LOUIS I. KAHN
An Inscribed Copy
Robert McCarter
Robert McCarter: LOUIS I. KAHN. London and New York: Phaidon, 2005. First edition. Quarto. Embossed paper covered boards titled in purple. Printed dust jacket. 512 pp. 150 color and 250 black and white illustrations and drawings. WARMLY INSCRIBED by author to Kimbell Art Museum Curator of Architecture Doctor Patricia Cummings Loud. A virtually as new copy in dust jacket.
From the Library of the Kimbell Art Museum Curator of Architecture Doctor Patricia Cummings Loud.
8.75 x 10 hardcover book journal with 512 pages that include photographs, archive materials and drawings published for the first time, and a comprehensive list of 231 projects, at least 30 of which have not previously been attributed to Kahn.
Doctor Patricia Cummings Loud (Beaumont, TX 1930 – 2021) served as Curator of Architecture at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas from 1981 until her retirement. As Curator and Archivist, Doctor Loud presented the public face of the Kimbell to the Architectural pilgrims who trekked from around the globe to Fort Worth to experience the magic of Louis Kahn’s temple of light.
She wrote “One visitor recently told me that she had merely stopped by to “bathe” in Louis Kahn’s luminous spaces; she would come back another time to see the special exhibition currently on view. She seemed to be saying that the building’s environment was enough for a spiritual lift even when there was not enough time to look thoughtfully at art. The art of architecture was fulfilling its role.”
Doctor Loud received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University Texas, Austin, in 1951; Master of Arts, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1954; Master of Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1954; and her Doctorate of Philosophy in Fine Arts, again from Harvard University, 1990.
During her teaching career, she served as a Ford fellow in Art History, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, 1956—1960; a Senior Resident Cabot Hall Radcliffe College, 1964—1968; a Lecturer University of Connecticut, Groton, Connecticut, 1971—1972; and an Instructor at Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, 1972—1976. She then moved into Arts administration as the Executive Assistant at the Van Cliburn Foundation, 1980—1981.
She was an honorary Member of the American Institute of Architects, and a Member of the Dallas Architect Association, the Society Architect Historians, the College Art Association, and the 1998 recipient of the honorary John G. Flowers award from the Texas Society Architects.
“The museum does provide what many find to be a profound, if unusual, architectural experience as a setting for a small, remarkable collection of fine art. It has become a pilgrimage destination for people from throughout the world. What these visitors seek may differ for individuals, but from what I have heard many say, it appears they find rewards within what Louis Kahn would call “a great treasury.” He said in a discussion shortly before the Kimbell Art Museum opened that “A museum seems like a secondary thing, unless it is a great treasury. A treasury, a guarded love of your source.”
Louis Isadore Kahn (born Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky) (1901 – 1974) was born into a poor Jewish Estonian family and achieved much fame and noriety as an American architect and major-league player based in Philadelphia. After working in various capacities for several firms in Philadelphia, he founded his own atelier in 1935. While continuing his private practice, he served as a design critic and professor of architecture at Yale School of Architecture from 1947 to 1957.
From 1957 until his death, he was a professor of architecture at the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Kahn created a style that was monumental and monolithic; his heavy buildings for the most part do not hide their weight, their materials, or the way they are assembled. Louis Kahn's works are considered as monumental beyond modernism. Famous for his meticulously built works, his provocative proposals that remained unbuilt, and his teaching, Kahn was one of the most influential architects of the twentieth century. He was awarded the AIA Gold Medal and the RIBA Gold Medal. At the time of his death he was considered by some as "America's foremost living architect."
Kahn trained at the University of Pennsylvania in a rigorous Beaux-Arts tradition, with its emphasis on drawing. After completing his Bachelor of Architecture in 1924, Kahn worked as senior draftsman in the office of the city architect, John Molitor. He worked on the designs for the 1926 Sesquicentennial Exposition. In 1928, Kahn made a European tour. He was interested particularly in the medieval walled city of Carcassonne, France, and the castles of Scotland, rather than any of the strongholds of classicism or modernism. After returning to the United States in 1929, Kahn worked in the offices of Paul Philippe Cret, his former studio critic at the University of Pennsylvania, and then with Zantzinger, Borie and Medary in Philadelphia.
In 1932, Kahn and Dominique Berninger founded the Architectural Research Group, whose members were interested in the populist social agenda and new aesthetics of the European avant-gardes. Among the projects Kahn worked on during this collaboration are schemes for public housing that he had presented to the Public Works Administration, which supported some similar projects during the Great Depression. They remained unbuilt.
Among the more important of Kahn's early collaborations was one with George Howe. Kahn worked with Howe in the late 1930s on projects for the Philadelphia Housing Authority and again in 1940, along with German-born architect Oscar Stonorov, for the design of housing developments in other parts of Pennsylvania. A formal architectural office partnership between Kahn and Oscar Stonorov began in February 1942 and ended in March 1947, which produced fifty-four documented projects and buildings.
Kahn did not arrive at his distinctive architectural style until he was in his fifties. Initially working in a fairly orthodox version of the International Style, he was influenced vitally by a stay as Architect in Residence at the American Academy in Rome during 1950, which marked a turning point in his career. After visiting the ruins of ancient buildings in Italy, Greece, and Egypt, he adopted a back-to-the-basics approach. He developed his own style as influenced by earlier modern movements, but not limited by their sometimes-dogmatic ideologies.
Kahn's teaching career began at Yale University in 1947. He eventually was named as the Albert F. Bemis Professor of Architecture and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956. Kahn then returned to Philadelphia to teach at the University of Pennsylvania from 1957 until his death, becoming the Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture. He also was a visiting lecturer at Princeton University from 1961 to 1967.
Kahn was elected a Fellow in the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1953. He was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1964. He was awarded the Frank P. Brown Medal in 1964. In 1965 he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician. He was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1968 and awarded the AIA Gold Medal, the highest award given by the AIA, in 1971, and the Royal Gold Medal by the RIBA, in 1972.
In 1974, Kahn died of a heart attack in a men's restroom at Penn Station in Manhattan. He had just returned from a work trip to India. Owing to police miscommunications in both New York City and Philadelphia, his wife and his office were not notified until two days after his death. After his long career, he was in debt when he died.
Kahn had three children with three women. With his wife, Esther, whom he married in 1930, he had a daughter, Sue Ann. With Anne Tyng, who began her working collaboration and personal relationship with Kahn in 1945, he also had a daughter, Alexandra Tyng. When Tyng became pregnant in 1953, to mitigate the scandal, she went to Rome, Italy, for the birth of their daughter. With Harriet Pattison, he had a son, Nathaniel Kahn.
Kahn's obituary in the New York Times, written by Paul Goldberger, mentions only Esther and his daughter by her as survivors. All of his children and their mothers attended the funeral. In 2003 Nathaniel Kahn released a documentary about his father, entitled, My Architect: A Son's Journey. The Oscar-nominated film provides views and insights into the architecture of Kahn while exploring him personally through people who knew him: family, friends, and colleagues. It also provides insights into Kahn's unusual and complicated family arrangements.
Louis Kahn's work infused the International style with a fastidious, highly personal taste, a poetry of light. His few projects reflect his deep personal involvement with each. Isamu Noguchi called him "a philosopher among architects." He was known for his ability to create monumental architecture that responded to the human scale. He also was concerned with creating strong formal distinctions between served spaces and servant spaces. What he meant by servant spaces was not spaces for servants, but rather spaces that serve other spaces, such as stairwells, corridors, restrooms, or any other back-of-house function such as storage space or mechanical rooms. His palette of materials tended toward heavily textured brick and bare concrete, the textures often reinforced by juxtaposition to highly refined surfaces such as travertine marble. He is often well remembered for his deliberation about the use of brick, on how it can be more than the basic building material:
“If you think of Brick, you say to Brick, ‘What do you want, Brick?’ And Brick says to you, ‘I like an Arch.’ And if you say to Brick, ‘Look, arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete lintel over you. What do you think of that, Brick?’ Brick says, ‘I like an Arch.’ And it’s important, you see, that you honor the material that you use. [..] You can only do it if you honor the brick and glorify the brick instead of shortchanging it.”