WHERE LIGHT DWELLS

 The Yale Center for British Art, Louis Kahn’s monument to light and humanity, returns to life.

WRITTEN BY DAVID HAY

Louis Kahn has always stood apart from the rest of the design world. In good part because of his singular preoccupation with the notion of civilization: how human epochs begin, how they are sustained. He was ever curious as to what monuments were created in these periods, why centuries later particular icons remained so etched in our consciousness. This explains his fascination with the Pyramids, the Parthenon – and the Pantheon in Rome. He did countless sketches of teach when he visited. Repeating them over and over in his lifetime. (He never carried a camera.) He too wanted to create buildings that would not only stand the test of their time but come to symbolize it.

Given such lofty ambitions, unusual fifty years ago, almost freakish now, what sort of person was Kahn? You might assume that thinking on a such an epic scale might have made him impossibly grave and serious, possibly foreboding. But no. Absolutely not. Louis Kahn thrived on being social. He lived for it. “He was deeply passionate about his students and loved to socialize with them long into the night,” notes his grandson, the Brooklyn-based architect, Gregory Kahn Melitonov. “And of course he loved smoking and drinking too.” (Luckily, Kahn never bothered to learn to drive.) Knowing this about him offers an entirely different spin on his accomplishments. Above all Louis Kahn was the supreme humanist.

When you look now at tapes of his talks, read the transcripts of his lectures – complex, often meandering ruminations on nature and humanity, barely adhering to the topic of specific design elements – you witness the thinking, searching Kahn: the artist grappling with how to combine his embrace of monumentalism with such a potent delight in humanity. In his buildings he strives to bring these opposing qualities together in ways that are utterly seamless. When he succeeds as in the case of such commissions as the Kimbell Museum it is genius.

Those who experienced both Kahn’s effervescence and the awesome reach of his artistic vision up close were members of his family. Luckily we now have their testimony. His daughter, Sue Ann Kahn, a New York musician, recently ushered in the publication of her father’s last notebook and two decades ago Nathaniel Kahn completed his seminal documentary profile, My Architect. Not surprisingly they take their subject to heart.

Sue Ann Kahn has inherited her father’s warmth, but she well understands the reach of his ambition. She remains in awe of it. I get the feeling this is why she chose to be a musician. Still, she is very in tune with her emotions and in recounting her experience of her father’s work, she harkens back to one of the more ecstatic moments in her life that occurred during her visit to the Kimbell Museum. “The one building of his he seemed almost completely satisfied with,” she recalls. “The one he didn’t want to go back to and change.” Sue Ann had arrived in Dallas feeling decidedly under the weather, dragging her feet. But upon entering the museum, she could feel it embracing her, buoying her. “Being there made me well,” she says without hesitation. “His buildings do that.” On the other hand, she confessed to being thoroughly scared by the prospect of entering the National Parliament in Dhakka. “I think I might be so overwhelmed, I might die.”

Nathaniel Kahn was perhaps more taken by the sheer visual impact of his father’s work. Its Monumentalism. I’m thinking of a particularly dramatic moment in his film when the documentarian is sitting in boat heading up the Buriganga River talking of course, slipping by the reeds and foliage on its banks. Suddenly the boat rounds a corner and in front is the Bangladesh National Parliament House. Sitting in a cinema I gasped as did all around me. Rising from nature is this apparition: floating yet formally huge. Beautiful. Yes, monumental. Sue Ann was right: it can be overwhelming.

This building holds a special place in the hearts of the Bangladeshi people. “Whenever I get into a cab with a driver from there I ask them about it…,” says Sue Ann Kahn. “Within seconds they’re telling me they had a cousin or a friend who laid bricks there… we’re talking about a dear friend.” Her father, of course would be proud, the building’s significance continues to gain force, its legend grows. It will stand the test of time.

“He had a real desire to understand the human condition and infuse his buildings accordingly,” argues Mark Masiello, the Founder and driving force behind FORM Portfolios who has long been drawn to Kahn’s work. “It connects on such a human level,” he confesses. Indeed, when we speak he asks immediately how many Kahn buildings I had visited in part I discover as he wants permission to share the almost religious sense he feels when in them. 

Masiello has thought hard about how Kahn achieves this. “Light and nature were critical to him,” he argues. “By placing them in his buildings, be it his expressive use of wood or his wonderfully calibrated schemes for allowing light to penetrate and flood sections of the interior, he achieves what I believe is an other-worldly effect. Much like a painter.”Just as Sue Ann Kahn’s deep connection with her father has been renewed by visiting his work, Masiello has had a journey too. One building after another. And like countless others, he responds with his heart. “It is a soulful human feeling you take with you when you leave.”

Luckily for us, this is sensuously evident once again in the newly restored Yale Center for British Art. Kahn’s final building, completed after his death in 1977, its exterior of matte steel and reflective glass speak to the architect’s signature monometalism. At the same time, in its geometric interior we see Kahn’s proposition for a human embrace of art: intimate spaces and skylit galleries with art itself made accessible – emotionally so – thanks to his palette of travertine, marble, white oak, even Belgian linen.

So yes here Kahn once again bares his soul. More evidence that the two driving forces behind this artist – the desire to make exemplars of the civilization that he lived in – and the sense of an all-encompassing humanity – can be fused in architecture. A rarity when he was alive, even more so now.

0, 3. THUMBNAIL: YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART © RICHARD CASPOLE
1. SKETCH OF YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART © LOUIS KAHN ARCHIVE, © FORM PORTFOLIOS
2. 1 TRAVEL DRAWING © LOUIS KAHN ARCHIVE, 2 KIMBELL ART MUSEUM © CEMAL EMDEN, 3 KIMBELL ART MUSEUM © CAROL M. HIGHSMITH, 4 TRAVEL DRAWING © LOUIS KAHN ARCHIVE, 5 NATIONAL PARLIAMENT OF BANGLADESH © CEMAL EMDEN, 6 NATIONAL PARLIAMENT OF BANGLADESH © RUPHO STUDIO, 7 TRAVEL DRAWING © LOUIS KAHN ARCHIVE, 8 YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART © RICHARD CASPOLE, 9 YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART © XAVIER DE JAURÉGUIBERRY, 10 TRAVEL DRAWING © LOUIS KAHN ARCHIVE, 11 LOUIS KAHN WITH STUDENTS © ARCHIVIO GRAZIANO ARICI, 12 LOUIS KAHN IN ROME © ABITARE
4. SKETCH OF YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART © LOUIS KAHN ARCHIVE

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