Arts and Letters

Louis I. Kahn, born in Estonia in February 1901, remained throughout his life in the United States an architectural outsider. Though at his death he was the greatest American architect, he was never in the main stream.

He was unlike any architect of his time in rejecting the mainline modern establishment in architecture design: not for him the "glass box," the truncated square towers, the minimalist rectangles. He preferred Welsh castles; he reminded us of the eighteenth-century romantics Boullée and Ledoux. His greatest work, the capitol group at Dacca in Bangladesh, was laid out in a complex symmetry reminiscent of nothing so much as the old vast Beaux Arts monumentality of the nineteenth century.

One cannot pin him down, each building was a surprise; a new juxtaposition of shapes; new evocations of history: among his great works, the closely clustered towers of the Richards Laboratory in Philadelphia, remind the viewer of medieval San Gimignano. The vast stairs of Dacca can only be compared to the scale of ancient Persepolis. The over-scale round holes cut into the brick walls in Bangladesh have only been seen before in the work of fantasts of the French Revolution. The long silver vaults of the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth could be Romanesque.

He broke once and for all the mould of the International Style that many today think was a rigid straightjacket that inhibited imagination. He was an original; a maverick.

He built very, very little for such a well-known figure. Rather than the five or six hundred buildings of Wright, Kahn's great works can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Although he was always a leader, all of his monuments were built late in life; most in the last decade of his life. Up to that time his prime fame was that of guru, a non-building teacher with a minimum practice.

He was an inspirer, a teacher, almost a pied-piper. We all paid heed when he spoke. His words were magic to a generation overfed on functionalist dogma; "What does the brick want to be? It wants to be an arch." "Brick is stingy, concrete is generous." Design he called "the thoughtful making of spaces." He believed "the future is today."

It was for his teaching that he achieved fame, but his buildings will make him remembered.

He belonged to no school, he founded no school. Unlike Frank Lloyd Wright, he created no single domestic style. Unlike Richardson, he started no Richardsonian tradition. Unlike Mies van der Rohe in Chicago, he did not cover a city with his and his students' works.

But he was a hero and we architects will always regard him as one of the handful of American greats.