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Identity Architecture, Louise Kahn

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DOI: 10.7763/IPEDR. 2012. V51. 14

Identity Architecture, Louise Kahn

Ali.Namazian1 and Armin.Mehdipour1+

1
Architecture and urban planning, Shahid Beheshti University, Iran

Abstract. This is a brief survey of the life and works of Louis Kahn (1901-1974), who died the say way in
which he was born: without identity. Only several days after his death was it discovered that it was, in fact,
Louis I. Kahn, one of the dominant and probably the last humanist architect of the twentieth century. Louis
Kahn was one of the leading architects of modern times. However, he was also considered, by social theorists
to be an inspired planner. To all who had allowed themselves to fall under the spell of Kahn’s intense,
articulate personality he was clearly a man possessed by a single, compelling truth that nothing can live
unless it acknowledges a simple logical system of organization and a principle of what Kahn called “order”.
Keywords: Architecture, Humanities, Identity, Louise Kahn.

1. Introduction
Kahn was an architect with respectable personality, remarkable architectural talent in design, creativity,
humanity and a philosophy of his own. Kahn, who was considered the son of the Beaux Arts tradition,
created many masterpieces, both in this country and abroad. Each one of Kahn’s designs has its own
personality arid character. Architecture for Kahn was not a necessity for survival but a choice for an
understanding, a desire for an order between events and elements. This order was not quantitative, absolute,
and fixed, but relative, active, and infinite.
Kahn spent some years teaching architecture as a professor of architecture at Yale and later at the
University of Pennsylvania. His architectural credibility and conspicuousness was not recognized until the
late 1950’s, when, in his fifties, he had become one of the leading architects of this country and a great
ambassador to the rest of the world. Lie erected buildings with order and light, in balance and harmony with
the culture, customs, and way of life of any country in which he built. Just as one would not ask an artist to
paint a portrait specifying two eyes, one nose, and only one mouth, in the same way an architect must be
allowed to make decisions to deal with the spaces of a building, spaces which he will order and inspire. This
is the philosophy of Louis Kahn, one of the dominant architects of the mid-twentieth century.
Perhaps because of his humanistic philosophy in architecture, his works were not understood and
appreciated by the public till the late 1950’s. Even after he became an international figure in architecture, his
clients tended to be academic institutions which were perhaps more willing to experiment and were also
understanding of his design approach. He might be considered one of the last humanist architects in this
century.

2. Louise Kahn; Initiator of Humanities in Architecture

Kahn was born on the Estonian island of 0sel in the Baltic in 1901, his family emigrating to the United
States when Louis was four years old [1]. He lived in Philadelphia most of his life. His father had been a
sergeant in the Russian Imperial Army and a stained glass craftsman. In Philadelphia, however, he barely
made a living operating a small candy store. Later his friends were to claim that Kahn was a late bloomer,
giving few indications in his early years of the architectural genius he was to become. In his teens, Kahn
became famous at the Philadelphia Industrial Art School for his superior drawings of animals at the
Philadelphia Zoo. He even earned money by drawing animals for the other students.
At Central High school in Philadelphia in 1916, he barely passed his courses, but he went on to art
school and won two big city-wide drawing contests held yearly by a local department store. During his
senior year, he took a course in architecture of which he said, “it was as if I had been hit by a rocket between

+ Corresponding author. Tel.: + 86-1302219834.

E-mail address: armin_mehdipour@yahoo.com.
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the eye and the eyeball. Up to this point he had never been much of a student, but he now became a different
type of person. He read, he studied, and he became enthralled with architecture. Architecture became part of
his life. Next to his yearbook picture dated June l920, young Louis had written, “hobby--sketching,
future--architecture” [2].
After graduating from high school, he turned down an art scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of
Fine Arts to attend the architecture school at the University of Pennsylvania. Kahn, who did not read music,
earned the three hundred dollars-a-year tuition by playing the piano and the organ at silent-movie houses. He
was good, and probably could have been a concert musician. When he was offered a gift of a baby grand
piano, he took it, and since his room was not large enough for both a bed and a piano, Kahn gave away his
bed and slept on his piano. Although he became a much better student at the university of Pennsylvania than
he had been at Central High, he was not first in his class. At the time of his graduation in 1924, he won the
third medal out of a class of thirty five. The University of Pennsylvania was at that time one of the country’s
finest architecture schools in the Beaux Arts tradition. In spite of the changes in architectural style, Kahn had
remained a true son of the classical Beaux Arts, whose design principles include order, symmetry, cross axial
balance, and geometric masses. His Beaux Arts professors taught Kahn to respect buildings of the past as
inspirations. As an architecture student, he dutifully traced and adapted forms of Roman ruins, Greek
Temples, and Medieval castles from his Beaux Arts texts. These buildings became the “Forms” of his
personal philosophy. They are shapes that adapted to suit the circumstances or use of the building he was
designing.
After graduation from the-University of Pennsylvania, Kahn worked as a chief designer on the
Sesquicentennial exhibition in Philadelphia in order to earn money to visit his sources of inspiration: the
European buildings of the past. He sketched Italian Romanesque buildings such as the towers of San
Gimignano which were the “Forms’’ that inspired his Richards Medical Building towers. Later he also drew
such medieval towns as Carcassonne and Siena.
Through the nineteen-thirties and early forties, Kahn’s fortunes suffered. He was not the only architect
on relief during the Depression and war years when few buildings went up. When he married Esther Israeli,
she put aside her medical school plans to support herself and her husband by working as a neurology
technician at the University of Pennsylvania. Kahn was unable to find himself, as a designer, within the
developments of the new style in architecture, the so-called international style. He supplemented his Beaux
Arts education by reading the architectural theories of Le Corbusier and tracing his solid, more sculptural
buildings. “I came to live”, he has said, ‘‘in a beautiful city called Le Corbusier [3].”
Kahn’s admirers often divided into two groups. Many believe that his main contribution has been the
distinctive look of his buildings: the heavy brick silos pierced with a large circle or arch surrounding his
-Indian Institute of Management at Ahmadabad; the stark, vertical concrete columns housing the exhaust and
air-conditioning pipes at Richards Towers on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania; the geometric
concrete slabs pock-marked by their plywood forms at the Salk Building in La Jolla; the insistent, concrete,
tetrahedranal canopy that makes the Yale Art Gallery ceiling.
Kahn’s concept of architecture differed from what is called international style. His new, structural forms
were answers to what he considered two of the basic problems in building: how to relate both natural light
and the systems involved like air-conditioning ducts, the elevators, and the structure to the building’s main
living and working spaces. Kahn calls them “servant spaces”, and the rest of the building the served” spaces.
The “servant” spaces must, said Kahn, be ordered around the “served” spaces in which people live and work.
The international stylists tended either to ignore the “servant” spaces by hiding them, or else to install them
in the middle of spacious loft-like “served” areas where their presence is an intrusion. For example, Kahn
criticized the Seagram Building because Philip Johnson and Mies properly hid its massive wind bracings.
Kahn calls the building “a lady whose beauty is hidden.”
In Kahn’s esthetic, the wind bracing and air—conditioning ducts are integral parts of the building’s
structure. They complement the living spaces and are frequently responsible for the innovative architectural
form in which Kahn’s entire building is expressed. Another of Kahn’s teaching and design obsessions was
light. He experimented with new ways to bring light into a building without glare. Like the served and
servant spaces, these new structures for admitting light made for design innovations in the total building.
About light, Kahn believed: “no space is, architecturally, a space unless it has natural light. A room in
architecture, space in architecture, needs that life-giving light - light from which nature is made [4].”

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 Kahn’s buildings were designed to be like human cups of light. He created many striking examples o the
archetypal vessal of light by filling central paces with skylights. At the Trenton Bathhouse Kahn designed a
central courtyard open to the sun, while the other modules are covered and lit by a central oculus. In pursuit
of light in his First Unitarian Church in Rochester, N.Y. Kahn designed four massive hoods overlooking the
roof through whose windows sunlight bounces down into the interior.’ The First Unitarian Church is a
demonstration of Kahn’s sequence of what he called form and design. For Kahn, form is immaterial. Form is
not simply function, but a conceived order. At Rochester Kahn placed the meeting hall in the center of the
school and services around it. It is clear that for Kahn form is symmetry, as it was for the Romans.
His most successful exploration of utilizing natural light are the two buildings he designed for hot, sunny
climates; the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmadabad the second legislative capital of Pakistan, now
Bladesh, at Dacca. Kahn calls the school itself “a building within a building — one open to the sun and the
other to living”. The outer wall is pierced by gigantic circles that admit light and ventilation while shielding
the inner walls from the direct glare of the sun. This is Kahn’s solution for a climate where, during the
summer, people close their houses during the day to keep out hot winds.
At Dacca, Kahn also uses a technique of piercing walls with giant geometric holes, integrating the forms
here with shapes from classic Islamic architecture, such as the dome, the arch, and the vault. Like the Indian
Institute of Management, Dacca frequently reminds one of the elaborately produced set of children’s blocks,
this time emphasizing triangu1ar hoods (which admit light) and a light shadow interplay of rectangular solids
and silo shape cylinders. The buildings are made of brick, marble and concrete.
Unlike most of the architects who are mostly concerned with function In their designs, for Kahn,
function is the secondary consideration. He believes that as long as he has considered only the functions of
the building, he is still not building the building. A building which simply functions is not a building in his
sense and it would not have a lasting quality. It would not have the quality of being in a life, of being in a
living thing. Kahn says;
“when you make a building, you make a life. It comes out of life, when you have only the comprehension of
the function of a building, it would not become an environment of a life [5].”
Kahn believed in solving an architectural problem. The architect should go beyond the solution, for Kahn,
a building begins after the problems are solved. By this he is referring to the character of the space. First is
the need of the space and second is the character of the space. The need of a space is definable. The character
of a space is not definable. A building can be high in character or low in character and still be functional.
However, for Kahn, that is not architecture.

3. Kahn and Wright

Even though Kahn claimed that he was never consciously influenced by Wright, this might be true, but
in some cases Scully refers to parallelism between Kahn’s work and Wright’s early work, which was wholly
unconscious on Kahn’s part. For example, the use of cross axial symmetry and geometric spaces are apparent
in Kahn’s plans and Wright’s early plans. In the Bath House for the Trentan Community Center, designed in
1955—56, Kahn keeps each of his four spaces uncompromised by giving it a separate roof, with oculus of its
own. Thus Kahn has given independence to each space, each saving its own identity. Wright used the same
principle in his Hillside Home School designed in 1902.In both cases they are supported by marine piers:
Wright using solid piers while Kahn’s are hollow. “Today we must build with hollow stones”, Kahn said in
1957, in reference to housing the services. Wright also used hollow piers to house services in his Unity
Church of 1906 .Kahn believed that the nature of a space is characterized more by the minor spaces that
serve it; storage rooms, service rooms. These spaces must not be partitioned areas of a single space structure,
rather, they need their own structure. In the Bath House, Kahn has grouped the masonry columns to express
the service spaces, which rig] it had also achieved in his Martin House Building designed in 1904.
In a house designed by Kahn located in suburb of Philadelphia, Kahn used a rectangular floor plan, this
being a perfect example of Kahn’s belief in cross axial symmetry. Exterior and also interior spaces are
symmetrical. Front and back views are almost identical. In the Winslow House and also in some of Wright’s
earlier works, he has used rectangular plans. Wright’s plan also has cross axial symmetry, but Wright’s plan
is not as symmetrical as Kahn’s. There is a free circulation in Wright’s plans: every space is easily accessible,
reached by other spaces, which is also seen in Kahn’s plan. Remarking on his plan, Kahn said, wherever you
are, you are inclined to be near the space you want to be next”.

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 The back of the house opens freely to the sky, the lawn, and the light, presenting a far different
personality, unrestricted by the elements of the street front for an almost tight-lipped privacy. Even though,
comparatively speaking, there is not much similarity between Kahn’s work and Wright’s work, some
resemblance is apparent in their philosophy. Kahn talks about the importance of natural light in a building:
“A space can never reach its place in architecture without natural light. Artificial light is the light of night
expressed in positioned chandeliers not to be compared with the unpredictable play of natural light. The
places of entrance, the galleries that radiate from them, the intimate entrances to the spaces of the institution
form an independent architecture of connection. This architecture is of equal importance to the major spaces
though these spaces are designed only for movement and must therefore be designed to be bathed in natural
light.ArChitect1 deals with spaces, the thoughtful and meaningful making of spaces. The architectural space
is one where the structure is apparent in the space itself. The structure is a design in light. The vault, the
dome, the arch, the column are structures related to the character of light. Natural light gives mood to space
by the nuances of light in the time of the day and the seasons of the year as it enters and modifies the space
[6].”
Wright also stressed a natural light in his designs. Wright, commenting on utilization of natural light says;
“The sun is the great luminary of all life. It should serve as Such in the building of any house [7].” Kahn,
the true son of the Beaux Arts tradition, believed in and used geometric shapes in his designs, as did Wright
to a certain extent.

4. Kahn and Mies

Some architectural critics have tried to show Mies’s influence on Kahn by referring to large spaces at the
Yale Art Gallery. Kahn denied it, saying; “I am much more conscious that the space must have the evidence
of how it was made. If a Mies’ space is undivided, and has this relationship, I would agree with him. If he
subdivides his general space, I would not [8].”
Kahn designs a space as an offering and he does not designate what it is to be used for. The use should
be inspired. In Kahn’s design o a house, the living room is discovered as the living room'. The space does not
say ‘I am the living room’ and that one must use it as such. Also, the bedroom, which in a sense, must also
be a living room, never has the specific character of a bedroom.
At the Art Gallery, some critics say that Kahn has designed Miesian spaces. To the contrary, Kahn’s
concept of spice differs entirely from Mies’s concept. Kahn believed that the client presents a program for
required areas rather than for required spaces, or required rooms. The architect has to translate these required
areas unto spaces. For Kahn a space is not a space unless one can see the evidence of how it was made. Then
he calls it a room, while Mies would call it a space. If an area is partitioned into several separate areas, Mies
would still call the whole area a space while Kahn considers any one of the separate areas a space. Kahn
considers the four rooms but Mies would consider IL a space within which divisions are made. Mies allows
division in his spaces, but Kahn believed there is no entity in a space when it is divided. For Kahn each space
stands for itself with different character, each room feels its entity, its completeness. It has a right to have a
name. It can be called the “east -room” for example, but in Mies’s concept there can be no east room because
he does not consider each space individually. According to Kahn’s concept of space, each of these four
rooms has its own character, because of the light: one has north and west light, one has south and east light,
etc. The window of one would not be designed the same as the window of another. Each room would have
its own light and character.

5. Conclusion
By all means, Louis Kahn was one of the leading architects of modern times. However, he was also
considered, by social theorists to be an inspired planner. To all who had allowed themselves to fall under the
spell of Kahn’s intense, articulate personality he was clearly a man possessed by a single, compelling truth
that nothing can live unless it acknowledges a simple logical system of organization and a principle of what
Kahn called “order”.
Kahn applies this principle, specifically, to buildings, to streets, to whole cities. For in his mind, these
were not inanimate things, they were alive, or could be, if they were created from a “principle of order”. By
order he means simply nature or organism. Cities for Kahn, were people whom he might love or hate, trust or
fear, approach with humility or with a bluster.

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 For the most important difference between Kahn and most city planners was that planners, for many
years, tried to solve problems as they arose, whereas, Kahn believed that if one gives the city the right and
the capability to live, the city will inevitably solve its own problems”. Kahn’s philosophy in planning was
“let the street live”. By this he meant that each street has to do its own task in its own way. The city streets
carry different contradictory types of traffic: buses that stop and go, private cars that do not stop very often,
trucks and so on. Different cars with different rates of movement. To carry all of these kinds of traffic on one
street is as wrong to Kahn as using hot water, cold water, waste aid electric current all through the same pipe
in a house. The consequences are not just the present congested streets, especially in the metropolitan but
also, it makes most of the buildings along the street unworkable. No building can work equally well for a
pedestrian moving three miles per hour and a car going fifty miles an hour.
Kahn’s solution for the transportation problems and planning of the cities was based on the phenomenon
of great rivers.-“express ways like rivers.”- and like rivers they carry a variety of traffic. These rivers should
be designed around the city. Rivers in turn have harbors. By harbors, Kahn referred to municipal parking
garages: large cylindrical towers; towers with all day car storage spaces at the core and for apartments,
offices or motels all around the perimeter. Here the river traffic begins to be sorted out from these harbors.
Canals branch out that serve the interior. These canals have few, if any, intersection and permit motor traffic
to move smoothly.
The beauty of Kahn’s concept is that, if put into operation, it should automatically create a city pattern
that will work and that can probably will end up beautiful. In regard to his concept in city planning, Kahn
says; “ A modern city will renew itself from its order concept of movement and this order concept of
movement- the river canal pattern – would reserve certain tendencies that threaten the heart of modern cities
[9].”

6. References
[1] Cook, John W. and Klotz, Heinrich, Conversations With Architects, (New York: 1973).
[2] Jencks, Charles, Modern Movement in Architecture, (New York: 1973).
[3] Kahn, Louis I., Notebook and Drawings of Louis I. Kahn, (Philadelphia: 1962).
[4] Pevsner, Nikolaus, Pioneers of Modern Design, (Baltimore: 1960).
[5] Scully, Vincent Jr., Louis I. Kahn,(New York: 1962).
[6] Scully, Vincent Jr., Modern Architecture, (New York, 1961 ).
[7] Architecture Forum, March, 1958. August / September, 1964.
[8] The New York Times Magazine, November 15, 1970.
[9] Progressive Architecture, September 1964. May 1974.

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