In a computer age when an architect can push a button and produce a floor plan, even call up a virtual reality version of a Frank Lloyd Wright house on CD-ROM, it’s refreshing to see the hand of a creative designer interpreting the real thing–particularly when the hand belongs to the late Louis I. Kahn.
Twenty-three years after he collapsed from a heart attack and died at age 73 in New York’s Pennsylvania Station, Kahn is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant figures of 20th Century architecture.
The reason is that Kahn broke free from the straitjacket of International Style modernism and thus liberated architecture to return to history.
He did so through such masterpieces as the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth, where barrel-vaulted galleries evoke the ruins of ancient Rome, and through his teachings, which produced poetic statements such as this one about respecting the nature of materials: “I asked the brick what it likes,” Kahn said, “and the brick said, `I like an arch.’ “
Like the Swiss-born modernist Le Corbusier, whom he deeply admired, the Philadelphia architect had a reverence for natural light. To bring it inside, he punched bold geometric openings into his facades, like the triangles and circles that animate his capital at Dhaka, Bangladesh.
“I sense light as the giver of all presences and materials as spent light,” Kahn said.
He did not arrive at such profundities easily; his first major commission, an addition to the Yale University Art Gallery, did not come until he was 50.
So one of the many strengths of a touring exhibition about Kahn’s travel sketches now at the Art Institute of Chicago is the way it charts Kahn’s intellectual growth and opens a window onto the workings of his mind.
His sketches–some 70 of them are in the show–range in subject from Italian piazzas to small-town America and in quality from lyrical to abysmal. In a sense, however, their technical quality is less significant than the ideas they convey and the transformations they suggest.
Drawings are a way for something to be put “in the compost of experience,” British architect Peter Smithson says on one of the show’s text panels. “It is what grows from the compost that is important.”
Absolutely true, and that points up a major shortcoming of the exhibition: It displays none of Kahn’s architecture.
Ideally, the viewer should be able to see how the architect’s travel sketches influenced his buildings. But the show’s organizers–the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Mass.–committed this sin of omission, and the Art Institute did not correct it. The absence of Kahn’s architecture is made even more odd by the inclusion of photographs of the buildings Kahn sketched.
How can the show include them, but not what he built?
Titled “Drawn From the Source: The Travel Sketches of Louis I. Kahn,” the exhibition appears in the museum’s horseshoe-shaped Kisho Kurokawa Gallery of Architecture (Gallery 227), just off the main stair. It was curated by the museum’s Martha Thorne, with the installation design by Chicago architect Margaret McCurry, her first at the Art Institute.
A defining characteristic of Kahn’s architecture is its sense of order and serenity, which the installation nicely conveys. In part this is because the walls are not crammed with material, as they were in the museum’s recent “Building for Air Travel” show. But it is also because McCurry has simulated light-wood wainscoting and a concrete, waffle-shaped ceiling, both of which Kahn employed, to felicitous effect. One can quibble about aspects of the design–its mix of domestic and institutional motifs, and whether it should have evoked Kahn’s work rather than paying homage. Yet on the whole, it works.
A less-than-obvious reason is that McCurry understands how Kahn brought architecture back to the idea of creating rooms. By extending the inner walls of two niche-like spaces along the horseshoe-shaped gallery by a few feet, she has turned them into rooms. That helps focus attention on what is in them: Kahn’s sketches from two decisive trips, one to Europe in 1928-29, the other to Europe and Egypt in 1951. Along the horseshoe’s curve are his 1930s drawings of American subjects and those from a 1959 European trip.
To look at Kahn’s watercolors and pastels, his charcoal and graphite drawings, is to witness how his way of seeing deepened over the years. He became less concerned with a building’s outer form than with its inner essence.
It is a long way from the promising, Beaux Arts-trained architect who faithfully but unimaginatively rendered a Milan church in a 1929 pencil sketch, to the mature interpreter, who in a 1951 pastel turned a Siena baptistry into a luminous, white object.
Kahn had come to grasp how color and shadow could energize his compositions. He also had fought his way to a profound truth–that architecture is not about shaping isolated objects, but rather about creating places.
So, in his well-known 1951 pastel of the Piazza Del Campo in Siena, the focus is on the piazza as an urban room and on architecture’s role in framing the room’s walls. The buildings are abstracted. Emphasis instead is placed on the concavity of the piazza’s floor and the details of its masonry joints. This is a celebration of both urban space and the materials that make it.
As the show explains, Kahn did not arrive at this level of understanding overnight. It follows him through the Depression, and how he learned to make the everyday extraordinary, as in his 1931 watercolor showing a storm descending on the hill town of Woodstock, N.Y.
An unexpected pleasure is that the show not only leads the viewer along Kahn’s path of enlightenment, but also provides expert commentary en route.
Shedding light on the show’s title, “Drawn From the Source,” German architect O.M. Ungers says that, before the era of virtual reality, the Internet and the modem, architects traveled to Rome, Greece and other “originating places of culture” to study their heritage and to learn from their spiritual ancestors. Kahn, he says, traveled to remember.
Through his sketchbook, Kahn used art to transform architecture and to teach this lesson: Architecture is not about copying the past, but about reinterpreting it. It is about infusing the buildings and urban spaces of today with the lessons of yesterday. If only Kahn’s buildings were represented to show how he did it–and how the man has himself become a source of inspiration.
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THE FACTS
`Drawn From Source: Louis I. Kahn’s Travel Sketches’
When: Through May 4
Where: Gallery 227, Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave.
Tickets: $7, $3.50 for senior citizens and students (except Tuesdays, when it’s free)
Call: 312-443-3600
