. If you have but to reflect very little really that a work of art transcends the time. It started in time certainly. It’s influenced greatly by technically availabilities it’s Influenced by people around maybe you gather some you certainly gather something from it but it’s import is something beyond.

The music we heard today which was written hundreds of years ago is just as fresh now that it was then. Why? Because it is actually looked for truth which is different from fact. the truth you might say is a sense of commonality and it is in this the music is written. There are things that sort of start you but it isn’t what you end up with. And therefore what is you must assume has always been and what was has always been and what will be will always be as though today is yesterday and tomorrow is yesterday and tomorrow is today and today is yesterday and in connection with such things that have to do with art with has to with the art. 

And the only language of man which is art and everything serves it including science. Cause science only deals with what already is and its discovery. Cause science cannot deal with that which is speculated on. It is really a discovery of what is. What is available. It has only to do with that of nature itself. Science deals not with man whatsoever. social science to me is no science. social studies yes. social Science no. science defies you see the strength the singularity of each person if only given the chance to become the singularity we would have the greatest crop in the world that is the minds of each individual. You see which one can only find the avenues of exchange which this can bring. that individual with another cannot matter what his degree of education is you see would startle you with that which presents his absolute personal kind of evaluation of things. you’ve spoken without education who tell you wonderful things and it’s a pity they can’t prime it. For that reason, I also believe in schools the schools of talent… natural talent. 

I believe that man who dances beautifully and natural talent for dancing could eventually learn latin. If you just honor the fact that and give him the privilege to express what through what he does beautifully naturally that he would feel like giving something to himself and to others because of this honor bestowed to him. so all the free wheeling in the world means little unless some larger recognitions are made regarding natural talent. Schools of natural talent. you go to school where you get the greatest freedom that you ever could imagine you to have got. it’s the one place where you should not be marked or judged. But you should be severely criticized. Yes. Constructively mind you. Because that does nobody anybody no harm. It does no harm in criticism. tremendous harm in judgement. Judging one man and judging another.

I was remarking just up to kind fortify this idea. you know I took phsyics in school I sat next to a fellow who could listen to what the teacher said and put down accurately what he said. Everytime I listened to the teacher i wrote down what he didn’t say. I couldn’t listen you see and write down at the same time. I just couldn’t do it. So I copied his notes to pass my examinations. This is how silly this is. Now If the same teacher would come to me and say “lou kahn, you’re never going to be, or not lou kahn, by the way, I’m his stand in by the way. and so I say you I say I’m speaking for him now. And he says “Lou kahn I tell you must you must attend classes that’s one thing. Cause Being an architect you must know physics. It’s true because physics the nature Of nature you should know every part of it. feel it. it’s marvelous to know but to pass the examination I’m afraid not. Because knowledge when it comes to an individual it’s personal. Knowledge itself is in the book. it is yet not finished and never will be finished. and as soon as that’s taken from there to you it becomes personal. And if you impart this personal. you’re saying practically nothing. You’re saying something to yourself but not to the other man. so therefore you must attend class. And you’ll be examined. But all you have to do is draw physics. You needn’t tell me what it’s all about. Just draw what you felt physics gave you. And I think that would be very much constructive along the lines of my natural talents. My natural talents are such that I still do not know the size of a brick I really don’t know it. and I resist like mad knowing it. because it is not important to know it for me. For someone else it’s very important.

What bearing has this in architecture? The spaces the rooms. You can call them rooms if you like. You can call them spaces. Cause it depends on just how much you take in as the point of departure from which your creative instincts your invention and your attitudes play.... ( to be continued)