Lars Müller Publishers 2010/2011 Architecture Design Photography ...

Michael Merrill
LOuIS KAhn:
DrAwIng TO fInD OuT
The Dominican Motherhouse
and the Patient Search
for Architecture
“while drawing, I’m always waiting
for something to happen.
I don’t want it to happen too
quickly, though.”
Louis Kahn
nEw
Design: Integral Lars Müller
30 × 24 cm, 11 ¾ × 9 ½ in, 240 pages
233 illustrations, hardcover
2010, ISBN 978-3-03778-221-7, English
EUR 59.– GBP 60.– USD / CAD 85.–
Like few others, Louis Kahn cultivated the craft
of drawing as a means to architecture. His personal
design drawings are unique in the twentieth
century. Over two hundred – mostly unpublished –
drawings are woven together with a lively and
informed commentary into an intimate biography
of an architectural idea. Unfolding around the
iconic project for the Dominican Motherhouse
(1965 – 69, unbuilt) the drawings form a narrative
which provides compelling insights into Louis
Kahn’s mature culture of designing. Fascinating
beauty, the drawings open a new and stimulating
perspective on one of the past century’s great
architects.
Michael Merrill
LOuIS KAhn:
On ThE ThOughTfuL MAKIng
Of SPACES
The Dominican Motherhouse and
a Modern Culture of Space
Design: Integral Lars Müller
16.5 × 24 cm, 6 ½ × 9 ½ in, 240 pages
215 illustrations, softcover
2010, ISBN 978-3-03778-220-0, English
EUR 35.– GBP 35.– USD / CAD 55.–
irregular silhouette, its superimposed diagonal and orthogonal orders,
and its folded peripheries — being much more complex than either of
these two-dimensional readings would suggest. ) The final scheme
offers its inhabitants choices between ambulatory and linear patterns
of movement. The three great communal rooms, being at once usable
space and “ circulation,” are unconventionally skewered together over
the entire length of the building by a great diagonal enfilade. The corner-as-connecter
is Kahn’s provocative answer to the problem of the
otherwise “ dead ” corner of the square in plan: “ I discovered at Bryn
Mawr that you can connect a room over its corner.” Partially buffered
from the communal spaces by the thickened walls of “ servant ”
spaces, the ambulatories provide access to the dormitory rooms.
The linear and ambulatory systems, in combination with a series of
both extroverted and hidden stairs, give the students the choice of
both exposed and hidden routes through the building, the choice
between “ remote or direct association ” with cohabitants and with
those communal “ availabilities ” the house has to offer.
The Dominican Motherhouse represents a special, and especially
dense, manifestation of a “ society of rooms ” plan. We have already
studied in the narrative the earliest bipolar scheme, with its hermetic
cells and its communal “ Forum of Availabilities,” the great ambulatory
and courts being the means of both spacing and connecting the individual
spaces. By the development of the fourth and final version, the original
theme had evolved into something decidedly less conventional;
instead of being presented with a choice of access to various rooms from
the vantage point of a generous and unprogrammed “ space of appearance
” ( as at Fort Wayne, Ahmedabad, et al. ), we are now, from our position
within a single discrete room, presented with the choice of movement
in any one of at least three directions. Something like an “ ordered
labyrinth ” is the result. An inversion has taken place: the matrix
has replaced the counterform and virtually the entire complex has
become an “architecture of connection.” While the Kahnian imperative
of free choice has remained, that of “ indirect association ” has collapsed.
Robin Evans’ description of Raphael’s Villa Madama reverberates:
“Once inside it is necessary to pass through one room to the next, then
to the next, to traverse the building. Where passages and stairways
The Second Scheme: August – September 1966
While the June meeting was largely affirmative, it did not take long
for the first harbingers of difficulty to cloud the optimistic beginning.
In September, Mother Emmanuel, likely developing a sense for the
project’s true dimensions, wrote Kahn to express her concerns and
to remind him of the congregation’s limited budget. High interest
rates and inflation had added considerably to the burden of financing
such a large project during the mid-sixties, and without a reliable cost
estimate, she was uncertain of how to go forward.
After receiving Mother Mary Emmanuel’s letter, Kahn and Polk
soon began to reconsider their design. Attempting to press the first
plan’s parti into a more compact package, the architects developed
a second scheme over September. The monastery’s position
and orientation on the site remain the same, but now responds to
the sisters’ suggestion that the combined main and service entrance
drive now lead in from Bishop Hollow Road. This lessens the sense of
extended threshold when compared with the earlier approach through
the orchard. Gone as well is the elegant separation of visitor and service
access. On the other hand, the new monastery now has its own
address, no longer accessed by driving past the manor house. On this
point Kahn and the sisters were in agreement, and the new route of
approach would remain for the duration of the design.
In response to the new approach, the entry tower — now octago-
nal in plan — shifts from the west side of the complex to the east. In
an attempt to tighten up the plan, a narrower main gallery skewers
through the tower, connecting the communal spaces and terminating
in the school and the living quarters. The first version’s generous system
of cloisters has been compacted by pressing the building blocks
tightly against each other; gone are the figure-ground obscuring “ hollow
columns ” and “ water gardens ” of the earlier scheme. The direct
relationship between chapel and refectory — favored by both architect
and the sisters — remains. An intriguing moment in the plan is the
chapel, where a square rotated within a square creates poché for ancillary
spaces such as confessionals and sacristy as well as connecting
neighboring rooms. Whereas in the previous version the governing
geometry may be derived from both program and relationship to the
topography, here an “ irrational ” geometry takes over in which both
internal parti and external relationships are considerably less lucid
than before.
While this squeezing has wrung almost 35,000 square feet ( 3,252 m )
out of the plan ( now measuring 131,600 square feet [ 12,226 m ] and
landscape: the Texas plain of Fort Worth. Raking, horizontal, and
generously shade-giving in the stark Texas sun, the long-vaulted
Kimbell sympathizes with the extended lines of these dry flatlands.
Like the Salk Institute, the materials — here concrete, travertine,
and lead roofing — with their subdued colors and toothy textures,
were chosen for their bleached, archaic presence in the strong sun.
Details are kept flush to emphasize the simple shapes in sunlight,
revealing subtle tectonic relief only at closer range. It has been suggested
by Lawrence Speck that the long multiple vaults are references
to the bow-topped Texas livestock sheds which are so common
around the Fort Worth area, while the museum’s great loggias may be
seen as inter pretations of the vernacular domestic Texas porch.
Whether Kahn consciously abstracted from these antecedents remains
a source of speculation, as he never spoke of the building in this way.
( Although later in Texas, the project for the De Menil Collection
seems to wink even more explicitly at local domestic architecture. )
What is certain is that the Kimbell demonstrates a strong sense of its
locale — a deep insight into its atmosphere, its colors, its topography,
its vernacular — without the vaguest hint of the Southwestern vernacular
pastiche which has become so common in this part of America.
( This ur-sense of place would later lead the artist Donald Judd to ponder
if the Kimbell was not, perhaps, the first building to be erected in
Fort Worth, built by an earlier — more civilized — culture than the one
now living there. )
What these four buildings begin to intimate is that while Kahn’s
mature architecture is not “about ” contextualism in the style- emulating
and motif-seeking postmodernist sense of the word ( nor “ about ” landscape
in the contemporary, literalist, “ building-as-landscape ” sense of
the word ), it is indeed very much about gathering, focusing, and revealing
the conditions of its context. This revealing may take place at the
micro-scale of the particular site: the diagonal geometries of Erdman
Hall and the Fisher House may be discussed in purely formal or in
phenomenal terms. Anyone who has visited these buildings knows
the undeniably physical experience of these diagonal foils on their
sloping sites, how their prow-like shapes exaggerate and intensify
the sense of the immediate topography. ( Richard Serra’s site-specific
“ elevations ” come to mind. ) This revealing may — as in Angola — have
to do with atmosphere, may be experienced in the way that sun, wind,
2 Architecture 3
nEw
It was not by chance that Louis Kahn’s move
into his profession’s spotlight coincided with the
crisis of modern architecture: representing, as his
work increasingly did, those aspects of space
which modernism had so ambitiously removed
from its program. Kahn’s rethinking of modern
architecture’s paradigm of space belongs to his
most important contributions to the métier. In
tracing the genesis of the unbuilt project for the
Dominican Motherhouse (1965–69), we are given
a close-up view of Kahn at work on a few fundamental
questions of architectural space: seeking
the sources of its meaning in its social, morphological,
landscape and contextual dimensions. This
rich and multivalent project opens the way to a second
section, which sheds new light on several of
major works in a timely reappraisal of Kahn’s work.
MICHAEL MERRILL, Dr.-Ing., is a practicing
architect in the USA and Germany and assistant
professor for Architectural Design at the
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.