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.)

 

Lou Kahn + Some Thoughts on Drawing

Architecture.  Making buildings.  Hopefully, with enough effort, the building will be worthwhile in the end. I'll stand there and admire it, and hopefully get to take a few photos of it, before turning it over to the owner. Maybe I will get to return and visit from time to time. Sometimes projects are far away, and you may not get the opportunity to go back, ever.

When you look at a particular building, all you can see is the finished product. There are no semi-erased lines on the floor showing where the walls would have been, before the architect revised the plans. Architecture is a process that leads to a product. To the viewing public, there is only the product. But to the architect, it is all about the process, and once the process is complete, the architect moves on.

One of the things I enjoy most about teaching drawing to young architects is that the process of creating architecture is fundamentally based on drawing. It's what we do. Novelists write, painters paint, architects draw.

Drawing is the primary means by which we communicate our ideas. When the students pin up their final designs for critique at the end of the semester, I think it's important to point out the examples of students who have design concepts that are beyond their ability to depict via their drawings. This gives me the opportunity to give one of my favorite mini-lectures: That your ideas are only as good as your ability to communicate them. It doesn't matter, in the end, how brilliant your ideas are, or how brilliant you think they are. If you can't communicate them with the world in an intelligible way, you fail. 

We also draw to study the world around us. This type of investigative drawing is similar to, but distinct from, design drawing. There is an exhibition running through July 1 at Lori Brookstein Fine Art, in New York, of some drawings by the great architect Lou Kahn.  The drawings on exhibit are sketches from his travels, of the 'investigative' type.  They strike me as being much more about the process of investigation and discovery, than about having anything to do with making a picture to be framed and hung on a gallery wall. The gallery has the exhibit available online; I encourage you to click through the link and check it out. Better yet, go see it for yourself if you can.

I think if more people saw drawing as a process of investigation and discovery, and less about trying to make a particularly nice looking picture (and by whose standard, anyway?) you would see more people out and about with their sketch pads and pencils in hand.  Drawing is a language of communication -- whether you are projecting your own fantasies to show others, or privately exploring the world around you. Each of us has a unique, individual voice, which can only be discovered by taking pencil or pen in hand and doing the work.

Imagine how the world opens up to an adult who is illiterate and then learns to read and write. I would argue that there is a similar expansion of one's life available to the person who is willing to make the effort to discover his own visual voice, and learn to use it to express himself.