Lou Kahn: Heroic Genius

Lou Kahn was born today in 1901.

I wrote a little bit about him in this post from 2011.  I don't have much more to add to the volumes that have been written about his work, except to say that he's a personal favorite of mine, and definitely holds a place of honor in my Pantheon.  If documentaries are your thing, you might enjoy My Architect, the documentary film about Kahn, his architecture, and his complex private life, made by his son Nathaniel. It is quite personal and touching, and is one of my favorite architectural documentaries.

Here in SoCal, we are very lucky to have one of the very best of Kahn's masterpieces, the Salk Institute. After Jonas Salk cured polio, he built a massive research institute along the coast at LaJolla. According to the Salk Institute website,

The Salk Institute was established in the 1960s by Jonas Salk, M.D., the developer of the polio vaccine. His goal was to establish an institute that would explore questions about the basic principles of life. He wanted to make it possible for biologists and others to work together in a collaborative environment that would encourage them to consider the wider implications of their discoveries for the future of humanity.

Jonas Salk had a distinct vision for the Salk Institute as he worked with scientists and architects to create a new paradigm for research and collaboration.

In December 1959, Salk and architect Louis Kahn began a unique partnership to design such a facility. Salk summarized his aesthetic objectives by telling the architect to "create a facility worthy of a visit by Picasso." Kahn, who was a devoted artist before he became an architect, was able to respond to this challenge.

Last summer, I got to spend a little time at the Salk, during an outing from OCON.  We spent a leisurely hour and a half or so, wandering around the outdoor passageways and courtyards.  Although the building is most famous for its epic main courtyard and orientation to the Pacific Ocean, I find the most compelling part to be the complex layering of spaces comprising the stairwells and balconies around the researchers' private studies.

So, without further ado, here are my pictures from that day (the first and last were by Eric, and the rest were mine.)

 

John Lautner Tour: Schwimmer House, 1982

Note: Nearly a year ago, there was a big to-do for John Lautner's 100th Birthday (and deservedly so, I must say). I toured 4 of his houses in L.A. and intended to blog about them all, but only 2 posts got finished.  The third post was started but never completed; now I have finished it.

I didn't want to completely re-write the beginning, so I am just appending this note at the top.

To see all my posts on Lautner, click here.

The Auditorium Building - Additional Images & Tour Info

Since it's less than two weeks until the Big Tour of the Auditorium Building, as well as the Louis-Sullivan's-Birthday-Edition of my talk on Viollet-le-Duc, Sullivan and Wright, and I'm in full-on final prep mode this week. I'm also very excited!

If you have no idea what I'm talking about with this tour, here's the deal: I'm leading a tour of one of the greatest extant works (the Auditorium Building) by the Godfather of Modern Architecture (Louis Sullivan), on Friday, September 2nd, starting at 2 pm.

The Auditorium Building is now owned by Roosevelt University, and we will be visiting several spaces that are part of Roosevelt that aren't generally available on a walk-in basis to the general public. We will also be seeing some spaces that are viewable on a walk-in basis, as well as visiting the Auditorium Theatre in a private, specially-arranged group tour.  All in all, we will be seeing as complete a picture of the entire building as one can have, and we will see Sullivan's architectural genius on full display.

To kick off the week, I thought I'd post a few additional pictures of the Auditorium Building from my visit there last month.  Let's start off with some of the Roosevelt University portions of the building that are not part of the Auditorium Theatre itself.

John Lautner Tour: Harpel House, 1956

The next house I bring you from last weekend's Lautner Tour is the Harpel House.  Nine years after the Jacobsen House, we can see that structure is clearly a major theme in John Lautner's work. Harpel displays his ongoing interest in developing a fully integrated and expressed structural system, for each project, as an important architectural value.

Harpel is located a few miles west of the Jacobsen House, just down Mulholland and on the opposite side about a block. From the road, there is a long driveway that goes uphill to a level pad where the house sits. You can get a pretty clear picture of the siting of the house from the Google Satellite view:

The Harpel House is the white bar at the lower right.  The octagon to the left is Lautner's famous Chemosphere, aka the Malin House. The small white circle just below the Harpel House is a Futuro which is apparently being restored by the Harpel's owner.

We weren't allowed to photograph inside the house, so I'll give an exterior tour and describe a few things I liked about the inside, using the floor plan for visuals.

John Lautner Tour: Jacobsen House, 1947

Last weekend I had the wonderful treat of participating in the special tour of John Lautner-designed homes that was jointly put on by the MAK Center and the John Lautner Foundation.  The whole thing was done in celebration of what would have been Lautner's 100th birthday on July 16th of this year.

I present them here in the reverse of the order in which I saw them on the tour, for a couple of reasons. First, by reversing the order, I will roughly present them in a chronological sequence from earlier career to later, which I think makes sense with this particular group of projects. Second, it makes little sense to lead with Sheats/Goldstein, since everything is pretty much anticlimactic after that.

One more introductory note: the MAK and Lautner folks who organized the tour did a great job, and produced a booklet for the tour with information about the houses. In my blog posts in this series, all the images are my own photographs, with the exception of one or two archival photos from the booklet, and the Lautner drawings which I scanned from the tour booklet.

The Jacobsen is on Multiview Drive, just below Mulholland Drive, overlooking the San Fernando Valley above Studio City and Universal City.  Multiview is a pretty good street for architecture; Schindler's wonderful Kallis House, with its butterfly roof and quirky stone fireplaces, is nearby on the same side of the street.

This is an early-career project for Lautner, dating from 1947.  According to Wikipedia, he had left Frank Lloyd Wright's employment and gone off on his own by that time, although he did not finally obtain his own architecture license until 1952.

So, this house is the work of an unlicensed individual who would have found himself in violation of California law had he have claimed to have been an architect. Ahem. Don't get me started.

The other houses on the tour were better concealed from the road; this house reveals itself pretty directly to you as you walk up the driveway:

A Little Pre-tour Lautner Fun at Curbed LA

I had a look at Curbed LA this morning to see if there was anything on there about the Lautner Tour, and I wasn't disappointed!

Curbed rarely disappoints.

Earlier this week they posted a neat little video of appearances by Lautner homes in movies. It's good fun, and they even included the sort-of appearance of the Chemosphere house on the Simpsons. Two houses from the tour are shown here, the Jacobsen and Sheats/Goldstein houses.



They have more info about the houses in the video over at Curbed.

Also don't forget to keep an eye on my live tour update posts, starting in a couple of hours, by following me at:
(pick one)
twitter.com/earl3d
earl3d.tumblr.com
facebook.com/earl3d.

I may even throw in some good stuff that's not even part of the tour!

Follow my Live Coverage of the John Lautner Home Tour

I'm very excited about the tour I'm participating in tomorrow, of 4 private homes designed by the great modern master John Lautner.

For the benefit of you, my readers (and because its fun!) I'm going to be covering the event with updates and photos throughout the day, through the magic of social media:

Twitter: follow me at twitter.com/Earl3d for updates with links to photos.
Facebook: friend me at facebook.com/Earl3d
Tumblr: Check out my new Tumblr blog for photo updates throughout the day at earl3d.tumblr.com.

I'll be posting the same updates to all 3 sites simultaneously, so don't feel like you have to keep track of all 3.

The Tumblr blog is going to be a bit of an experiment for me. Thus far, I'm thinking of it this way: Creatures of Prometheus is going to remain my primary blogging outlet for more thoughtful analysis, carefully written essays, photo essays, and the like; whereas I'll use the Tumblr blog for briefly captioned mobile uploads and live-tweeting (live tumbling?) or live-blogging of events that will benefit from lots of photography.

I also plan to take my trusty Nikon D-90 on the tour and get lots of 'good' photos of the houses too, and write up separate blog posts for each one, as I described the other day. One thing that throws a little wrench into this plan is that they have forbidden any photography at the Harpel House. Perhaps they will allow some exterior photography there. In any event, I can bring my sketchbook.

I got my ticket and wrist band in the mail today,

and my itinerary is as follows:

11:20 am- 12:00 pm Sheats/Goldstein House
12:05 pm - 12:45 pm Schwimmer House
1:35 pm - 2:05 pm Harpel House
2:15 pm - 2:45 pm Jacobsen House

Also, the Schindler House on Kings Road will be open all day, with free admission for tour-goers, so I'll likely stop by there after the tour, on my way home. That should be a great way to decompress, collect my thoughts, and contemplate the events of the day.

Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels: Quick Post

A couple months ago I took my students on a field trip, to the L.A. Cathedral, officially known as the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.  At some point, I would like to write a longer post on that building, as it is one of my local faves, and I have a lot to say about it. Today, however, we're just going to have a quick look at the way the sunlight and shadows move and play across the facade over the course of the day.

These were taken in early April, so the times given in my descriptions are PST.

Here is the Cathedral as it looked when I arrived, at 9:25 a.m.  It's not first thing as the sun rises, but the sun is still relatively low in the eastern sky, and the building is getting a more or less straight-on blast of sunlight.   You can see that the adobe-colored concrete is treated in 2 different ways: it has smooth, flat surfaces and horizontally banded surfaces.

Here is the horizontal banding up close, with a flat section also, so you can get a better idea about what it's like:

The portion of the building I am interested in for this discussion is this area above the main entrance.  The right section is flat concrete, and has a recessed window very high up.  The center section is horizontally banded and has a less-deeply recessed, larger window; the left section is also horizontally banded.  Note also that none of these surfaces are related to one another by right angles.  This affects the way the sunlight and shadows react with the building, as we shall see.  The photo below was taken at 9:31, and the shadows are pretty much the same as the one above

Here it is about 30 minutes later, at 9:58.  Notice how the flat surface is still in the shade, but it is no longer casting any shadow on the adjacent surface; the shadow line between the two surfaces has receded right into the corner.  Notice also how the next surface over, with the larger window, is just barely being grazed by sunlight, so that the lower edges of the horizontal bands are subtly dabbed in light.

Now (below) it is a bit later, 12:21 p.m.  Look at the fantastic play of light on the surface to the left!  The sun is high in the sky, causing long shadows on the horizontal panels, and the glass of the window is reflecting sunlight back onto the wall as well.  The flat surface to the right, by contrast, is getting a direct blast.

Here is a closeup, just a moment later, at 12:30.  Another nuance you can see, if you click to embiggen, is the way the small concrete wall segment above the large window is also reflecting a small but noticeable amount of light onto the adjacent darker surface, at the corner.

And finally, about an hour and a half later, here is how it looks at 2:07 p.m.  The surface to the left is in complete shadow, and the window reflection isn't doing its thing any more.  The surface in the middle is just getting enough sunlight to make little triangular tips on the edge.  One of the things I like about this building is that there are no right angles at all in the floor plan, and how that leads to this kind of richness and variety in the way the surfaces interact with the sunlight throughout the day.

It also leads to some really interesting things on the inside, but I'll have to leave that discussion for another day.  Have you been to the Cathedral?  Did you like it?  Hate it?  Let me know in the comments!