LOUIS KAHN AT VITRA DESIGN MUSEUM
The Power of Architecture
February 23, 2013 – August 11, 2013
LOUIS KAHN: THE POWER OF ARCHITECTURE AT
VITRA DESIGN MUSEUM
February 23, 2013 – August 11, 2013
The American architect Louis Kahn (1901-1974) is regarded as
one of the great master builders of the twentieth century. With complex
spatial compositions and a choreographic mastery of light, Kahn created
buildings of archaic beauty and powerful universal symbolism. Among his most
important works are the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California (1959-65), the
Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (1966-72), and the National Assembly
Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh (1962-83). The exhibition ‘Louis Kahn — The
Power of Architecture’, presented by the Vitra Design Museum, is the first
major retrospective of Kahn’s work in two decades.
The exhibition encompasses an unprecedented and diverse
range of architectural models, original drawings, photographs and films. All of
Kahn’s important projects are extensively documented — from his early urban
planning concepts and single-family houses to monumental late works such as the
Roosevelt Memorial in New York City (1973/74), posthumously completed in
October 2012. The view of Kahn’s architectural oeuvre is augmented by a
selection of watercolours, pastels and charcoal drawings created during his
travels, which document his skill as an artist and illustrator. Highlights of
the exhibition include a four-meter-high model of the spectacular City Tower
designed for Philadelphia (1952-57), as well as previously unpublished film
footage shot by Nathanial Kahn, the son of Louis Kahn and director of the film
‘My Architect’. Interviews with architects such as Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano,
Peter Zumthor and Sou Fujimoto underscore the current significance of Kahn’s
work, which is being rediscovered and made accessible to a wide public audience
with this exhibition.
The exhibition begins with an extensive biographical section
that employs films, personal documents and drawings to introduce visitors to
Kahn’s life and work. Growing up in Philadelphia as the son of Jewish
immigrants from Estonia, Kahn discovered his interest in art at an early age
and subsequently studied in his home city at one of the nation’s best
architectural schools. During the late 1920s, the young Kahn embarked on his
first Grand Tour, travelling through the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and
Greece. He returned to Europe in 1950 as Architect in Residence at the American
Academy in Rome and also visited Egypt. While Kahn soon established a
revered reputation as a lecturer and professor at Yale University and the
University of Pennsylvania, he did not experience his international
breakthrough as an architect until he was almost 60 years old. His early work
in the 1940s and ’50s was mainly devoted to residential building and urban
planning, but from 1960 onward he became primarily known for his institutional
structures: museums, laboratories, sacred edifices, a university and a national
assembly building. First revealed publicly in the film ‘My Architect’, Kahn’s
complex private life included several separate families: in addition to his
early marriage with his lifelong wife Esther, he maintained long-term
relationships with the architect Anne Tyng and the landscape architect Har-riet
Pattison, both of whom had a significant influence on his work.
The biographical introduction to the exhibition is followed
by six thematic areas that illustrate the development of Kahn’s work over time.
The leitmotif of this progression is found in Kahn’s quest for origins: in
architecture and art, but also in the natural sciences — and even in the
observation of human behaviour and society.
The first section of the exhibition, entitled City, is closely connected with Kahn’s
biography in its ex-amination of the architect’s relationship to Philadelphia,
which he came to regard as his home after immigrating to the US, and which
became a kind of laboratory for the development of his own urban-istic and
architectural principles. In the 1940s, Kahn became a pioneering figure of the
urban renewal movement in America, planning neighbourhood redevelopment
projects with a high degree of social engagement and pragmatism. In the 1950s
and ’60s, he publicly advocated increasingly radical and visionary proposals
for the reconstruction of Philadelphia’s city centre. These ranged from ideas
for a fundamentally new organisation of urban traffic, to a conception of the
central district as an expansive pedestrian zone surrounded by gigantic
parking towers, to plans for a projected 1976 world exhibition in Philadelphia.
The second exhibition category, Science, demonstrates how Kahn studied
the structural laws inherent in nature as a means of establishing a foundation
for the renewal of architecture. Commencing in the 1950s, this work was related
to his teaching activities at Yale and in Philadelphia. Inspired by Anne Tyng,
who worked in his office during this period, as well as the French-born
engineer Robert Le Rico-lais, Kahn created a new architectural vocabulary with
geometric structures that corresponded to the forms identified in
microbiological research as the building blocks of life. In connection with
these efforts, he maintained a close association with Richard Buckminster
Fuller, who also taught at Yale. The breakthrough of Kahn’s structural thinking
was marked by the completion of the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven (1951-53) and the Richards Medical
Laboratories in Philadelphia (1957-65), for which Kahn developed completely
novel methods of concrete construction in collaboration with the engineer
August E. Komendant, a fellow immigrant from Estonia. With the daring project
of a 180 meter high office tower for the city administration of Philadelphia
(1952-57), Kahn’s ‘structuralist’s approach reached its zenith. Conceived as a
space frame structure, the City Tower anticipated the architecture of
metabolism by years, proposing forms for high-rise structures that were first
proven viable half a century later.
In the third section, Landscape,
it becomes clear that nature was not only a source of inspiration for Kahn, but
that it became increasingly important as a context for his buildings. This is
evident in the planning of gardens as an extension of the architecture,
exemplified in the Kimbell Art Museum (1966-72), a collaboration with Harriet
Pattison, as well as the Adele Levy Memorial Playground in New York (1961-66,
unbuilt), designed together with Isamu Noguchi as a playscape with a
sculpturally shaped ground surface. Of similar importance to Kahn were the
utilisation of traditional and regional building techniques and the achievement
of passive climate control in buildings by taking local environmental
conditions into account, such as the position of the sun and wind patterns.
These concerns were dramatically heightened and stylised through a
sophisticated choreography of incident daylight.
Kahn’s desire to create a stronger connection between
architecture and the surrounding environment also formed the basis of his
residential designs: he regarded the House as an archetype and starting
point for his understanding of architecture and community. While Kahn initially
explored the ideas of functionalism — as seen in the modular prefabricated
Parasol House (1944, unbuilt) his residential designs from the mid-1940s
onward were increasingly inspired by regional sources, such as the buildings of
early American settlers or Shaker furniture. At the same time, Kahn recognised
a close correspondence between the organisation of a city and that of a house,
correlating the bedroom with a city’s residential districts, the kitchen with
industrial areas and the corridors with streets. Striking characteristics of
Kahn’s detached houses, such as the Esherick House (1959-62), the Fisher House
(1960-67) or the Korman House (1971-73), are the directional distribution of
light, the rhythmic disposition of the façade and the refined combination of
natural stone, wood and glass, which required extremely precise craftsmanship.
Kahn’s increasing success as an architect was accompanied by
the evolution of an architecture that was closely linked to the timeless
foundations of traditional building, yet radically innovative and future-oriented in terms of technology and construction. The
underlying ideal of an Eternal
Present resulted from
Kahn’s intense engagement with architectural history and archetypical
structures, some-thing that is vividly documented in his travel drawings from
Italy, Greece and Egypt. Kahn’s fascination with ruins was a focal motif; free
of stucco and ornamentation, architectural ruins reveal their true structure
and eventually recede back into the landscape as they deteriorate. This motif
is reflected in the austerity and elemental materiality of projects like the
Hurva Synagogue in Jerusalem (1967-74, unbuilt). In Kahn’s designs for
monuments and memorials, his interest in aspects of monumental architecture is
also clearly evident; examples include the unbuilt Memorial to the Six Million
Jewish Martyrs (New York, 1966-72), or the massive granite block memorial to
American President Franklin D. Roosevelt (designed 1973-74) on the tip of
Roosevelt Island in New York’s East River, which was posthumously completed in
October 2012.
The conclusion and climax of the exhibition is represented
by the section community, which
demonstrates how essential the social significance of architecture was to
Kahn, and how he derived new forms for public buildings from it. Kahn is
probably the only architect ever to have designed a church (First Unitarian
Church, Rochester NY, 1959-62) as well as several synagogues and a Muslim
prayer room. They bear witness to the fact that Kahn’s spatial concepts were
always physical manifestations of his social and political ideas, above and
beyond their designated functions. This is especially evident in the Indian
Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (1962-74), and in the National Assembly
Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh (1962-86), which can be viewed as the epitome of
Kahn’s architectural work. Erected with the help of hundreds of local labourers
under the restricted conditions of regional construction methods, these
structures became architectural icons of the two young nations for which they
were built within a very short period of time. Their public and semi-public
spaces not only facilitate a maximum amount of interaction and communication
between people, but also provide a stage for the daily lives of their visitors.
Merging regional building traditions with a modern architectural idiom, these
structures are quintessential examples of an architecture which transcends
national and cultural boundaries, and which reinvents the qualities that give
meaning to the art of building.
Taken as a whole, the seven sections of the exhibition reveal
a new view of Louis Kahn’s oeuvre that defies the common classifications of
modernism or postmodernism. Kahn’s uniqueness lies in his synthesis of the
major conceptual traditions of modern architecture from the École des
Beaux-Arts and the constructive rationalism of the nineteenth century to the
Arts and Crafts movement and Bauhaus modernism - enhanced by the consideration
of indigenous, non-western building traditions. Kahn gained important impulses
from architectural movements such as metabolism or brutalism. He anticipated aspects of building that are highly relevant today,
including a return to local resources and ‘soft’ factors such as air, light and
water. He saw himself as part of a tradition that spanned thousands of years
and that understood architecture not only as a means of satisfying utilitarian
needs, but as an instrument of artistic speculation and a means of
contemplating nature, history and human community.
Louis Kahn died on 17 March 1974 in New York’s Pennsylvania
Station, on his way home to Philadelphia after a trip to India.
The exhibition is a cooperation of the Vitra Design Museum,
the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia,
and the NAI part of The New Institute, Rotterdam. Vitra Design Museum thanks
global sponsor Swarovski for its generous support as part its cultural
programme, which makes an important contribution to the rediscovery of a
seminal architect.
