Part I
Rome and Kahn
Elisabetta Barizza
1 Rome and Kahn
The Italian edition of this book was first published in 2014, the fortieth anniversary of Louis Kahn’s death in Pennsylvania Station in New York on 17 March 1974. Kahn became one of the central figures in the attempt to re-establish modern architecture by reclaiming its past history, but at the height of his artistic career and while he was fully engaged in his profession as architect, by some bizarre twist of fate, his heart gave out in the very place where, little more than 10 years earlier, there had stood one of the symbols of American beaux arts architecture that he so loved: the Pennsylvania Station building, constructed in 1910, one of the most important of the works of the architects McKim, Mead and White. The station was modelled on the Baths of Caracalla (also a source of inspiration for Louis Kahn in his last 20 years). At the end of the 1930s, the station was still splendid to behold:
Despite a fierce battle fought in the 1960s by many citizens and celebrities of New York to save the building (among them architect Philip Johnson), demolition began in October 1963 to make way for Madison Square Garden and other new urban infrastructures. The destruction of the Pennsylvania Station would become an emblem for the later battles that led to the birth of conservationism and an awareness of the importance of history in America:
In 1944, while Europe was in the throes of the Second World War, Kahn presented his famous essay ‘Monumentality’ at the New Architecture and City Planning conference organised by Paul Zucker at Columbia University in New York. The conference reiterated the topics addressed in the manifesto Nine Points on a New Monumentality, signed by Sigfried Giedion, Josep Lluis Sert and Fernand Léger and published in 1943, where they announced the need for a new monumentality, how it could be reinvented and how its inherent dangers could be averted. The New York manifesto was supported by the American Abstract Artists association and was considered to be an American answer to the manifestos of the European CIAM issued between the wars, which had endorsed the birth of the Modern Movement. At the conference, Giedion (who, along with Le Corbusier, had already organised the first CIAM in 1928 in La Sarras in Switzerland) traced out the development of modern architecture from the 1920s to 1943, and declared:
Modern architecture, Giedion goes on to say, was in its origins dedicated to functionality, then it began to concentrate on city planning; now it needs to take a further step:
With his 1944 essay ‘Monumentality’, Kahn entered the debate with an entirely personal contribution and attempted a form of synthesis, which many thought impossible; he based the last 30 years of his career on the two dialectically opposed doctrines of modernisation and new monumentality, and thus issued his challenge. On the one hand, he extolled modernity and the building methods of industrialisation, and on the other he pointed the way towards a new way of envisaging the past, in order to once again give character to architecture and to restore quality to living spaces and cities:
As Kenneth Frampton said: “right from the start, Kahn dealt with the question of monumentality in a rather atypical fashion, by laying emphasis on the tectonic elements and making them paramount above all other considerations,” but it was in Rome that he expanded and finalised this idea by introducing the key concept of the institution.6 During his second stay in the city, when he was at the American Academy, in fact, Kahn perfected his idea of a universal architecture inspired by the great models of the past, which could provide ‘new institutions’ for contemporary mankind.
Kahn’s sensitivity towards history had its roots in his own European Jewish origins, but this was offset by a completely American sense of freedom that was an essential feature of the New World. Observing Rome in the 1950s, where the ancient ruins stood side by side with the building sites of the post-war reconstruction, Kahn seemed to echo the words of Goethe:
Thanks to his artistic training, Kahn could study the architecture of Rome and manage to see the potential “unity of form as a synthesis of many shapes,” and uncover the secrets of the architectural and urban spaces of the Eternal City. Apart from his decision to focus on masonry architecture, the design projects from Kahn’s mature period show the large variety of spatial solutions that he produced within a stringent compositional framework, organised according to his theory of ‘order and design’. Using a series of repetitive components that are often limited in number, Kahn succeeded in obtaining the maximum amount of spatial contrast, producing surprising effects, variations, unexpected changes in direction, a judicious selection of viewpoints, and rhythmic sequences within the architectural space. Similarly, by making use of compositional categories such as symmetry and axiality – outlawed by the Modern Movement – he went on, with “compositions of dissimilar parts brought together by hypotaxis and parataxis”8 to reinvent forms that generated spaces flooded with light, in a consistent and irrevocable coherence of construction. The coherence between form and structure was for Kahn the central feature that endowed architecture with solemnity. Writing on Kahn’s creative process, Mario Manieri Elia, an architect belonging to the Roman group STASS, commented:
This is the distinguishing feature of Kahn’s vision of the city and its architecture: he experienced its built reality by perceiving its unity of form inwardly, before he engaged with it on a rational level. This unity derived from the correspondence of the infrastructures with the ancient architecture, ‘the order of the air, the order of the water, the order of construction, the order of movement’, which had to be maintained and focused upon in every new design project. Rome was always the perfect example of a city built as an organic unity produced by layers upon layers of history. The balance between a building and its surrounding natural environment, the addition of new elements to pre-existing structures, and the transformation of buildings over the centuries by a process of ‘re-fusion’ is proof that in Rome, it is the architecture that creates the city. By investigating the ruins, Kahn was able to grasp the potential of adaptable masonry-built architecture that was based on the harmony between the structural and the spatial order. Two years after his stay at the American Academy, in fact, he wrote to Anne Tyng, who was then in Rome giving birth to their daughter Alexandra:
The perfect balance between the structural arrangement and the spatial and distributive features that he could perceive in Roman architecture became for Kahn the key he sought in order to remodel his architectural language. When he discovered the importance of the organic form of masonry-built architecture, in which ‘the choice of structure is the choice of light’, he found the answer to the questions that from 1946 onwards had led him to apply for a fellowship to study at the American Academy in Rome. He wanted to give to modern architecture a new shape and a new monumentality generated by the same structural coherence and expressiveness to be found in historical buildings. In fact, as he wrote in a letter to AAR in 1946, he was looking for answers “on the problem of structure in relation to new architectural space.” It was the organic qualities of the fabric of a city in relation to those found within each institution that Kahn held in such high regard, and which, from 1950 on, he would make reference to in all his design projects.
Kahn firmly believed that the purity and beauty of the generating form should be evident and perceptible. This beauty was not to be thought of as an end in itself, but as the end result of a creative process bent on ensuring architectural integrity. This concept of architecture was made clear by Kahn when he said: “from beauty comes wonder and from wonder realization that the form is made of inseparable parts, parts that you cannot separate.”11 And when he maintained that form is ‘what’ and design is ‘how’, he was harking back to his beaux arts-trained teacher, Paul Philippe Cret (1876–1945), for whom designing consisted in knowing how to give form to an idea, how to make it buildable and meaningful by choosing the proper proportions that were needed to achieve spatial and structural unity in an architectural organism composed of finite and mutually dependent elements. This is a loftier concept of design, seen not as a simple overlapping of beauty and function, but as some...