in 1974, the man who was (arguably) the greatest architect of the 20th century died in a men's room in Penn Station. His body lay unclaimed for three days in the morgue.
Anyone who has been to Penn Station in New York City (ie half of America) must understand the sheer grotesque irony of that. There cannot be a more irreverent, or even profane, place for an architect to die. Not only does Penn Station defy any thought of architecture as an important human need, which makes it the ultimate abomination from the architectural point of view, but it is a desecration too, in that one of the most marvelous buildings ever built in New York City, Old Penn station, was razed to make way for it.
For this picture of Old Penn Station, please to to Progressive Historians:
http://www.progressivehistorians.com...
http://www.nyc-archi...
http://www.imdb.com/...
New Penn Station hasn't gotten any better with age. I remember it as my introduction to New York City. The best I can say for it is that the City itself looked like Heaven in comparison.
Still, the destruction of Old Penn Station was a breakthrough for historic preservation in America. It galvanized the historic preservation community across the nation, and - at the same time - it offered a visceral and undeniable example of the willful destructiveness that sometimes posed as urban renewal in the fifties, sixties and into the seventies. It did for historic preservation what George W. Bush has done for progressivism.
Growing up in Boston, I became involved in historic preservation struggles in the eighties. It must be hard to imagine this today, because historic preservation is now widely understood, even by 'developers', as crucial to the vitality of urban centers, even measured strictly in economic terms. But as late as the eighties, historic preservation was still a hard battle, a very hard battle. Old Penn Station was the icon that remained unforgettable and therefore essential.
But in Boston, where I grew up, we had our own legendary architectural desecrations. One was Jordan Marsh, the beautiful and genteel old Downtown department store rubbed out to make way for the architectural travesty that put the Box in Big Box. According to one story, one of the workers involved in tearing down the old Jordan Marsh building entertained himself one lunch time by grabbing a sledge hammer and giving the century old carved heads decorating the keystones of the old building a bash or two, one after the other.
The desecration I remember with the most horror involved one of the oldest and most beautiful Catholic Churches in Boston, the Church of the Immaculate Conception, built in the 1860's.
The Jesuits wanted to destroy the interior of this church because of declining attendance. They thought, possibly rightly, but rather blindly, that it would do better subdivided into offices. The surrounding community, on the other hand, was very aesthetically minded and wanted to preserve what was obviously one of the oldest and finest Catholic church interiors in the country. Enraged, the Jesuits locked the doors of the church, just before the Boston committee for historic preservation was poised to act, and took sledgehammers to it. I wonder if they used one of the sledgehammers from Jordan Marsh, out of a sense of symbolic solidarity with acts of mad destruction! ;)
http://www.adoremus....
Jesuits can be very bookish types, I guess. Perhaps to some of them, a little artistic and historic desecration was an act of glorification. Some Religious believe that art and history come between us and God. For me, and for many others in Boston, it was Old Penn Station, all over again.
The battle continues, btw, as the Catholic Church in Boston and elsewhere seems at times eager to destroy churches that have been community landmarks forever. Look at this one, torn down recently, a beautiful local landmark from the late 1800s in Lynn, Massachusettes; destroyed by those who claim to honor God.
http://www.nationalt...
I see such destruction as a horrendous perversion, perhaps even intended by the Catholic hierarchy as a way of punishing the entire community of Greater Boston, and elsewhere, for daring to challenge the Catholic Church hierarchy over priests who were sexual predators. I have no proof for that allegation; I just think it's obvious, and it strikes me as typical of how the Catholic hierarchy thinks. Like George Bush, their response to a challenge, however reasonable or necessary that challenge may be, is often very in-your-face.
Look at what the Church did with Cardinal Law, the prelate associated with the Boston Archdiocese sexual predator coverups; he was transferred to one of the most prominent and desirable jobs in Rome, at Saint Maria Maggiore. What can you call that but an in-your-face to the Boston Catholic community?
http://www.washingto...
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Well, from the death of Old Penn Station in New York arose an envigorated preservation movement which reshaped urban architecture all across Amerian in the last decades of the twentieth century.
After the assault on The Church of the Immaculate Conception in Boston, I saw a similar affect in Boston: the historic preservation community became more determined to stop historical and cultural philistines from laying waste to the city's urban fabric. From darkness came light.
The movie My Architect also describes a kind of rebirth. Building on the story of what had to be as lonely a death as a person could have, in a Penn Station bathroom in New York City; a lonely and illegitimate son, Nathaniel Kahn - who barely knew his father - made the beginnings of a journey towards love, compassion and understanding.
I think Nathaniel Kahn had to have a lot of courage to undertake to learn about his father through the remembrances of others and through his own personal explorations of the great buildings Louis I. Kahn left behind him.
Each insight he would gain would, at the same time, be an arrow in his heart and a question: 'why did my father not share this great love with me?'
It was, after all, love that set Louis I. Kahn's buildings apart.
http://www.greatbuil...
I can attest to this personally. Yale, where I went to school, has two of Kahn's finest buildings: the Art building (also the Art Museum) and the British Art Center. Those two buildings are not much alike, yet I love them both. The Art building is all rough concrete and industrial style windows. It feels like a good place to whack around with paint and materials and emotions, and yet it has a great dignity and strength to it. It embraces work in the midst of struggle.
The BAC, by contrast, is a kind of mausoleum. It is both austere and a little fussy, earthy and full of light. It is truly a place to honor work of the past.
There are showier places to make art and to show art, but there are none that honor art so well.
I read once that Jerry Garcia's children resented the love so many people felt for Jerry, because they could not love him that way, and they wanted to. He had been present to others so much, and not to them. Nathanial Kahn bears this emotion too, in his film. He interviews some of the heavyweights of recent Architecture history, such as Moshe Safdie, I.M.Pei, Frank Gehry and Philip Johnson, along with various less well known coworkers and peers, and even Kahn's other children.
http://www.greatbuil...
http://www.greatbuil...
One senses that each of these people wishes they could somehow give Nathaniel Kahn more of Louis Kahn. They give him what they can and this alone makes it very clear that Nathaniel is not just trying to make a buck or a reputation off his father's memory, that his sincerity and need touches a deep chord in others. Nathaniel evokes Louis for them, and in turn they invoke Louis for him.
One senses too that they remember Louis Kahn with wonderment, that they remember him for the burning commitment he had to his work, that it was something that went beyond what they could imagine. Philip Johnson, a famous and not particularly humble man, declares:
All of my buildings combined don't add up to his three or four buildings... He was his own artist."
http://www.greatbuil...
I.M.Pei points out that Louis Kahn lacked the salesmanship that it takes to be a financially successful architect. He did not hesitate to alienate a client who could not understand his ideas.
http://www.greatbuil...
Louis Kahn was probably most similar to Le Corbusier as an architect, in that he combined modernism with a sensibility steeped in the monuments and ruins of ancient architecture, but he was both more austere and less brutal than Le Corbusier.
http://www.greatbuil...
Louis Kahn had Frank Lloyd Wright's delicate sense of the relationship between detail and plastic form, yet without Wright's preciousness.
http://www.greatbuil...
One of Louis Kahn's collaborators in Kahn's final and most magnificent project, the government buildings in Bangladesh, calls him a "guru". That may be the best single word to describe him. He was born the son of immigrants in Philadephia, but he became a man of the world, because of the reach of his inspiration.
http://en.wikipedia....
Because Louis Kahn was a man who put all of himself into his creations, who left nothing ungiven, Nathaniel Kahn's journey to find his father turned out not to be a journey to nowhere. It is, though, a journey with awkward moments. During one sequence, in which Nathaniel is filming one of his father's early buildings, he has to listen to people complaining about the building, but, more touchingly, it's evident that he's not sure how to photograph his father's building. He sets up different shots and can't seem to find one that is telling.
"I remember the time my father bought me a pitchback ? one of those things where you throw a baseball at the pitcher and it bounces it back to you. It's the kind of thing that you have to play by yourself. It served as a kind of metaphor for our relationship," says Kahn.
http://www.chicagofi...
As the film progresses, roughly chronologically, through Louis Kahn's buildings, Nathaniel Kahn's ability to "find" the architecture grows palpably. In one particularly awesome and austere complex, the Saulk Institute, Nathaniel rollerskates in the seemingly endless courtyard. It is a touching expression of his determination to find his own relationship, in his own way, with his father's work.
By the end of My Architect, Nathaniel Kahn is clearly on a roll. He lavishes time on Louis Kahn's largest, last and most ambitious project: the government buildings in Bangladesh.
http://intro2arch.ar...
http://archnet.org/...
Again and again, Nathaniel and his camera approach this complex of buildings from different vantage points; studying it not just in terms of physical context, but also through conversations with people involved in the making or the use of the complex. Nathaniel Kahn seems ready to rejoice and dwell, for a time, in this approaching, as a metaphor for his larger journey - as if to say that the journey is no longer an expression of what he has lost, but of what he finally knows he is finding.
Some time is spent exploring the corridors and detailings of the outer areas of the complex.
Then Nathaniel Kahn takes us to the central part of the complex, the hall of Bangladesh's national assembly. It is a vision of light and height, of gathering and separation, of containment and infinity, of reason and of deeper stirrings. Lous Kahn himself put it this way:
"In the assembly I have introduced a light-giving element to the interior of the plan. If you see a series of columns you can say that the choice of columns is a choice in light. The columns as solids frame the spaces of light. Now think of it just in reverse and think that the columns are hollow and much bigger and that their walls can themselves give light, then the voids are rooms, and the column is the maker of light and can take on complex shapes and be the supporter of spaces and give light to spaces. I am working to develop the element to such an extent that it becomes a poetic entity which has its own beauty outside of its place in the composition. In this way it becomes analogous to the solid column I mentioned above as a giver of light."
"It was not belief, not design, not pattern, but the essence from which an institution could emerge..."
http://www.greatbuil...
http://archnet.org/...
http://archnet.org/...
Nathaniel Kahn says of his movie:
" It's important to me that, though it comes from a very painful and confusing place, in the end it's really a life affirming story. That people watch and can see that it is possible to achieve redemption through love. That no matter how long it's been and how much mystery there is behind someone they love, that they can go out and they can find those answers and find new meanings," says Kahn.
http://www.chicagofi...
Nathaniel Kahn found his father.
We should all be so lucky.
http://www.myarchite...