You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn

394 Pages·2017·38.58 MB·English

by  Wendy Lesser

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Table of Contents
A Note About the Author
Photos
Copyright Page

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For Ileene Smith
I honor beginnings. Of all things, I honor beginnings. I believe that what
was has always been, and what is has always been, and what will be has
always been.

—Louis Kahn
PROLOGUE
There was much to praise in his work, his colleagues felt, and they would not
have hesitated to call him one of the greatest architects of the twentieth century.
Just about everybody in the profession, across a broad range of architectural
schools and styles, admired what he did. They thought of him as the artist among
them. His output over the course of a lifetime was small, but his best buildings
were uniquely his, and they were beautiful in a surprising new way.
If he inspired any feelings of envy, they were rare and strangely muted.
Perhaps that was because he was such a bad businessman, so hopeless at the
financial side of the practice that no one worried about having to compete with
him. Or perhaps it was his soft, disarming manner. Through some combination
of his poverty-stricken childhood, his unsuccessful school days, and his
generally unprepossessing appearance, he had acquired a personality that was
completely unthreatening. Even among people who knew how good his work
was, the character he radiated was affable, conciliatory, and a bit self-mocking.
Louis Kahn was a warm, captivating man, beloved by students, colleagues,
and friends, enduringly attractive to strangers and intimates alike. But he was
also a secretive man hiding under a series of masks. There was the physical
mask he wore permanently on his face, a layer of heavy scars produced by a
childhood accident. Then there was the mask of conventionality he wore in his
private life—the forty-four-year marriage to Esther Kahn, mother of his oldest
daughter and partner in his Philadelphia social life—which covered over his
intense romantic liaisons with two other women, Anne Tyng and Harriet
Pattison, each of whom bore him a child outside of wedlock. There was also his
name, which was not really his name at all, but a convenient invention devised
by Kahn’s father and subsequently imposed on his whole family when they
immigrated to America. The boy who had been born Leiser-Itze Schmulowsky
in Estonia became Louis Isadore Kahn in America: not an escape from Jewish
identity itself, but a purposeful elevation from the lowly Eastern European
category to the more respectable and established ranks of German Jews. And