Abstract
The stature of Louis I. Kahn as one of the great architects of the twentieth century rests, to a substantial degree, on his observations about daylight and how he employed it in his buildings. His spoken observations were often poetic, leaning toward the mystical. But his key insight into daylight was derived from the very pragmatic need to respond to a real condition, that of intense solar glare in Luanda, Angola, for which he prepared a design for a United States Consulate in 1961. In fact, his solution was inspired by Luandans themselves. Kahn saw that Luandans avoided looking at the glare of the bright sky, preferring to look toward blank walls, which diffused the intense sunlight. Kahn’s design solution located walls with simple, geometrical openings in the path of light so that inhabitants would experience daylight but only after it was softened by architectural surfaces. Kahn referred to this strategy as “wrapping buildings in ruins” and he employed it, in more advanced ways, in later, better known buildings. In this regard, Luanda is the seminal building in Kahn’s use of daylight.
A reexamination of the consulate design and a consideration of Kahn’s later buildings encourages us to rethink Kahn’s intentions and achievements with daylight. Interestingly, a review of the unbuilt consulate suggests that the solar orientation of the Consulate is less than ideal—a 90-degree rotation of the building in plan offers better daylighting control. But this is not to denigrate Kahn’s insights or achievements: Kahn’s purpose, his interest in daylight, was never about the achievement of target illumination levels nor on clever lighting effects. His interest was in how his understanding of daylight might organize space for human purposes. Kahn realized that his knowledge of daylight could be deployed—not just for the sake of lighting—but as a fundamental generator of architectural design from the very beginning of the process. In doing so, his buildings reveal the spatial implications of the performance of daylight, based on orientation to sun and sky and with reference to climate, but aimed at human needs.
The architectural results of his lighting strategies enabled Kahn to satisfy his other interests (those that may have competed with his Luandan daylight strategy) such as the need to honor the social aspirations of common people and how then to establish a new monumentality that commemorated these desires. In producing his daylight-generated designs, beginning with Luanda and into his later career, Kahn also revealed much about himself, his own aspirations and persona, his sense of himself. In his architecture and through the incorporation of the requirements of daylighting, Louis Kahn presented a resolution of sorts: first, between the inner lives of working people and their greater collective aspirations; and second, between the conflicts of the inner man (Kahn) and his own public persona. Louis Kahn’s buildings represent the highest aspirations of the people he built for and the best versions he could present of himself.
Keywords
daylight, architecture, Kahn, glare, design process
Introduction: The Thought of a Wall
In 1961, Louis I. Kahn described his visit to Luanda, Angola for which he was preparing a design proposal for a U.S. Consulate complex consisting of two separated residence and chancellery buildings. (Figure 1) In particular, Kahn recalled the “marked glare in the atmosphere,” saying “Looking at a window was unbearable because of the glare. The dark walls framing the brilliant light outside made you very uncomfortable.” [[1]] Glare, as Kahn knew, is not absolute brightness. It is the condition in which the eye tries but is unable to adjust itself to both bright light and darkness in the field of vision at the same time. This results in an inability to see clearly or comfortably. In Luanda, Kahn sought to develop an architectural response to this condition. He found his response, not surprisingly, in the everyday behavior of Luandans. Kahn said,
“I …noticed that when people worked in the sun—and many of them did—the native population…usually faced the wall and not the open country or the open street. Indoors, they would turn their chair toward the wall and do whatever they were doing by getting the light indirectly from the wall.” [[2]]
Figure 1. Sketch by Louis I. Kahn of his design for the United States Consulate Buildings in Luanda, Angola.
Kahn found himself doing the same thing as the Luandans, looking at daylight as it was captured on wall surfaces:
“I …noticed that buildings which were very close to windows–were very pleasant to look at from the windows…That gave me the thought of a wall a small distance in front of every window…One doesn’t feel like having the view cut away, so I thought of placing openings in the wall.” [[3]]
Kahn’s simple observation led him to propose walls whose primary purpose, instead of supporting the roof or providing enclosure, would be to catch daylight. In practice, his proposal meant placing an additional layer of wall and space around a building to protect inhabitants from intense sunlight or bright sky. Because of the wall’s essential independence from other tasks and the absence of framed glazing, Kahn referred to this strategy as “wrapping buildings with ruins.”
“I thought of the beauty of ruins…the absence of [window] frames…of things which nothing lives behind…and so I thought of wrapping ruins around buildings; you might say encasing a building in a ruin so that you look through the wall which had its apertures by accident. But in this case, you’d want to formalize these openings, and I felt that this would be an answer to the glare problem.” [[4]]
Kahn’s wrapping wall was not simply a shading device. It was intended to catch daylight that would be seen on its surface and would then and diffuse the light inward. Kahn proposed concrete panels as a wrapping wall at Luanda, walls whose finely textured, light gray surfaces would have absorbed roughly half of the incoming light and reflected the remaining half toward the interior. [[5]] Inside, people would live and work in spaces illuminated in the resulting comfortable light. And even if inhabitants saw a slice of the bright sky or sun, the softly lighted adjacent wall surface would, by providing an intermediate level of reflected light, reduce the contrast in brightness and minimize glare.
For Louis Kahn, certainly from this point on, light had to strike walls. Kahn understood that we do not see light hovering in space. We occasionally see light as it emanates from a source, but more often we see it when it is reflected from a material or surface. For example, we see “skylight” as it is reflected by particles (material) in the earth’s atmosphere—this reflective activity is what we call “the sky”—and more significantly for architecture, we see light reflected by walls, floors, and ceilings placed in the path of daylight. Kahn made architecture in order to see light, enabling his architecture to make its own light, fashioned from that provided by the sun and sky.
The space between the building and the wrapping wall became an inhabitable, daylighted zone, a place in which the diffused light could be reflected and seen. In this way, the nested composition logically evolved to emphasize the transition from outside and public space to inside and private space; it created a threshold. In Kahn’s hands, the architecture became a source of light, in condition in which daylight and inhabitable space collaborated and became inseparable. The new layer of space, the zone in which light is mediated, provided the kind of spatial concentration that makes us feel suitably protected while simultaneously exposed, and enabling us to participate in the inside and outside world at the same time.
The question is, in his proposal for Luanda, Kahn’s first effort at employing his wrapping strategy, how effective would it have been? In order for us to evaluate this, we need to understand glare and evaluate Kahn’s daylighting strategy with reference to the sun conditions in Luanda.
Mitigating Glare in Equatorial Sun
One of the great propositions of early twentieth century architecture was that we could bring daylight into interiors by replacing load-bearing walls with columns and beams and by replacing exterior walls with envelopes of glass. This enabled interior space to be filled with daylight. The problem was that when sunlight penetrates unprotected glass, heat and glare are introduced in summer, and cold and glare are introduced in winter months. Kahn was aware of this problem and questioned the solution endorsed by his then better-known professional contemporaries in the 1960’s, Edward Durrell Stone and Minoru Yamasaki. Kahn observed that
“Some of the buildings used piece work, grillwork…in front of windows…(the grillwork) was dark against the light; it gave you just a multiple pattern of glare…little pin points…of glare against the dark ribs of the grillwork. And that tended to be unsatisfactory. “[[6]]
Patterns of organized glare are acceptable in some situations, for example in the Mosque at Cordoba where daylight is incorporated into the intricate geometric patterns of wooden grillwork, partly for decorative reasons, and the grill is not prominent in our field of vision. But for general living and work conditions, glare is unacceptable. It causes the pupil in the eye to contract, admitting less light to protect the eye. The result of less light is less vision: glare is blinding. When this visual distress is added to warm air and the heat conducted by direct solar radiation, as in Luanda, the discomfort is multiplied.
Sun paths are significantly different from those conditions in the temperate latitudes. Over the course of a year, in Luanda and at other latitudes on or near the equator, the sun moves through both the northern and southern skies. The sun moves through the southern sky during December (summer) and through the northern sky after the March solstice until nearly the September solstice. These paths provide very high angle direct sun to both north and south elevations of a building. In the hours just after sunrise and before sunset, the angle of the sun above the horizon is low and directed onto the east and west elevations. Structures in these regions receive significant direct sunlight from all sides, and this calls for specific architectural responses.
The Consulate and the Residence
In fact, high sun, whether from south or north, is fairly easy to manage. In his design for the Consulate, Kahn proposed a parasol strategy, a “sun roof,” as he called it, a trellis structure suspended above what he called the “rain roof,” the roof structure and its weather resistant roofing material. The interception of direct sun by the sun roof and the air passing through the interstitial space would have helped the interior of the Consulate buildings avoid a substantial amount of direct solar radiation, heat and light. Kahn said,
I feel that in bringing the rain roof and the sun roof away from each other, I was telling the man on the street his way of life. I was explaining the atmospheric conditions of wind, the conditions of light, the conditions of sun and glare to him. If I use a device—a clever kind of device—it would only seem like a design to him—something pretty.
I didn’t want anything pretty. I wanted to have a clear statement of a way of life [[7]]…I thought wouldn’t it be good if one could…find an architectural expression for the problems of glare without adding devices to a window…but rather by developing… [an] architecture…which somehow tells the story of the problems of glare. [[8]]
The trellis would have been highly effective, but in other respects, Kahn’s strategy remained underdeveloped. Typically, high angle sun is effectively shaded by roof overhangs, which are sometimes developed into porches or galleries. his strategy also permits low angle sun to enter and warm the building in cool seasons. However, Kahn does not use this approach at the north and south faces of the Consulate structures. Instead, he proposed nearly blank north and south elevations, with no fenestration and clipped his trellis, the sun roof, so that it ends in alignment with the exterior walls and cannot shade the north or south facades.
Kahn’s wrapping walls create porches (at the ambassador’s residence) and porch-like gaps (at the chancellery) and these spaces are protected overhead by his sun trellis, but only on the east and west elevations of the buildings. (Figure 2) They usually protect the inner building from high sun, but not generally from low angle sun at the beginning and the end of the day. Kahn’s arched openings in the wrapping wall are large and so are the gaps between the wrapping wall and trellis. The interior rooms just inside the wrapping wall openings were to be substantially glazed. The arched openings do not align exactly with the inner glazed openings but are offset so that a good portion of the glazed window is overlapped by wall. So, at times the interior spaces would have been subject to intense solar radiation penetrating the openings and incident on the glass.
Figure 2. Chancellery main floor plan, as designed, north up
Not surprisingly, Kahn later reconsidered the size of the openings in the wrapping walls:
“I feel…that they’re now a little too large, that they can be made smaller. It’s only that I still haven’t developed a kind of sense in lieu of experience to tell me whether they’re large or small. I haven’t developed this because they must be tried…I feel the openings should be smaller because you can…always have a side view. You can look out and see anything you want.” [[9]]
Kahn’s reconsideration is interesting. He seems to be saying that, at the chancellery, one might have stood on a west or east “porch” or in the gap between the building proper and the wrapper, and seen through smaller openings facing east or west. The alternate “side” views toward north and south into the intermediate or wrapped spaces–the two-story gaps–and toward high-altitude sun would have revealed skylight and limited sun to grazing the inner faces of the walls. Direct views out of the rooms would have been restricted but would still have been available from other rooms or from within the wrapped zone, where one might, “look out and see anything you want.”
In fact, this strategy of openings to sky and light, but not directly exposed to the sun, is suggested by the rooms located on both floors at the middle of the west side of the chancellery. Note that glazed windows in these rooms face north and south into the protected gap between the inner and outer walls. Shaded by Kahn’s trellis and stepped back from the perimeter of the building, those rooms would have received diffused skylight and sunlight reflected from building surfaces. Similarly, the deeply recessed, two-story entry areas centrally located on the north and south sides of the chancellery would have gathered skylight with sun filtered by the trellis before diffusing it toward limited and reasonably protected glazing. In general, this strategy of spaces with opaque wall surfaces facing the sun and with glazing limited to walls at right angles to the opaque surfaces would be an excellent approach to the problems of sun, glare, and heat in this climate.
But to take this one step further, this thinking suggests that the building would have been an even more effective diffuser of daylight if the plan were rotated 90 degrees from that which Kahn had planned. (Figure 3) As for his musings about smaller openings, there are other factors in the design of openings that are equal to or more important than size. The locations of openings relative to an interior room and its reflecting surfaces, the shapes of openings, and the orientation of openings toward sun and skylight are probably more significant. (Figure 4)
Figure 3. Main floor plan of the chancellery with the plan
rotated 90 degrees so that Kahn’s intended north and
south elevations are re-oriented east and west.
Figure 4. Model view of the Chancellery from southwest,
As designed. Imagine the south (right side) elevation
as if it were the west or east and the west (left side)
elevation as if it faced north or south.
If the chancellery were rotated 90 degrees, the sizes of the openings would not matter much. In this hypothetical reorientation, this composition of porches or doubled exterior walls, and the trellis, would work well. The double-wall zones would filter high sun and receive diffused skylight from the north and south skies. The reoriented opaque east and west elevations, formerly vulnerable to low-angle sun, would occlude sun that cannot be blocked effectively by overhangs. The deep entry spaces, now facing east and west, would present opaque wall and floor surfaces to catch low angle sun and to diffuse the light into appropriately located glazing. These spaces would be shielded from high sun by the trellis overhead. Initial simulations indicate that with the alternate orientation, only the glazed rooms on the “new” north elevation would receive direct sun and then mostly at the rooms’ forward edges, and from sun sliding into the gaps between the outer wall and inner building—not usually through the arched openings. With the rotated orientation, Kahn’s bilaterally symmetrical plan would work quite well.
Having expressed a skepticism toward grille work and having considered, if in retrospect, smaller openings, it is interesting that Kahn later considered large, operable, wood shutters, at least at the Consulate Residence, which would have been located immediately north of the Chancellery. Previously unpublished drawings prepared in the Kahn office and dated February 1961, near the end of the project, show east and west elevations with shutters filling balcony openings, in partially open and closed positions. The office went so far as to show the shutters detailed in large-scale section drawings and referenced them in written outline specifications. [[10]] Undoubtedly, Kahn would also have considered the need for more privacy in the Residence, but clearly, late in the design process, the architect was still struggling with the problem of glare and thermal control strategies.
The Consulate design, as we know it, must be considered incomplete: Kahn lost the commission in August 1961. However, given the opportunity, it would be safe to speculate that he would have continued to refine the scheme as it came closer to construction, as was his habit. [[11]] Nor does this discussion take into account the progress he made in his comprehension of daylight and other design issues as he took up subsequent commissions for projects that permitted him to study daylight further. This was only Kahn’s initial look into this approach to daylight.
Community and Social Responsibility
Much of Louis Kahn’s reputation is based on his passion for and deft handling of daylight. But Kahn’s architecture about more. Kahn was deeply engaged with other architects and critics in the development of a modern version of architectural monumentality, the recognition of the significance of people, events, places, and contemporary public institutions through specific design strategies. Even more important, Kahn was committed to a firm social agenda and the establishment of community: the potential to represent the shared aspirations of common men and women through architecture and town planning.
Kahn understood the disadvantages of poverty, immigrant and outsider status, and membership in a persecuted ethnic and religious minority—he experienced all of this himself. Kahn sought to address these conditions through architecture. Sarah Williams Goldhagen has referred to this as Kahn’s “long standing desire to create an architecture that would become a symbol of communal identity and encourage communal participation. [[12]] Eventually in Kahn’s work, the streams of thought—the demands of daylighting, the interest in monumentality, and the significance of community—converged. Taken as a whole, these insights, manifested in Kahn’s maturing architecture, reveal much about the man, as well.
Early in his career, Kahn applied himself to these circumstances through his work as a planner. He worked with the Philadelphia Planning Commission (1933-1935) and the remainder of that decade as an architectural consultant to the Commission and involved in neighborhood planning; he was convinced of the ideals of collectivism and social activism. He collaborated with his partner, Oscar Stonorov to publish pamphlets such as Why City Planning and You and Your Neighborhood: A Primer for Neighborhood Planning; and wrote letters to the editor of Architectural Forum. These writings encouraged local citizens to involve themselves in city planning processes by establishing neighborhood planning councils. Kahn gained recognition as a designer of public housing and an aspiring urban planner. [[13]] In his middle years, Kahn’s design portfolio included commissions for buildings with social programs such as housing and community structures, and health facilities for two labor unions. During the mature period of his career in which he produced his most articulate work, his projects continued to address a range of cultural and educational missions. All of these programs explicitly recognized and celebrated the lives, aspirations, and cultural significance of common people. Goldhagen has written that
“Kahn fused his feelings about his own Jewishness with his response to contemporary trends in American religious culture to arrive at an explicitly non-transcendental religious ideal, which extended his conviction that each individual should participate in a community as a means to a richer, more responsive polis.” [[14]]
Monumentality
Monumentality in architecture is an expression of some kind of greater significance, usually of a recognized political or social event. Kahn realized that it might be possible for a monumental architecture to represent the importance of the lives and aspirations of common people. Interestingly, Kahn’s essay, “Monumentality,” rarely uses the term. After four mentions on the first two of its ten pages, that word, or forms of it, appear but once in the middle and once right at the very end of the text. The article is really an inquiry into authenticity; it speaks of materials, how they perform, and how a particular material does its best work when employed appropriately. [[15]] Kahn wrote about how buildings might work rather than how they look. This attention to essential qualities and performance would later become the essential ingredient in Kahn’s “monumentality” as his ideas were transformed into his great buildings. In the same way that he looked to his community of working people to inspire and inhabit his institutions, he looked to common materials, and how they work, to conceive his monumental spaces. He wrote:
“Neither the finest material nor the most advanced technology need enter a work of monumental character for the same reason that the finest ink was not required to draw up the Magna Carta.” [[16]]
Kahn’s discussion of materials includes, of course, steel, glass, concrete, and stone, but also notably, daylight. Daylight has long represented truth (light itself), enlightenment (understanding), and authenticity (undisputed honesty). Daylight is both that which is most common in our world and that which is transcendent. It is ever present, yet difficult to capture for any length of time, which ironically, lends it the characteristic of rarity. Light expresses both the everyday and the sublime, and both tendencies are present in Kahn’s architecture. The weight of his architecture, as depicted in his hand drawings or as built, heightens the sense and presence–the monumentality–of weightless space and light. Kahn said that “the making of spaces is the making of light at the same time.” [[17]] Space, too, can be understood as “monumental” when configured by Kahn and then seen in terms of its significance. The elements that constitute its configuration, including enclosure, proportions, the clarity and authenticity of the volume, serve to render space and its captured light and shadow as something of monumental significance; in Kahn’s hands, space and light are ennobled.
In the 1950’s,” according to Goldhagen, Kahn sought to harness the authenticity of structure and fuse it with his ethical convictions. She writes that Kahn thought, “…architecture should perform the specific social role of symbolizing and reinforcing communal identity. He needed to move to an idiom that merged the authentic with the monumental and the symbolic.” [[18]] Kahn’s architecture eventually transformed the language of monumentality from one that had previously celebrated singular privilege into a vocabulary that operates in the service of real lives. The Consulate complex in Luanda, when it was designed, was perhaps Louis Kahn’s most complete and coherent expression of these slowly converging interests.
About Face
The design of the United States Consulate in Luanda came to an unresolved end, it is fair to say, because it was never built; it was the end of construction that typically concluded Kahn’s design process. It was not built for a number of reasons: the U.S. State Department’s impatience with Kahn’s lengthy design process; that agency’s dissatisfaction with, and inability to understand, the design; [[19]] and perhaps the outbreak of the Angolan war for independence that began in 1961. [[20]] However, the project remains important for what it reveals about the architect and his work.
In the project for Luanda, practical concerns about daylight and glare led Louis Kahn to devise a daylighting strategy with implications well beyond those pragmatic concerns. Kahn’s architecture was very much about daylight, but not about achieving specific recommended levels of illumination at some point in space. The work is about light as it conjures space, which eventually led to decisions about materials, building performance, circulation, structure, and to the resolution of Kahn’s questions about meaning, monumentality, and the social significance of public institutions. It is this work with light that enabled him to uncover something important about the potential for meaning in modern architecture and to develop an ethical position relative to people and architecture. And, it is through this process that the architect also revealed himself and that we may realize a new understanding of the man.
All artists reveal something of themselves in their work. This is inescapable: we all reveal ourselves in what we do. Although these considerations are spoken of in an undertone in architecture, they are central to understanding work in the other arts and even in science. How could what we make or how we behave not be a reflection of who we are? As Stephen Greenblatt says of his scholarship on the work and life of William Shakespeare, “I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter.” [[21]] An architect’s work is a mirror of his or her character, powerful, non-verbal evidence of a life and beliefs. It may even be that the more articulate and insightful the architecture, the more revealing it is. So, as with makers of all manner of things, Kahn’s buildings can be said to be reflection of their architect.
Kahn’s elegant wrapping walls, revealed in daylight and shadow and exposed to the world, are highly abstracted and perfected expressions of sometimes tangled, but authentic, human activity. Like our faces, or masks, walls may be employed to create an impression; they even camouflage, but often end up doing the opposite: they reveal unseen truths. In the case of Louis Kahn, the interior workings of his architecture–even wrapped with highly refined geometries and the elegant use of materials, contain—doubly enveloped—the inevitable messiness of human work and habitation, the disorderliness and unpredictable patterns of human activity, now clothed impeccably. This can be seen clearly in Kahn’s late buildings, in Ahmedabad, Dhaka, and La Jolla, where the works draw their second skins around themselves, becoming the “wrappers” referenced in the now axiomatic, “buildings wrapped in ruins.” These works are the direct descendants of Kahn’s Luandan strategy of intercepting sun with secondary wall surfaces, and the development of the architect’s perfected expressions of the buildings’ inner lives.
The façade is the most exposed and initially revealing part of a building and it is the same for a façade’s creator. With this in mind, it is reasonable to ask, what did Kahn see, every day, when he saw his own face, and how did this reflect his outlook on the world? Kahn’s early life was one of difficult circumstances. He was raised in poverty, an immigrant burdened with religious minority status. Even as a qualified professional he was an outsider, “a Jew working in a protestant gentlemen’s profession.” [[22]] Moreover, he was a physically unimposing man. As an adult, he stood about five foot seven inches tall, [[23]] with receding white hair and a scarred lower face, the outcome of a childhood accident in which he grabbed at the glowing coals in a fireplace. [[24]] The evidence of his complex and imperfect family relations is now well known and has been documented on film by his son. [[25]]
Figure 5: Louis I. Kahn, self-portraits, all circa 1949 [26]
Clearly, the attraction Louis Kahn held for others and his influence over them was a demonstration of charisma, personal wisdom, his artistic and musical talents, and a kind of fineness that emerged from an inner, but beautiful, messiness. If only Kahn could have created a face for himself that fully expressed that inner beauty! He could not change his own face, but he did so for others in his architecture, providing for his buildings and the people who inhabit them a perfected version of themselves, and in a sense, of himself, for all to see. Who else but an individual with a less than perfect face, and with the finest, if conflicted, heart and mind, would have been open to understanding how inner beauty needed to be translated to the façade? Interestingly, the way he spoke in public about his work also seems to have been a redirection from reality, the daily disappointments and compromises of architectural practice. Kahn’s talks concentrated on larger, nearly philosophical thoughts that veiled the everyday professional struggles. Kahn, renowned for speaking in great, glowing language about architecture, inspired many but confounded others, such as his partisan Vincent Scully, who referred to Kahn’s rambling talks as “a smoke screen around his actual methods.” [[27]] Kahn’s building facades screen inner conflict, uncertainty, and daily chaos, as much as they reveal aspiration, contentedness, concord, and decency. Kahn alluded to this, citing Jorn Utzon’s Sydney Opera House as an example, and rendering the relationship between its inner life and public persona in this way:
“It was approached…by a cascade of steps that gave you a sense of the ceremonial–seeing that which is not…formally real but internally real, as though the truth was being brought before you…” [[28]]
Louis Kahn’s double life is well known; the story is told by his son on film with the empathetic participation of his sisters, each a child of a different mother. It might be more accurate to say that Kahn had multiple lives, counting not just his three families, but also his intense intellectual life, which formed the basis of his architecture, lectures, and writings; and his office life, which contained the facts of his transforming his intellectual life into built form. Kahn’s insight was to make an architecture of several lives, with layered orders of space, so that each life might be given its own space and a sense of belonging: an acknowledgement that the competing elements of our lives might be recognized as deserving of a place in the world. Kahn’s layered spaces, rigorously defined orders, proportioned rooms, and geometrically refined openings, organize our lives by giving each its place and lending us the impression, at least temporarily, that they all make sense.
Andre Malraux wrote: “Man is not what he thinks he is; he is what he hides.” [[29]] Who but a man with visible facial imperfections, who struggled early and faced and mature life conflicts, but with a mind that generated beautiful ideas about how people could live together, would fully, if perhaps subconsciously, appreciate the value of presenting to the world a new, more perfect face for himself and for his buildings? Through their work, artists have the opportunity, to present to the world their best natures, perfected versions of their unfinished selves. Kahn’s architecture presents us with an idealized, yet in some ways more complete, version of himself. He devised for his architecture, and through architecture for himself, new faces that revealed hidden truths, those of his and our unruly, but noble, inner lives. He achieved this through his understanding of daylight acquired through his work at Luanda. Kahn’s architecture was illuminated by daylight from the outside so that it seemed to emanate from interior space. Kahn, too, shone most brightly from the inside and, judging from his architecture, he must have believed that others do, too.
Acknowledgement
The author wishes to acknowledge the research assistance of Ms. Julia Jovanovic.
References
1 Latour, Alessandra, editor, Louis I. Kahn Writings, Lectures, Interviews, Rizzoli, New York 1991; p. 122
5 “An as-struck smooth grey Portland cement surface may have a reflectance of 40%,” but with some care and the appropriate materials, such as white cement, reflectance may reach 70. The Concrete Society, http://www.concrete.org.uk/fingertips_nuggets.asp?cmd=display&id=916; retrieved January 3, 2014
10 Louis I. Kahn Collection, Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania; folder 555A, 030.I.C.555.001; pencil drawings on tracing paper
11 Wiseman, Carter, Louis I. Kahn: Beyond Time and Style, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, USA, 2007, p. 114
12 Goldhagen, Sarah Williams, Louis Kahn’s Situated Modernism, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, USA, p. 122
15 Kahn, Louis I., “Monumentality,” in Louis Kahn, Essential Texts, (Robert C. Twombly, editor), W.W. Norton, New York, USA, 2003, page 24. Kahn wrote, “The I-beam is an engineering accomplishment deriving its shape from an analysis of the stresses involved in its use.…under test it was found that even the fillets, an aid in the rolling process, helped convey the stresses from one section to another…”
16 Kahn, “Monumentality,” p. 22
17 Kahn, Louis I., “Talk at the Conclusion of the Otterloo Congress,” Louis Kahn, Essential Texts, (Robert C. Twombly, editor), W.W. Norton, New York, USA, 2003, p. 48
19 Hughes, William P., Letter from William P. Hughes, Director, Office of Foreign Buildings to Kahn dated Aug 26, 1960, Louis I. Kahn Collection, Architecture Archives, University of Pennsylvania, Box 34, Folder 28: “Before going further into the details of your work on this project, I deem it advisable to point out to you certain very serious functional problems that appear as a result of our review of these sketches. Our main objections are as follows…The proposed roof construction is considered expensive and unnecessarily experimental, if not bizarre…. Particularly we do not like our public buildings to be planned as windowless buildings nor do we like them to have a fortress quality.”
20 Henderson, Lawrence W., Angola; Five Centuries of Conflict, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, USA, 1979, p. 199-201
21 This position may be traced to Lucretius, who pointed out that “Nothing from nothing ever yet was born.” Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Book I, 50 BCE, (translated by William Ellery Leonard), http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/nature_things.mb.txt, retrieved August 11, 2021
22 Kahn, Nathaniel, “My Architect Press Kit,” http://www.myarchitectfilm.com/presskit/MyArchitectPressKit.pdf, retrieved June 14, 2012
23 Louis I, Kahn’s 1928 passport is accessible at http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/0107/feature1_2.html, retrieved October 18, 2013
24 Wiseman, Carter, Louis I. Kahn: Beyond Time and Style: A Life in Architecture, W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., New York, USA, 2007, p. 14
25 Nathaniel Kahn, director, My Architect, New Yorker Films, New York, USA 2003
[26] “Self-portrait no. 1,” Louis Kahn, c. 1949, from Jan Hochstim. The Paintings & Sketches of Louis I. Kahn, Rizzoli, 1991, pages ______. 208
27 Brownlee, David B., and DeLong, David G., Louis I. Kahn; In the Realm of Architecture, Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., New York, USA, 1991, p. 127; citation of an interview with Louis Kahn in by Alessandra Latour, Louis I. Kahn, L’uomo, il maestro, Edizione Kappa, Rome, Italy, 1986, p. 149.
28 Steeley, Melissa, and Whitaker, William, editors, “Conversation between Louis I. Kahn and Doris Fisher; A House within a House,” Architecture and Urbanism (a+u), number 461, February 2009, p. 48. The article is a transcription of a conversation that took place at the Fisher House on March 8, 1970.
29 Siegel, Lee, “We Are What We Hide,” The New Yorker online, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/11/we-are-what-we-hide.html?mbid=social_mobile_email; posted November 15, 2013