Building with Spent Light

By ROBERT HUGHES

Under the harsh Texas light, Louis Kahn's building is exactly what it seems:

a tour de force of explicitness. The subject of the building is twofold: art, and what makes art manifest--light.

Seen from outside, Kimbell Art Museum looks like a group of barrel vaults running horizontally across the flat terrain of Fort Worth. Five of the vaults are closed at the ends to form galleries, offices and storage space; their roofs, sheathed unexpectedly in lead, glisten like old pewter in the sun. The sixth is open, a portico opening generously toward the street (below, opposite). Inside the museum, this conversation of silvery tones resumes as the sun spills through a long slit in the roof where the halves of the vaults meet, and is diffused by a perforated deflector slung on yokes. The light washes the plain concrete surface of the cycloids, gently blending warmer reflections from a white oak floor. Curve answers to curve, vault to channel. There is no glare on the pictures. Yet as the sun moves, the light, and by implication the space, changes subtly, like reflections in a pond.

The museum is probably Louis Kahn's most publicized building. But it is a bench mark in an extraordinary career that has seen Kahn rise from obscurity to an almost unchallenged eminence in world architecture. Kahn did not put up a major building until he was 50, in 1951.

In the past 20 years he has brought forth a series of buildings that every intelligent architect must reckon with. Among the most recent are the Salk Institute at La Jolla, Calif. (1965), the lately opened Phillips Exeter Library, the Kimbell Museum and two unfinished complexes in Asia--the capitol for Dacca in Bangladesh and the Institute of Management at Ahmedabad, India.

Meanwhile, Kahn has been professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania for the past 15 years. As he puts it: "I think teaching is essential to me. I feel it is my chapel." Kahn's office, two loft floors on Walnut Street in Philadelphia, is more like the messy drawing studio of an architecture school than the luxurious corporate hives of other leading U.S. architects. Done in raw wood and plasterboard, it is defended by only one secretary. The 71-year-old Kahn can be found in a small room (stacked with battered tomes on architectural history), tossing his thatch of white hair and discoursing in a high, cryptic, unstoppable flow on the principles of his craft. There is probably no serious architecture student in the U.S.

who would not jump at the chance of working in Kahn's 20-man office, but he keeps his staff small. "During the times of thinking about a project and realizing its nature, I don't need so many people," he explains. "It can be harmful if you employ too many. What I look for is a man who really wants to develop himself, not serve me so much.

Many come who try to show me how I should think that day. That way always fails, because the next day isn't the way I thought the day before."

The tremendous enthusiasm that Kahn's teaching--no less than his buildings--evokes in other architects is partly explained by the decay of the socalled International Style. That system of curtain-wall, frame-and-fill architecture came to America from the Bauhaus, and has dominated the nation's cityscapes ever since. But the past decade has not been kind to the International Style. As the last "rational" abstract mode of building, it has been much attacked as unresponsive to human needs. The architect as master planner, exerting in his structures a pressure, both functional and ethical, on the messy, changing lives of their inhabitants, now seems to some critics an elitist figure, and obsolete as well. And certainly much of classical modern architecture as descended from Gropius and Mies van der Rohe was conceived in a spirit of lofty indifference to social patterns.

Behavior is not a liquid that sets like Jell-O into the mold of a building. Yet all building implies some ordering of life. Fine spaces do not "happen"; they are designed, either by consensus over a span of years (like the town plan of San Gimignano in Tuscany) or else by the authoritative work of one man. There is no consensus of the first kind in America: witness the slurping tide of chaotic architectural mutants that passes for an urban experience in any U.S. city. So we are left with the individual architect as form giver: the responsibilities remain.

Marble Foyers. It was not the fault of the Bauhaus that its formal lessons were so quickly vulgarized by American business. Most architecture is parody, and the International Style's problem, paradoxically enough, was not so much that it failed in the U.S. but that it hardly got a break. For every pure and major act of creation, like Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson's Seagram Building (1958), there have been a hundred ripoffs: bland, scaleless crates with their $50 per sq. ft. marble foyers and 100 Sheetrock offices, their eggbox planning, insipid detail and graceless proportions. The International Style expended itself in these shallows, not in its masterpieces. But what is the alternative? Not the culture of Vegas casinos and duck-shaped roadhouses beloved of Pop architectural theorists like Reyner Banham and Robert Venturi; trash may be language, but it remains trash. The desire for an architecture that is grand, exemplary, responsive and practical still exists. And general expectations of such an architecture have to a large extent converged on Kahn.

He is a fundamentalist: his enterprise has been to rethink the process and nature of architecture, not from Volume I of its history but from what he calls Volume Zero. "Volume Zero," he says, "is what precedes shape, it is the source." His reflections on the nature of building materials express themselves in apparently irreducible riddles, like Zenkoans (Q. "What does a brick like?" A. "An arch"), or bizarrely provocative but elliptical ruminations:

"You cannot really read, or admire, or be in a room unless natural light is there.

We are actually born out of light, you might say. I believe light is the maker of all material. Material is spent light."

They have a practical core, however.

"In architecture," Kahn says, "nature approves of what you do--by working."

Kahn's prolonged meditation on substance, even through the lean years of the Depression and World War II when he built almost nothing independently, had immense consequences for his later work. For even the most complex of his buildings, the intricate massing of volume and void at Dacca or the planning of the Salk Institute, are also a demonstration of the bare rudiments of architecture. "I learned about order, order itself. That the brick wanted to be brick and nothing else, the stone stone, the concrete concrete. I just learned it so thoroughly, the orders and the elements. And from there I learned that a stair isn't just something you get out of a catalogue but a very important event in a building. I never forgot such principles. From this I sensed the eternity qualities of architecture. In the beginning lies eternity. It can never come about without the feeling that it's absolutely right, that there is no precedent before."

Consequently Kahn's relationship to past building is very strong; and because of his liking for traditional materials, axial planning and muscular interplays of light and shadow, space and solid, grand and intimate, he is linked to the historical icebox raiding of the Beaux-Arts tradition. "Except," he adds, "that I don't know it as a tradition. I know it as an introduction to the spirit of architecture, which has very little to do with the realistic solving of problems." The problems are posed and solved by what Kahn calls "reprogramming," and a radical questioning of the use a building is to be put to. Such questioning can make Kahn's relations with a client prickly, but it also produces remarkable collaborations, like the one with Dr. Richard Brown, the director of the Kimbell Art Museum, who supervised and fought out every detail of Kahn's proposals during the six years they worked together on the building. "But he was always on my side," chortles Kahn. "He wanted me to win." In the Exeter Library, Kahn refused to countenance the idea of a reading hall and produced instead a series of zones of privacy tucked away "in the folds of construction. I like early Gothic libraries I've seen," he says. "There was a high aedicular quality to them; they were small places, intimate."

What the trained eye gathers in one of Kahn's buildings is no historical inventory; it is more like a dialogue between assumed equals past and present based on first principles. Kahn's use of brickwork, often stretched in warm massive curves, goes back to medieval Siena. The immense cylinders, arcs and courts at Dacca were inspired by the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. At times, Kahn's forms possess a superb and primal practicality. The Ahmedabad dormitories, for instance, with their stairs set in a thick vertical silo flanked on either side by dark openings, are both a celebration of the sun and a defense against it. Structure is to architectural history as history is to instinct. The unique power of Kahn's work is to excite one's participation on all levels; he is a poet of fact, not of style. "Creative inspiration," as Kahn sums it up, "comes directly from the necessity of wanting to know how you were made. I think all of knowledge has only to deal with how we were made. You discover your own structure by making other structures."

sbRobert Hughes

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