Louis I. Kahn in Rome and Venice

Tangible Forms

Elisabetta Barizza

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000412857
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Saggi e monografie sull'architettura

This book examines the idea of organism in the work of Louis I. Kahn, from the turning point of Rome to the project for Venice. It presents an original interpretation of the work of Kahn during one of the most fruitful periods of his career, when he was working on a particular design method based on an entirely novel way of interacting with the past. Beginning with a meticulous documentation and analysis of Kahn's experiences in the twenty years from 1930 to 1950, the book sheds new light on the relationship between Kahn's work and the modern movement. The arguments are supported by case studies, including that of the Palazzo dei Congressi in Venice based on Kahn's words (like his lessons in Venice at IUA, International University of Art, in 1971) and others as the Trenton Bath House, the Salk Institute (La Jolla), the Kimbell Museum (Fort Worth), the Yale Gallery and the Mellon Center for British Art (New Haven) and more.

Unlike much of the by now well-established literature on Kahn's work, Louis I. Kahn in Rome and Venice suggests that the basic premise of Kahn's invention is the idea of spatial, constructive organism, which explains how he created forms that were inextricably anchored in the past, without imitating any one kind of ancient architecture. The main objective of the book is to explain Kahn's methodology to architects and students, showing how he was able to design an architectural object with the characteristics of the best designed objects: organisms, in which each part contributes, with the whole, to creating "something made of indivisible parts".

IV Kahn and Venice. “Places more than buildings”

Part Four of this book presents unpublished material as regards the work of Louis I. Kahn in Venice (1968–1971), discovered by the author at UIA (International University of Art) in Venice and in the Archives of the Kahn Collection at UPenn, during the PhD research done at Sapienza University of Rome (2012–2015). The most important part of this material (documents, photographs, tapes of lessons, etc.) was found in the attic of the present building of UIA and has been organised, translated where needed and analysed by the author. Of major importance is the lecture given by Kahn in January 1969 (vernissage of the exhibition “Il Palazzo dei Congressi di Louis Kahn a Palazzo Ducale”) and the tapes of the lessons given by Kahn to Venetian students during a workshop at the UIA in March 1971. From those tapes, the passage that begins this part of the book has been taken.

Venice is the architecture of joy.

I love this place, which is all of one piece,

where each building collaborates with the others.

An architect wanting to design in Venice

has to think in terms of collaboration.

Working on the project I thought constantly

about the buildings I love so much in Venice, asking myself

if they would accept me into their company.

Louis I. Kahn

8 The significance of the idea of city

Figure 8.1a–8.1b Comparison of the facades of the Ducal Palace and the Palazzo dei Congressi, Venice; from original reproductions reworked by Louis I. Kahn (not to scale).

Source: Louis I. Kahn Collection, University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Housed in the Harvey & Irwin Kroiz Gallery, the resources of the Louis I. Kahn Collection are used with the permission of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania.

The origins of the Venice project go back to the meeting between Giuseppe Mazzariol, the representative of the Venice Tourism Board (AAST), and Louis Kahn, which took place in the latter’s Philadelphia studio in April 1968. Mazzariol proposed that Kahn should design “a Palazzo dei Congressi (Conference Centre) in keeping with the dignity of the city and satisfying the current requirements of the conference centre market”.¹

The area selected was the Biennale Gardens in the Castello district, which Mazzariol showed to Kahn during their meeting by means of a hundred or so slides that he had brought with him from Italy.² Kahn was very keen on the idea of a design project actually in Venice, a city he loved, for a new institution to be seen as a “meeting place for people”.³ From the very start, as can be gathered from the correspondence between them, their shared aim was to use the project to revitalise the area (and, as a consequence, the city), bringing it entirely up to date as urbs and as civitas. They both had an abiding faith in the power of modern architecture; the structural choices and the use of materials with state-of-the-art techniques would shape spaces that would be able to create new ways to exploit the area and, at the same time, rediscover its attraction. Siting the project in the Gardens would, therefore, redevelop an area that was currently rather peripheral and would reconnect it to the organic form of Venice.

The entire form of Venice – its ideal form, one might say – can be preserved only if the whole of Venice, in its totality of works of art, is maintained and upheld as urbs and as civitas, in every respect and with no reservations.⁴

8.1 The design project of the Palazzo dei Congressi, 1968–1969

Kahn conceived the new Palazzo dei Congressi as the central focus of the reorganisation of the whole area of the Biennale Gardens, bordered by Via Garibaldi to the northwest, the group of foreign pavilions to the southeast and the Lagoon to the southwest. As an integral part of this new arrangement, less importance was given in the design to the new building for the Biennale, taking the place of the Italian pavilion, and a small entrance building next to the vaporetto docking pier. The project involved the redefinition of a cultural nexus associated with the most important institutions of both the island city and the mainland, based on a new approach to make the public space of the Biennale usable not only during exhibitions but throughout the entire year.

Figure 8.2 Louis I. Kahn, Giuseppe Mazzariol and Carlos Enrique Vallhonrat in Venice, 1968.

Source: Courtesy of Martina Mazzariol, Fondo Mazzariol, Querini Stampalia Foundation, Venice.

Figure 8.3 General layout with plans of the ground floors.

Source: Lotus, n. 6, 1969.

Kahn was able to readily grasp the significance of the historical and social context into which he was inserting his project via Mazzariol, who wrote:

Day after day, the ancient Venetians invented their lives and their city; the Venetians of today live off their city as if it were an inherited legacy, using it as easily and as least inventively as they can; in other words, they risk consuming it. If they carry on using Venice as an object to show off on certain occasions, they will lose it, no matter what expedient they come up with to bequeath it to future generations; they will lose it as a living organism and therefore able to express itself as a city, and have in exchange a restored monument, lifeless and embalmed, frozen in its final form: a ruin for tourists, which is the exact opposite of what Venice should be.⁵

[…] [A]ny possible technocratic intervention would only compromise the situation in Venice; only by discovering new ways of expressing the spirit of its community can the city achieve a subsequent and corresponding recovery of its proper, formal dimension. […] [T]he island city will thus be the organizing centre and driving force for the greater Venice, the benchmark for a life of harmony and industry.⁶

Kahn began working on the project from his studio in Philadelphia and was constantly in touch with Mazzariol and the AAST in Venice, from whom, at his request, came a continual stream of information and clarifications. The sheer amount of detailed study he conducted of the surrounding context can be seen from the hundreds of large-size aerial photographs of Venice, its lagoon and the outlying islands that he had them send from Italy. Moreover, before starting the design of the actual buildings, Kahn asked the young Mario Botta (who had been charged by Mazzariol to furnish Kahn with all useful material and correspond with him about everything he might need at all stages of the project) for a survey of all the trees present in the Selva Gardens (of over eight hundred, not a single one was cut down), as well as data on the amount of yearly rainfall and other such technical information. Kahn rigorously examined the territory, including the entire area facing the lake and the existing architectural objects with which the new buildings would interrelate: the island of San Giorgio, Piazza San Marco, the Punta della Dogana with the church of Santa Maria della Salute, Palladio’s churches on the Giudecca and the future hospital by Le Corbusier (which would, in fact, never be built). Also, account had to be taken of the great floods of 1966 and 1968, which had made the unsolved “problem of Venice”⁷ even more in need of an urgent solution; in fact, pictures of Venice and Florence devastated by floodwater and mud had been seen all round the world and had exerted a powerful effect on public opinion. The idea of founding the International University of Art (UIA) in Venice and Florence,⁸ endorsed by Mazzariol and Ludovico Ragghianti, was occasioned by the urgent need to create projects of protection and conservation in the two cities. In the opening lecture at a week of workshops held at the Fondazione Cini in March 1971, devoted to design projects for the islands of the Venice lagoon, Kahn had this to say:

But, we must know in order to make nature help us, because nature is the maker of all things. But man has the vision, the sense, of what nature cannot make without him; he cannot make it without nature, but nature cannot make anything without man (that man wants), therefore, you must know its orders: you must know the order of water, the order of air, the order of spaces, the order of structure, the order of time, the order of construction, the order of materials; man knows intuitively the order of stone, but he must learn the order of concrete, of steel, of plastic, he must not just use it, he must know the order of it.⁹

Addressing the Venetian students who were presenting their design concepts (which were based on seminars held by Buckminster Fuller and Arthur Erickson) Kahn went on:

There is not city today which is more pointedly an ecological problem than that. There is not. So, therefore, it is, in my opinion first, you see, considering the threat, it’s considered as an ecological problem. Yes. Now, I see Venice, a city in a fecund field which is the whole Lagoon. […] I would like to see the phenomenon of Venice be extended so that all of you know it is Venice. Yes the lagoon, and whatever is built. Yes. It seems to me that there must be an architecture of water. There must be also an architecture of air.¹⁰

To resuscitate the outlying part of the Castello gardens and reconnect it to the city centre, Kahn knew he had to create a continuous, dynamic, vital sense of space, like that of “a living organism, and therefore civically meaningful”.¹¹ In the development of the project, he concentrated on the unity of form through continuous stages of scale (from the plan to the building solution, all the way to the finer details). In this way he portrayed the complexity of a uniform urban fabric, where the architecture expressed the logic of the forms, subject to natural constraints and complying with constructional requirements. Kahn’s critical sensibility was more intuitive and based on his own experience rather than being modelled on historical examples (as he himself admitted);¹² he agreed with Mazzariol and Sergio Bettini’s views on the city, and regarded the Venice project as an opportunity to create a place that was architecturally and functionally relevant, and that would open up new dynamic possibilities for the city. The design process involved seeking the maximum amount of intelligibility at different scales – at an urban scale, of the city as a “living unit”, which Kahn construed at the level of the distribution of space, according to the order of movement, and at the scale of architectural form, which was to be determined by identifying those aspects of the built urban organism that were invariable and consistent, and that were to be re-interpreted in a coherent fashion. While engaging with the projects of the Venetian students, Kahn pointed out the usefulness of thinking on different scales in order to comprehend fully how the project related to pre-existing elements:

Now, in thinking small, I didn’t want to take down one of the details of sculpture or stone! Now again, in thinking big, I thought that instead of trying to imitate the charm of the wave of buildings, that I felt, if you were to make a compound (like a very large palazzo of small buildings). A building of simple geometry with a court, and with gardens and passages. That it would not trying anyway to imitate the charming results of increment of building. And this in relation to elevated gardens and… well… and fundamentally an architecture of windows. Yes. That it is not an architecture of walls, but again I don’t mean a glass facade. I was thinking more in a line of the buildings, in… as say in Amsterdam, which try to minimize the pear-shape (like to say the spaces between windows). But the windows, of course, would be entirely Venetian, of course, I don’t mean Amsterdam.¹³

For the Palazzo dei Congressi project, Kahn based his architectural solution on what he had gleaned from his first perusal of the physical features of the site. It is a tiny sketch of three centimetres, done “with the point of a pencil” in the margin of the drawing showing the setting of the ground plan, with the outline of San Marco, the domes and the bell-tower, which reveals his creative thought process: a building designed according to a structural solution involving two solid, ground-based points of support, on which a structure is suspended, which is topped by a roof containing a series of domes (which would be reduced from five to three). The different levels of the design project cannot be distinguished: the functional, distributive level of the organisation of spaces, or the structural, constructional level involving the choice of tectonic solutions, materials, focal points and details. Kahn worked by simultaneously designing the various aspects within the architectural organism, which, by its very nature, took the shape of a unit made up of inseparable, interdependent parts at each different stage of the project. In Venice, as in Jerusalem, Kahn would design a building the plasticity of which was taken to extremes. This architectural use of solid structures seemed to become more explicit as Kahn’s researches developed and finally became the creative and constructive centre point of his design. Giuseppe Strappa encapsulated the idea thus:

Figure 8.4 Louis I. Kahn, sketch of the structural idea of the Palazzo dei Congressi, 1968.

Source: Louis I. Kahn Collection, University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Housed in the Harvey & Irwin Kroiz Gallery, the resources of the Louis I. Kahn Collection are used with the permission of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania.

Plastic architecture, derived from the continuity of forms constructed in long-lasting, massive materials, is the domain of solidarity, where every individual thing is bound to the others and collaborates to the life and unity of the whole; the walls link together spaces and structures in the builder’s one single action.¹⁴

We should, at this point, remember that at the same time that Kahn received the commission for the Palazzo dei Congressi in Venice, he was also working on the Hurva synagogue in Jerusalem, and both cases involved examples of monumental architecture¹⁵ based on a structural, compositional and functional solution that was homogeneous and highly expressive; evidently, even in such different contexts and with different purposes, Kahn’s idea of architecture was self-consistent. These were two projects that originated from a clear “notion” of space, resulting from an awareness of the nature of the place that the architectural work was meant to articulate. The need to create a building that could express the unique capacity of the place to evoke organic form led Kahn to experiment...