LOUIS KAHN TO ANNE TYNG: The Rome Letters 1953-1954
Edited with commentary by Anne Griswold Tyng
Rizzoli International Publications, 216 pages, $45 hardcover, $29.95 paper
Steamy” is an adjective rarely used to describe architecture books. This recounting of the little-known affair between the great architect Louis Kahn and his young associate Anne Griswold Tyng departs from that dry norm. It is a tale of illicit passion, unexpected pregnancy, a woman’s flight to Rome and her return to an America that had not yet arrived at its present ambivalence about adultery.
In such masterpieces as the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth, Kahn imbued the revolutionary, abstract forms of 20th-Century modernism with history, evoking the classicism of ancient Rome with powerfully sculpted yet breathtakingly light shapes of concrete. He was equally renowned as a teacher, making poetic if vague pronouncements like, “(I)f you ask brick what it wants, it will say, ‘Well, I like an arch.’ ” But Kahn, who died in 1974, had more than bricks on the brain.
His affair with Tyng began soon after she started work-ing for him in 1945 at age 25; it broke off in 1960 when he became involved with another woman. They were an unlikely pair, not only because he, already married, was 19 years older than her. He was an Estonian-born Jew, hardly dashing, whose face had been scarred in a childhood accident. She was the daughter of Episcopa missionary parents, born in the mountains of China, a classic beauty with high cheekbones. Their shared passion for architecture and each other emerges lovingly in the portrait Tyng etches of Kahn:
“His wavy mop of reddish sandy hair was prematurely graying and his blue eyes, which tilted impishly upward at the sides, seemed to be on fire from within, compelling me to look beyond the scars. On swelteringly hot summer weekend charettes (intense design sessions) when Lou occasionally worked shirtless, it was hard not to notice how unusually broad his lightly freckled shoulders were in proportion to his slim hips. I had never met anyone remotely like him. He generated a profound energy in his resilient walk, in the lively lines of his drawings, and in his ideas which seemed to take shape as he drew and talked.”
Tyng provides an equally vivid description of their respective childhoods in exotic lands and writes lyrically about the way “our creative work together deepened our relationship and the relationship enlarged our creativity.” But sometimes she goes over the top, as when she muses about “a possible cosmic connection” between her and Kahn. Alternately, she underinforms, failing to describe, for example, what it was like for the daughter of “an intense Episcopal clergyman” to carry on an affair. Was there remorse? How, if at all, did Tyng interact with Kahn’s wife, Esther? We simply don’t know. (Esther Kahn died in 1996; this book almost surely was timed to avoid her the public embarrassment of hearing others cluck about her husband’s love letters to another woman.)
In 1953, Tyng discovered that she was pregnant with Kahn’s child. Knowing that he would not divorce his wife, she moved to Rome to avoid a scandal; the 53 previously unpublished letters Kahn sent to her there make up the bulk of this book. They show flashes of Kahn’s brilliance, the seeds of thoughts about architectural order that would later emerge full flowered. Yet mostly, they give us the everyday Kahn, not Kahn the philosopher. He worries about where his next commission will come from. He complains about tight-fisted clients. He apologizes for not sending Tyng $10 for living expenses. He struggles to jot down his thoughts as the table jiggles on the train ride to New Haven, where his Yale University Art Gallery was making its acclaimed debut.
The letters are valuable to the extent that they demystify a figure who has ascended to demigod status, rooting him in day-to-day life and revealing all-too-human aspects of his character: ambition, pettiness, forgetfulness. But their promise-to open a window onto Kahn’s great mind-goes unrealized. They’re unfiltered information, like watching CNN during a major news story when you get plenty of facts, but no big-picture perspective. In other words, there’s more chaff than wheat.
Tyng’s narratives of her relationship with Kahn are far more compelling, even if they occasionally turn self-aggrandizing. It’s unseemly when she explains her influ-ence on such key projects as the Yale Art Gallery, with its triangulated geometry, or the Trenton Bathhouse in New Jersey, four pavilions with pyramid-shaped roofs that represented a decisive break from the ahistorical forms of modernism. That task is bet-ter left to dispassionate historians.
Perhaps, though, there’s more involved here than who gets credit. Could it be that, by securing her place in architectural history, Tyng hopes to finally effect an eternal union with Kahn-in buildings that are monuments to innovation, his and hers? Whatever drives her, she has produced a well-crafted account of the intersection of love and creativity.
