GA [GLOBAL ARCHITECTURE] 76: LOUIS I. KAHN
Margaret Esherick House, Chestnut Hill, PA 1959–61
Norman Fisher House, Hatboro, PA 1960–67
Peter S. Reed [text],
Yukio Futagawa [Editor and Photographer]
Peter S. Reed [text] Yukio Futagawa [Editor and Photographer]: GA [GLOBAL ARCHITECTURE] 76: LOUIS I. KAHN [Margaret Esherick House, Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania 1959–61 / Norman Fisher House, Hatboro, Pennsylvania 1960–67]. Tokyo: A. D. A . Edita, 1996. First edition. Parallel text in English and Japanese. Folio. Photo illustrated French folded wrappers. 48 pp. Fully illustrated with color and black and white plates, shot specifically for GA by Yukio Futagawa. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. A fines copy.
10.25 x 14.25 perfect-bound softcover magazine with 48 pages of full-page color and black and white plates, shot specifically for GA by Yukio Futagawa.
Isamu Noguchi called Kahn "a philosopher among architects."
The Esherick House in Philadelphia, is one of the most studied of the nine built houses designed by American architect Louis Kahn. Commissioned by Margaret Esherick, it was completed in 1961. The house is noted especially for its spatial organization and for the ventilation and natural lighting provided by its unusual window and shutter configuration. A sunken bathtub doubled as a seat. A kitchen of wood and copper was created for the house by Wharton Esherick, a nationally known craftsman and artist. Kahn had several connections with the Esherick family. Besides designing this house for Margaret Esherick, he was a close friend of Wharton Esherick, Margaret's uncle, for whom he designed a studio that is now part of a National Historic Landmark. Joseph Esherick, Margaret's brother, was a leader of the architectural firm that completed Kahn's schematic design for the Graduate Theological Union Library, now known as the Flora Lamson Hewlett Library, at the University of California, Berkeley, after Kahn's death. Kahn also had connections to other notable architecture nearby. A few doors from the Esherick house is the Vanna Venturi House, one of the first prominent works of postmodern architecture, which was designed by Robert Venturi for his mother. Kahn served as a critic on Venturi's thesis, made him a teaching assistant at the University of Pennsylvania, where Kahn was a professor, and employed him in his architectural practice before Venturi began working independently.
The Fisher House, also known as the Norman Fisher House, was designed by the architect Louis Kahn and built for Dr. Norman Fisher and his wife, Doris, a landscape designer, in 1967 in Hatboro, Pennsylvania. Characterized by its dual cubic volumes, stone foundation and detailed cypress cladding, the Fisher house stands as a clear statement of how Kahn was working at the time, and how his work differed from that of his contemporaries. In the Fisher House, Kahn eschews the linearity of the modern plan and focuses on a simple geometry, allowing the cubes to provide a separation of public and private space. Known widely for monumental works like the Salk Institute and the Richards Medical Center, the Fisher house stands as a testament to Kahn’s ability to work with the details of small residential architecture. The Fisher House stands as the clearest example of Kahn's unique architectural style at the time, his use of the two almost perfect cubes differing greatly from much of what was being done at the time and setting him apart in his own field of design.
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.”