Back to the Beginning - Trenton Bath House

"you just like this cause of the name. if it wasn't famous you wouldn't have come."

"no no.... i really think this is great."

i've been accused idol worship before. liking buildings because they were designed by famous architects. to a layperson, the crumbling concrete block walls and asphalt shingled roofs looked like a dump. surely this was not deserving of a 2 hour drive to visit. or was it?

                                         

i made a valiant attempt to defend Lou Kahn's honor. 

"This bathhouse plan looks like a simple 9 square plan, but look more closely and you’ll see it is underlaid with a tartan grid. see how the alternating 22-foot and 8-foot bands intersect to define large and small square spaces?"

I now started pointing around the various features of the building in a very excited manner.

“the narrow zones provide the square corner piers for entry storage and toilets and skylit rectangular servant zones for changing showering and washing. Kahn honors the hollow square cmu ‘columns’ by capping them with cast in place concrete slab lid like roofs and articulating vertical expansion joint lines at their edges. With the roofs springing from the corners Kahn highlights the inner square focal point of each structure. The roofs seem to hover mysteriously."

my passionate defense fell on deaf ears like a desperate used car salesman's pitch .

k and j were not buying it.

unfazed, I kept trying to proselytize the skeptics. “During the design of the bathhouse, Kahn was smitten with Palladian grids and how to integrate servant and served spaces. “The architect must find a way in which the serving areas of a space can be there, and still not destroy his spaces. He must find a new column, he must find a new way of making those things work, and still not lose his building on a podium,” he said. “Like the great Villa rotunda, where the servant spaces complement the central roof, here the Trenton bath house uses the same organizational and geometric logic."

palladian house grids

villa rotunda vs trenton bathhouse

J brutally cut through all my gesticulations and jargon down with his teenage take. "i can't believe we drove 2 hours to see a bathroom." at 13 years old, he has a concept of what kids normally do with their fathers. play baseball or board games, fix fences, go fly fishing, change motor oil. driving 90 minutes to see a bathroom in cornhole new jersey is not what he considers normal father son behavior.

i interrupted his  "why are we here?" grievances by dispatching him to the urinal, "you should probably go pee and try to develop a sensitivity to great architecture. hopefully one day, you’ll appreciate these experiences…”

it was sweltering. 95 degrees and humid. i never dress up, but here i was wearing a dress shirt. the night before, i worried that i wouldn't be able to take pictures or videos here since using cameras in bathrooms is kind of dicey with people in various states of deshabille and associated privacy issues.

if caught, i was thinking how awkward the interrogations would be.
"why are you video recording a changing room?"
"for the architecture, sir...” 

“Good to know you’re not just a pervert taking pictures of naked people…”

so i hatched a cockamamie plan. i put on a dress shirt with a front chest pocket. i slid my phone with lens poking out right above the brim and pressed video record. i walked around my apartment slow and steady to practice creating architecture video walkthroughs.

there have been times, where i've gone to sites that don't allow photos only to make secret bootleg videos as the security inevitably looks away. The videos sit in my hard drive like taxidermy shoulder mounts on a hunter's cabin wall. my most treasured kills have included forbidden scenes of the salk institute, frick museum, rockefellers’ estate, last supper, sistine chapel, massacio frescos, etc...

nothing was going to deter me from capturing the essence of the trenton bath house for my handful of dedicated blog readers.

anticipating "sir, no photography in the bathhouse. And absolutely no videotaping in the changing rooms." i pressed record and put my phone in my pocket with the camera peeping out. i walked around more deliberately and slowly so as to keep the lens level. There is nothing worse than going to a site, and not being able to take pictures.

to my disappointment, some middle-aged man was in the changing room putting his clothes on, marring my pristine video frames. i didn't want to look suspicious so i walked nonchalantly over to the urinal and started taking a piss. i left and circled the building for 10 minutes. Within the 9 square plan, the four corners and center are voids. You enter the central open air atrium from a corner. A reception desk fronts a square storage volume capped with a pyramidal roof. On either side of the atrium are the men's and women’s changing rooms which are also sheltered under pyramidal roofs. Opposite the reception in this bilaterally symmetrical arrangement is a ceremonial set of stairs leading up to the municipal pool. This set of stairs has a roof, but no walls. In this way kahn worked between solid and void.

                                        

                                     

                                                

When I returned to the locker room, I incredulously saw the same guy still in the process of putting on his shirt. my luck, i encounter a man in the changing room who fumbles buttons and can’t dress in a reasonably prompt manner.

he probably would've reported me to security if i started filming him overtly. every time i went in, i went to the urinal and peed a little more. i did this about 4 subsequent times at 5 minute intervals each. I have several outtakes on my hard drive of my trenton bath urinations as a result. on my last round, he finally left and i had the room to myself. i promptly took my camera out of my pocket and started filming the roof, and the iconic moments of sky over the showers and sinks. what a grand feeling of openness Kahn provided for those changing to go to the pool.

Despite being in the presence of great architecture I couldn’t stop thinking that the guy who I thought was the slowest dresser, probably thought i had the smallest bladder. and if i were endowed with faulkner's talent, i could write a novel ala 'as i lay dying' where the narrative perspective would stream of consciousness flip back and forth between him, the local slow dressing Trenton resident and me, the sweaty small bladdered  architecture enthusiast in dress shirt.

As I lay Waiting for Man to Finish Changing (Chapter 1)

"what's he doing here all dressed up?”
"great, he's the only one in here, i'll feign use of the facilities so as to not act suspicious"
"glad he's gone... I don’t like putting clothes in with other people around. Uh oh… now he's back again"
"shit he's still here, i'm going to force myself to go pee again"
"why is that dude walking around with a phone in his front pocket?"
"this guy literally takes 20 minutes to put on a stupid shirt"
"i feel sorry for this guy. he's sweating and peeing a lot"
and so on and so forth..

I was the perverted dude in dress shirt standing in bathhouse front-pocket filming on the sly. I rationalized to myself, in today's cancel culture. what i was doing was rather harmless.

kahn would've never survived trenton if it were built in today's cultural climate. Pritzker prize winner Richard meier was recently taken down by five women, four of whom were former employees. they came forward with accusations of sexual harassment that included Meier groping their underwear and exposing himself to them. this seems tame to kahn's philandering 50's. Whereas Meier had to renounce his role at his firm and retire ignominiously, during the Trenton project, kahn had a wife, lived with his parents-in-law, had a hustle, and then a side hustle. that is, while Lou kahn raised a daughter with his wife, he simultaneously collaborated with mistress Anne Tyng on the geometry of the Trenton bath house. While Tyng carried Lou’s love child to term in secret in Rome, Kahn engaged in a side hustle with Marie Kuo, an intern working out the bath house entry mural which was based on the baths of Caracalla mosaics. After Tyng returned, Kuo, who didn’t realize Tyng was fluent in Chinese and could understand Kuo’s phone conversations to her mom concerning contraception and was aware of all of Kahn’s transgressions.

within the chaos of his personal life where he juggled 3 children from 3 women and an intern mural designer, Kahn conceived the purest of crystal structures. ideal perfection harmonizing ancient proportions with the integration of servant and served spaces. he made his architecture extra logical, legible and clear to counterbalance the chaos of his personal life.

While all these relationships were consensual, Kahn probably wielded his position of power to gain access to these women. Without cancellation, Kahn went on to design some of the world’ greatest buildings: the kimbell arts museum, salk institute, exeter library, british arts center.... similar in depravity, frank lloyd wright went on to design the guggenheim, usonian houses, falling water, taliesin I and II after running off with a client's wife and being caught moonlighting in louis sullivan's firm. jefferson designed UVA and monticello after serially impregnating his deceased wife’s half sister and daughter’s teenage slave/companion Sally Hemmings. Philip Johnson supposedly burned all his nazi white supremacist papers in the chimney of the glass house, etc.. many great architects did amazing work with very questionable morals. That is, the history of great architecture is constituted by the stunning work of socially deviant architects who refuse to submit to societal norms. 

Having rationalized that my odd social deviant behavior of photographing changing rooms was relatively minor compared to Kahn’s dalliances, i  proceeded to meticulously document the shower stalls and toilets. i started noticing odd water stains and signs of impending trouble where the sloped roof was held back from the perimeter walls. according to anne tyng, Kahn intended the water to run over the masonry surfaces. unfortunately, in New Jersey, Kahn didn't consider the impact of freeze and thaw cycles. Within 7 years of its construction in 1952, the water shedding off the iconic pyramidal roofs on the walls caused mold, disintegration, and cracking. The owners were about to tear the structure down until the county bought the property. For decades, the bathhouse succumbed to crumbling cmu and heaving slabs which were only recently repaired in 2020.

Looking beyond kahn’s cavalier approach to waterproofing and dereliction in detailing, Kahn's bathhouse marks an important change in his design philosophy. If an architect's life is analogous to sporting event, where there are critical moments that impact the final outcome… the trenton bathhouse was the turning point of Louis Kahn’s career. At middle age, Louis Kahn was written off, losing by a wide margin to the Great Depression, with no substantive designs to his name. In the second half of his life, from 1952 to his death in 1974, Lou Kahn came back with a vengeance, unleashing a string of amazing buildings. Looking back at the Trenton Bathhouse project, Kahn remarked it was the “generative force which is recognizable in every building which I have done since.”

The importance of trenton is that it was Kahn’s beginning. And according to Kahn, he didn’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.” The beginning is where the ideas were sparked, the beginning is the creation of something fresh and new. Within the crumbling cmu blocks and economically shingled asphalt roofs there were beginnings of ideas that Kahn would work tirelessly on for the rest of his illustrious career. After Trenton, Kahn had clear direction and goals to achieve in architecture. 

Comparing Trenton to his last project, the Yale British arts center, one can see how kahn developed and evolved themes of servant-served, day light modulation, and building planning principles.

At Trenton, Kahn refined his approach to utilitarian spaces and articulated his notion of spaces serving and spaces served. Whereas each pyramidal asphalt shingled wood roof at Trenton rests on four hollow CMU column supports that serve as mechanical spaces or as circulation for changing room, in his British Arts Center, his blackened steel-clad columns and precast beam supports were hollow and served as mechanical spaces to convey air, electricity, and water. servant space is woven seamlessly into served space, articulated and harmonious.

At the BAC, Kahn continued the Trenton truncated pyramidal roof lighting motif but increased the aperture size and introduced louvers for a more diffuse filtered lighting suitable for artwork. Kahn figured out ways to control direct sun by adding layer of sunscreening devices.

finally, the trenton bathouse was supposed to be part of a larger complex never built that Kahn envisioned for a jewish community center that included a landscape of axial pathways on tree lined paths, and a day camp pavilion. Kahn developed notions of how buildings and space are organized in relation to each other. Spatially, at Trenton, each bathhouse room is conceived as an independent pavilion around a central atrium, which is open to the sky. In BAC, each gallery room is similarly conceived as a skylit gallery cell that surrounds a daylit central entry atrium, and double height picture gallery.

 

For the non architects and disgruntled teenagers, Trenton bathhouse is nothingburger meh, for the connoisseurs who seek enlightenment on the ideas of Lou Kahn, it’s an architectural provocation and a demonstration of what happens when architects find purpose in life. 

The Joke, the Temple, and the Rhino (Intro)

For the past 3 months I have been suffering tremendous writer’s block. I’ve been contemplating a lecture delivered by Lou Kahn at Ball State University (Louis I. Kahn, "Architecture", 1971-04-14 - YouTube), which sounds like a sermon in metaphysics, a standup comedy routine called the Bicentennial Prayer by Richard Pryor (The Sermon_Richard Pryor - YouTube) which sounds like a sermon in critical race theory, and some strange idiosyncrasies in Albrect Duhrer’s famous rhinoceros wood cuts (Dürer's Rhinoceros - Wikipedia). If I were a PhD student, my thesis would be titled something like, “The metaphysics of lou kahn through Richard Pryor’s Parrhesian lens of critical race theory with a bonus explanation of anatomically misplaced rhinoceros horns in duhrer’s woodcuts.” It sounds complicated and obscure, but with covid raging, what else is there to do in my free time?

I don’t have a thesis advisor, so I’ve been kind of floating around untethered in a sea of ideas. When I don’t understand something, I try to read about it. To my knowledge and prodigious internet search skills, there have been no academic attempts that discuss the above ideas in any real depth. No transcripts exist for any of the above material. Some people jog or go to museums as hobbies. In my spare time I transcribe things that have yet to be transcribed. In the search to provide new insight to things that already exist, the importance of the primary source material cannot be stressed.  

So when someone asks me what I’ve been doing the past 3 months in my spare time, I respond, “I’ve been tirelessly transcribing Lou Kahn’s lecture at Ball State University, dissecting Richard Pryor’s Bicentennial prayer regarding racism in america, and looking at weird unexplained things going on in duhrer’s famous rhinoceros woodcut.” Usually my friends say “uh cool. Sounds interesting… then steer the conversation towards easier topics by saying something more conventional like “so how are your wife and kids?” to which we end up commiserating over our kids’ borderline psychopathic use of tik tok.

It’s been frustrating... when I have a couple good ideas and I struggle to pull them together. I think It would be great to pull these Ideas together like an expert juggler. I’m not one of those regular jugglers that just takes a bunch of banal bowling pins and throws them up in the air. I’m the more ambitious and dangerous type of juggler who you can’t stop watching. I like to juggle different things together like flaming torches, heavy butcher knives and used toilet brushes. At the heart of it, my superpower if I had any, is not flight, nor is it charming good looks, nor is it turning invisible… it’s making connections between things and coming up with theories and speculations nobody is crazy enough pauses to think about.  

When I try to write about about subjects, but can’t quite keep them in the air simultaneously. It’s frustrating. I have juggler’s block. My mind starts straying, I look at the long list of things I want to write about and just end up procrastinating further and further thinking about more and more disparate things to juggle.  I start reading, drowning in a sea of more and more craziness, wanting to throw up wilder and wilder combinations of things like Japanese haiku poetry of Basho, 1960’s jazz piano of Bill Evans, and the architecture of Carlo Scarpa.  

Enter the unexpected lifeguard. It’s not everyday you get to ask a Grammy nominee and NYTimes best selling author (Crying in H mart) Japanese Breakfast questions about creative process, but that’s what I did today in a serendipitous open zoom forum.

() Me - “What’s your song writing and essay writing process like? What do you do when you get writer’s block?” And she actually responded, “I give myself assignments like write 1000 words a day (which translates to 2 pages of single spaced text) or write 30 songs for the month of June. I hope for something good.. sometimes I get 1 sentence, other times I get raw source material for future albums.”

I came to an epiphany today. Fuck it. Make a disciplined series of daily blog posts that show the struggle and process of writing. So here I’m about to set a set of dangerous objects in motion. Gather round ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to start juggling this flaming torch, butcher’s knife and toilet brush in orbit, and see if I can keep it going. A Kahn lecture, Pryor prayer, and duhrer misplaced rhinoceros horn. At best, I’m going to provide valuable insights to humanity, at worst, if it’s an epic fail, I might cut off my toe, suffer 3rd degree burns and die of a terrible infection on my self-inflicted wounds, and at the very least I publish transcribed texts so people after me can see the primary sources in Microsoft word format and can study it for their own PhD work. So in effect, my existence on earth either provides insight no-one really asked for, a humorous spectacle of self- mutilation or a service to those who are hearing impaired or don’t understand English but want to experience Richard pryor, lou kahn or Albrecht duhrer in English. It’s a win win win situation.

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)

Part 4 - Lou Kahn transcript: Architecture dreams

When listening to Kahn lecture about his Venice Congressional Hall design, it’s as important to listen to what Kahn didn’t talk about as much as what he did talk about. Kahn spent 6 years working on this proposal that would have spanned across the Canale delle Galeazze like a suspension bridge, with an expressed sloped post-tensioned concrete slab replete with two stair towers that would have risen from opposite banks of the canal. His proposal was ultimately rejected by city officials like Le Corbusier’s hospital, the Palazzo dei Congressi, because it didn’t work with the historical fabric of Venice. 

From the onset of the project, Kahn had been warned by the city’s health commissioner, Vito Chiarelli that Venice had “innate inability to accept abstract forms embedded in its historic context,” but Kahn's refused to compromise his vision. 

Kahn does not discuss the particulars of his Venice proposal, nor does he show any slides of it. Instead Kahn focuses on the importance of looking beyond the current reality and looking at the fundamental issues of a building project. At its heart, architecture is a dream… it changes the way people use a site, it inspires structural and technological innovations not yet realized. His design is a meditation on the evolution of a city, it’s a resolution to the paradox of building on water that involves public agencies that didn't exist, it’s a provocation and an uncompromising solitary vision for a new reality. 

"In a recent visit to Venice. I, knowing nothing about the conditions but just realizing that what is happening to it, in a disregard for the considerations that were made a long time ago about what can make Venice a bearing city in the middle of a body a water a lagoon which is this big compared to Venice which is that big. And it’s so related to the Adriatic that allows the shallow body of water which is a lagoon to be replenished as the tide flows in and out and wash away all that renews the water around Venice and keeps a kind of balance of all the foundations and the flat areas on which you walk. With the coming of industry land was needed near the lagoon. Channels were dug for large ships to come in causing more water to come in from the Adriatic, destroying the balance of this very low amount of water that came in and out. Venice breathes… the water is a kind of breathing system you see. Which made that Venice always eventful for whatever the time of day it was part. It was a kind of water architecture.It was in which the order of water was considered seriously. As should be the order of winds, the order of sun, the order of structure, the order of construction, the order of time, and the order of spaces, and the order of movement which are all the orders that must be considered when you’re building a town for instance.

You’re not designing. Designing is already knowing everything and what you’re doing when you’re designing is you’re simply sharpening up making eloquent the elements that must be considered.

Design is the last operation. And the one that can be assigned in many many avenues. Design isn’t something… it is especially of one man really. There it isn’t. but the realizations of the inseparable parts is the design of one. That which conceives the indestructible elements that must be there as against some other place where there are other elements. That is something which is the strongest part of a conception.

This can be known as composition as it is in music. You know, a musician when he reads a sheet of music, he doesn’t read all the little details. He reads the music as fast I would turn the page practically and he sort of realizes what it is all about by simply realizing the composition. And not the design aspects of it, which are the  infighting that goes in it to make this composition glorious, readable, and all that. Oh It’s a wonderful process. He wouldn’t hand it off to anybody else in the way but when people speak of having great teams on things. They can be designed in teams but provided you see there is some mind that never deviates from the inseparable parts which can be known the form of this building the form which means if you take one thing away nothing is there. Not just take it away and you have it still… you don’t. That could be part. That is a kind of order, an order of spaces which makes it so..

With all these problems in venice. The factories which are smoke belching and also all the waste that throws into the lagoon is causing a great imbalance of a lot of things just so many things you just think. If you just think of the most aggravated ecological problem, that’s it. You see… fish, fauna… everything and flora the water everything you can possibly imagine you see is disturbed by this there.

And you feel helpless. But you know as a newcomer. Humph. You don’t have the great responsibility, you’re not mayor of Venice. All of these things would tighten you up if you were mayor. you gotta talk to so many babies… and stuff so you have to you just sit back. And then just sit back and we just sort of sense that there be order, there must be an order to this, see and then you can see an order. It’s clear. You just build another Venice which is a factory. and it sits on an elevated platform with many sieves through the platform which allows the lagoon to replenish itself and not to allow land to be made without having things underneath the land you see. Let the water flow.

So you build yourself land which is just not land, that’s all. You can’t use the land there. The lagoon must have all the stretch it can so as not to make the tide rise too high on them. You lift it up and you set up an ecological government and you make this estate 3 times as big as it now. There should be no complaint to empowering the industrious. you leave them enough land to spread out. And then you set up a government, an ecological government in which every element you see is answerable to the ecological needs of Venice.

Because the land belongs to venice, so you set up an ecological government you see in this estate and you invent instruments which are called smoke eaters out of like which I have no idea what they would be but you turn to engineers to figure it out…  but the point is the you make this statement because you have to make the statement and you must not think of technology if it’s ready or not. You must think in terms of an inspired technology. You don’t have to limit yourself and not consider that you have to wait for technology to be on the scene. If you’re not the dictator in this technology what kind of an architect is that? and what kind of work is it that doesn’t inspire a technology?

So therefore you need to say something outlandish and let the engineers who have that kind of mind scurry around for the answers. There’s going to be the impossible. what is not made yet is important because we actually live our life with greater acuity when we don’t think of needs. It’s disgraceful not to give needs it’s your birth right to have needs. don’t think you’re doing anything if you’re supplying needs. but if you touch the avenues of your desire that which is contained the yet not made and yet not said then you’re talking like an artist and that’s the role of man.

And so the engineer has to be yours too. He doesn’t know it, but he has to be really nice he’s a textbook ringer. you know he brings the textbook for things and and the reason for it is quite simple because he’s a servant of people who designs buildings. I’m talking about structural engineers now because he works for many people. an engineer can work easily for 50 architects and every whim of the architects he tries to satisfy. therefore he is just a servant of the object. once in a while you get a peep out of him. But in most cases you see most cases he’ll say “look I don’t think you ought to do this in concrete because it’s much cheaper to do this building in brick.” Now he’s talking about another architect where he learned this thing you see but it doesn’t apply to your building which can’t tolerate it. You wonder what’s wrong with his mind? it’s only because his mind is completely razzled dazzled by the number of servants he must feed to satisfy all these people who must be satisfied.

so I suggested this and it seemed as though to say venice is terribly important I said “all the industry in the world isn’t worth one giotto.” I said “Why don’t you consider this is as not being a difficult money problem. If you would have the problems of venice any other way it would cost a lot more. you see what was considered an industry would like to be there. only the best play the game properly. when I heard also the only industry that is in venice actually belongs to milan because they don’t have land enough to go to venice you see and they don’t to spoil their own city so they spoil venice. So this power is very helpful because you know when you see the issue there you just love the death out of it.

That is one thing when considering building in Venice. they are thinking of doing and but designs constantly comes a stopping point because the buildings there  extremely charming and they’re very delicate, they’re lace like they’re unbelievable they’re just plain sheer exuberance all the buildings. Joy of living everything is there.

Now when you start to do your own scribbling and say it must be sympathetic to this you find that you‘ve go to be someone other than yourself. And I suggested in one portion of venice they build buildings on bridges none of them on the water, mind you. On the land, so the foundations are constant and the building are above and then you pick one area particularly where the bridges sort of group themselves in such a way that you get another piazza san marco probably somewhat larger but it could be a singleness from which you can see all around you as you can san marco. other places around venice you lose your way and that’s beautiful.

They never really would execute my design in venice… and I somehow wasn’t worried about it since you can’t trust this delicate lacy work to everybody. something has to happen in the establishment of a new order in venice which is not applicable in other places but is applicable there.

Now i’m sure it’s a dangerous thing that I suggested. it is my kind of way of stirring things up, but I think when I presented it, I didn’t feel accused in any way that I was playing truant or I was really doing venice wrong.

I hope nobody does it mind you but at least you shake venice into realizing something can be done. and so it was with the canals because the canals are not like Canalletto you see who visualized them full of festivity but why can’t you have boats which are restaurants? why can’t they be fantastic? you’re not going to Europe with those boats. you can make the canals live again just by new encouragements. it’s a wonderful place those things can happen. it’s very festive. now all these ideas you can put in the waste basket if you like. the point is that you’re stimulated by the problem and you’re thinking of it in terms of a new order but not a new design. something which can somehow be true to the water inspired architecture of Venice."  

No Trespassing - Salk Institute

From my perch I looked down. The game was over. I had loitered excitedly around the site for an hour, marveling how Louis Kahn organized his open plan flexible labs, brought natural daylight down to the lowest floors, and angled private offices clad in teak to overlook the plaza and ocean in raw concrete frame structures. 

I was on the top floor of the complex looking down at the iconic plaza. Despite the seriousness of my infraction, it was a funny site to behold. I could spot the 2 guards coming after me from afar. I remembered during the design process, Kahn thought of planting trees between his two rows of laboratories, but he followed Luis Barragán’s advice who told him, “I would put not a single tree in this area. I would make a plaza. If you make a plaza, you will have another facade to the sky.” As a result of this treeless plaza design, I could see the Salk security officers in their dorky bright turquoise T-shirt and khaki pant uniforms coming after me against the spare white bright travertine plaza.

Barragan's sketch sent to friend Louis Kahn

When I arrived on site earlier in the morning, I was surprised and disappointed to find “No Trespassing” signs posted at the entry gates. Perhaps, the Salk Institute is tired of architects like me roaming the grounds, or activist vegetarians protesting the animal laboratories on site… but something pulled me into the site. Maybe it was the sight of an injured talking ground squirrel limping away. Perhaps it was the symmetrical serrated arrangement of concrete building frames with a channel of water flowing in the travertine plaza towards the horizon. The experience of the space felt like a procession… towards the point where the ocean meets the sky. The Mayans have their jungle temples, and the Romans have their Colosseums, but the Americans have their modern temples in the form of Louis Kahn’s laboratory buildings. The guards felt sorry for me and told me to vacate the premises.

When Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine was gifted 27 acres of land by San Diego overlooking the Pacific Ocean, he partnered with fellow Russian Jew émigré, Louis Kahn to create an environment where researchers collaborate and explore scientific principles. Salk wanted to “create a facility worthy of a visit by Picasso.”

In my forbidden visit to the Salk Institute, I saw ancient lessons of Rome embedded within the geometry and form of the concrete walls. Kahn had gone to Rome mid-career and came back re-energized, inspired, and focused. For the past couple weeks, I’ve been (working harder than when I had a job) obsessively drawing, re-drawing, poring through models and research papers to figure out the Colosseum to deduce the essence of Roman architecture to explain Rome’s architecture influence on Kahn.

Imperfect perfection - Lou Kahn Yale University Art Gallery

Architect Thom Mayne said "when you've started a firm, you know you've hit the bigtime when a building you've designed has an elevator." Lou Kahn, he finally made it big when he designed the Yale University Art Gallery. When it opened in 1953, Kahn was 52 years old. It was his first significant commission and is considered his first masterpiece. The building was also the first modernist structure at Yale, and included open spaces for art exhibits, studio spaces for use by art and architecture students. 

In plan, the Yale Art Gallery has a central core that is flanked by 2 open spaces, each 40'x80' long. Within the central core, the fire stairs, elevators, mechanical shafts, and toilets are gathered in a central zone away from the perimeter. The diagrammatic clarity of the plan is reinforced spatially by the building structure. The core acts like a trunk of a tree carrying services vertically. The ducts and electrical raceways are threaded through the distinctive concrete tetrahedral ceiling that branch east and west. There is a distinction between the 'servant' and 'served' spaces - a spatial hierarchy. The narrower towards the eastern portion of the building is the link between the old academic buildings and the new building. 

Each material in the building serves a role. Reinforced concrete forms the structural frame, columns, girders, structural slab, and the hollow cylindrical column of the main stair. It is the least refined. today, you can see the narrow boards of the wood formwork which are visible on the surface of the concrete.

Steel and glass curtain wall clads the north side of the building. Face brick on the east is mounted to 4"x6" concrete block which is exposed on the interior. Within the central core, a cylindrical concrete stair announces its importance since its geometry contrasts with the rectangular and triangular forms of the building. terrazzo is used a a floor finish at the entrance and in the core. Each material decision in the Art Gallery follows a systematic way of thinking. there is a logic behind each decision. 

Despite the clarity in thought, i would later learn the building and architect were far from perfect. when i was at polshek, i worked with a couple architects in charge of the renovation of the Yale Art Gallery. The glass curtain wall was mounted between the concrete floor slabs without consideration of steel mullion thermal expansion movement. Over time, the material expansion put pressure on glass cracking the insulative seals thereby allowing condensation to build up over time. Polshek replaced the steel frame of the window wall with an aluminum one that is thermally broken by a synthetic material, so that the fluctuations in external temperature that previously resulted in condensation and corrosion have been minimized. New expansion joints installed throughout the building relieve the pressure that previously caused floor slabs to crack and glazing seals to fail.

In my last year, i saw a screening of a movie by Kahn's son, Nathaniel called My Architect at the British Arts Center. In the movie, Nathaniel, showed how unstable, secretive, chaotic, Kahn's personal life was. Kahn led a nomadic existence, always traveling in search of the next commission or to oversee work on far-off projects. To the outside world, he was happily married to Esther Israeli and raising a daughter, Sue Ann. When the architect died in 1974 of a heart attack, alone and destitute in the men's room at New York's Pennsylvania Station, he left behind three separate families who lived within miles of each other but never crossed paths until his funeral. Kahn hardly seemed the womanizing sort, but outside his marriage, he had long-term relationships with two other women who bore children by him. One was Anne Tyng, a talented architect who worked in Kahn's office for 10 years, on projects such as the Salk Institute. She had his daughter Alexandra. The other was Nathaniel's mother, who worked in Kahn's office on the Kimbell Art Museum, among other projects.

Tyng graduated from Radcliffe College in 1942, and was among the first women admitted to the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she studied architecture under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. Her classmates included Lawrence Halprin, Philip Johnson, Eileen Pei, I.M. Pei, and William Wurster. When 25-year-old Anne Tyng went to work for Philadelphia architect Louis I. Kahn in 1945, Kahn was a married man 19 years her senior. In 1954, Tyng gave birth to Alexandra Tyng, Kahn's daughter. 

In his midlife tour to Europe for the Rome Prize residency, Kahn corresponded with Tyng about the epiphanies he saw in the ancient ruins of Greece, Rome and the Pyramids -- that the best buildings are those that combined bold geometries with the monumentality and mystery of ancient ruins with the expressive use of materials and natural light. Tyng was instrumental in helping Kahn refine the geometry of his projects. At the Yale Art Gallery, she is credited with the geometric order of tetrahedral ceiling. Of their relationship, Tyng said, "I believe our creative work together deepened our relationship and the relationship enlarged our creativity. In our years of working together toward a goal outside ourselves, believing profoundly in each other‘s abilities helped us to believe in ourselves." 

Like the British Arts Center blog entry, all of Kahn's Yale Art Gallery building drawings are provided later in this post.