|
Louis I. Kahn: Building As Philosophy(Working title) By John Lobell Contents and excerpt are from book in progress. CONTENTS• PREFACE • INTRODUCTION • ARCHITECTURE AS PHILOSOPHY
• KAHN'S PHILOSOPHY OF ARCHITECTURE
• THEMES IN KAHN'S ARCHITECTURE
• THE BUILDINGS
• APPENDICES
EXCERPT2. KAHN'S PHILOSOPHY OF ARCHITECTURE 2.A. Philosophy Kahn's architectural search was built on continually questioning. Much of this questioning was done in dialogue with his colleagues and students, and as he slowly built a framework of ideas, he also developed his own vocabulary, including such phrases as Order, the Measurable and the Unmeasurable, Silence and Light, Desire, and Form and Design. He had his own meanings for these words that were not precise, as he spoke in poetic metaphor, but what he gave up in precision, he more than made up in depth of insight. 2.A.1. Order Modernism rejected monumentality as a glorification of a no longer relevant past, as an assertion of a dangerous nationalism, and as a celebration of non-democratic traditions. The totalitarian regimes of the 1930s and 1940s certainly encouraged this rejection. But by the mid 1940s, several architects began to question their stand against monumentality. They felt that there were situations requiring buildings with some kind of monumentality that would outlive the period that created them and express the highest cultural values. Kahn concurred, feeling that modernism was right in rejecting the outdated approaches of the Beaux Arts, but that it failed to discover a new monumentality underlying 20 th Century conditions. Kahn had experienced monumentality in the Beaux Arts architecture he had studied in school, and saw it lacking in the Modern Architecture he was practicing. And indeed Beaux Arts buildings were big, heavy, and rooted in the past, but they no longer addressed our modern conditions. In the mid 1940s Kahn wrote, "Monumentality in architecture may be defined as a quality, a spiritual quality inherent in a structure which conveys the feeling of its eternity, that it cannot be added to or changed." [Latour p 18 1944] But by the mid 1950s, Kahn had stopped speaking of monumentality, and started speaking instead of Order, seeing Order as a deeper and more archetypal expression of what he had been seeking in monumentality. He struggled to define Order, and eventually realized that it was not possible to do so precisely, saying, "I stopped by not saying what it is, just saying, 'Order is.'" While acknowledging the futility of precisely defining "Order," we will attempt to describe what Kahn means. Order is the way something exists with integrity, clarity, and rootedness, fully expressing its nature. Khan speaks of the Order of brick ("If you think of brick, and you're consulting the Orders..."), of a building ("What does this building want to be?" and "The building is the record of the making of the building."), of ourselves ("The man is the record of the making of the man.)", of nature ("The rose is the record of the making of the rose."), the creative process ("Silence, the Unmeasurable, desire to be, desire to express, the source of new need, meets Light, the Measurable, giver of all presence, by will, by law at a threshold which is inspiration, the sanctuary of art, the Treasury of Shadow."), and even of existence itself. Kahn came to realize that it was not monumentality that Modern Architecture was lacking, but Order, a rootedness in its own nature. If we were to describe Kahn's architectural quest in one phrase, we might say that it is an attempt to bring Order into Modern Architecture. Superficially, Kahn does this by rejecting lightweight steel construction in favor of heavy concrete evocative of ancient construction, but more profoundly he does it by looking for the inner essence of every aspect of the building, from the institution it houses, to its structure, to its materials, to its mechanical, to its details. It is how he does this that we exam in this book.
2.A.2. The Nature of Man: The Measurable and the Unmeasurable Kahn begins his approach to architecture with a new notion of Man. (Note that when we use the term "Man" rather than "Human Being" in our discussion of Kahn's philosophy, it is because that is the term he uses.) Finding the materialistic notion of the modernists inadequate, Kahn said that Man is made by nature, but is not nature. We are a part of nature, and to that extent we are Measurable and understandable by science. But we are also more than nature in that we are Human, as evidenced by our consciousness and our Desire. He refers to this part of Man as Unmeasurable. 2.A.3. Desire For Kahn, our needs define our natural selves, but our Desires define our Human selves. We need to eat and we need shelter. So do animals. But we Desire to achieve, to serve, to define and project ourselves. We desire to be a musician or a filmmaker or an architect. There are many desires, but Kahn says they can be organized under three great desires: the Desire to learn, the Desire to meet together, and the Desire for well-being. 2.A.4. Institutions In order to assure that we have the best opportunity to fulfill our Desires we create institutions. Kahn says that school began when a group of people were gathered under a tree and one of them was speaking. Later the others realized that the one speaking was a teacher and they wanted to assure that their children would have the same opportunity to learn from the speaker. Not wanting to trust to the chance of the group gathering again, they built a school to assure the experience. The school is an institution, and Kahn recognizes that institutions suffer from bureaucratic limitations, but he says that rather than abandon institutions because of their limitations, which would be nihilistic, we must continually struggle to improve them. Thus institutions grow out of Desire, and Desire defines our Humanness. 2.B. Architecture 2.B.1. Architecture as The Art of Institutions For Kahn, architecture is not the art of space (sculpture can encompass space) or of use (we use all kinds of tools) but of human institutions. If we think about it, all architecture serves institutions: the house serves the institution of residence; the school serves the institution of education; the laboratory serves the institution of science; the church serves the institution of religion. The "art" of architecture is in the insight the architect brings to the institution. For example, in designing a school, the architect might address such issues as: What is education? Is education answerable to the individual or society? Should education look back to tradition, or forward to new needs? Good architects struggle with such questions, and we see their responses in their buildings.
2.B.2. Form and Design Through the Beaux Arts tradition Kahn knew an architecture that not only had a classical vocabulary, but also a solidity that modernism lacked. But Kahn realized that the Beaux Arts was no longer appropriate to his times and he that he must restore Order to architecture not by going back to an historical past, but by going outside of time to what he called Beginnings or Volume Zero. In his theory of mythology Joseph Campbell refers to "universal forms" and "local transformations," or what we might call archetypes and manifestations. An example of this approach is found in religion, in which an archetype might be a dying and resurrecting god, born miraculously and associated with a cross. In manifestation, it might be Christ for the Christians, but also Osiris for the Egyptians, Tammuz for the Babylonians, Orpheus and Dionysius for the Greeks, Buddha for the Indians, and Quetzalcoatl for the Meso-Americans. Thus the archetype is a pattern that stands outside time and culture, existing in Volume Zero, while the circumstantial is the manifestation of the archetype within a given time and culture, taking on the cloak of that time and culture. Kahn uses the terms Form and Design for a similar dichotomy. Kahn begins the design of a building with the question, "What does this building want to be?" The answer gives him the Form, which is the archetypal nature of the building. In the case of a chapel, the answer Kahn gives is, "First you have a sanctuary, and the sanctuary is for those who want to kneel. Around the sanctuary is an ambulatory, and the ambulatory is for those who are not sure, but who want to be near. Outside is a court for those who want to feel the presence of the chapel. And the court has a wall. Those who pass the wall can just wink at it." This gives Kahn the "Form" of the chapel, its archetypal nature before the encounter with the circumstantial. The encounter with the circumstantial, under the creative will of the architect, leads to the "Design." There are some interesting implications to the question, "What does this building want to be?" One is that the building, even though it has not yet been built, or even designed, has some kind of existence. The other is that a building--an inanimate thing--can "want" something. Under his diagram of a seed split open to show the germ, Louis Sullivan wrote, "The germ is the real thing. Within its delicate mechanism lies the seat of identity, the function which is to find its true identity in form." And Frank Lloyd Wright wrote: "Deeper than the truths of Philosophy or the laws of morality is the sense of honor. What is honor? Not the rules of a code--but the nature of honor. What would be the honor of a brick? That in the brick which makes the brick a brick." Thus what Kahn calls "Form," Sullivan calls "function" and Wright calls "honor." It is the inner existence-will--that which makes the thing what it is. We might think of an acorn as "wanting to be" an oak tree. We know that the acorn has DNA inside it that contains the information to make the oak tree, and we could say that "wanting to be" is a metaphor for the power of the DNA. But these architects speak of brick and steel, which have no DNA. Sullivan asks how can it be that steel, an inanimate substance, can have a will. He answers that of course it cannot. But it can in the creative presence of the architect. Now comes the question, was there ever anything in the brick and steel, or does all of this come from the architect? We remember that Michelangelo said the he did not create his sculptures, but that the figures were already in the stone and he just released them. Were the figures really there? The phenomenological philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty sees the human being as a body-subject that organizes and gives meaning to its world. Quantum physics shows that some particles do not gain their characteristics until they are observed. In this light we might see the creative theories of Michelangelo, Sullivan, Wright, and Kahn as not just metaphors, but as philosophical positions about the nature of reality that have parallels to positions in phenomenological philosophy and quantum physics.
|
 |
|