LOUIS I. KAHN’S FISHER HOUSE: A CASE STUDY ON THE ARCHITECTURAL DETAIL AND DESIGN INTENT

By Pierson William Booher. University of Pennsylvania

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CHAPTER ONE | LOUIS I. KAHN

Louis Isidore Kahn was born on February 20, 1901 on the Island of Saaremaa, Estonia to Leopold and Bertha Mendelsohn. Upon immigrating to the United States
in 1906, the family settled in the Northern Liberties neighborhood of Philadelphia and changed their last name to Kahn. The early part of the family’s life in Philadelphia was marked by extreme poverty. It was a transient existence as they moved from house to house throughout their first years in America. Kahn’s father Leopold was a talented designer but struggled to find steady work, and after suffering a debilitating back injury the family was forced to lean heavily on the knitted clothing samples produced by Kahn’s mother.1 The modest upbringing led a young Louis, driven by his innate inquisitiveness, to seek out enlightenment. Even as a young boy, Kahn’s interest in the beauty of nature was readily apparent. He had suffered severe burns to his face as a youth because he got too close to a collection of burning coals; when asked about why he defied his senses, Kahn said that he was attracted by the beautiful colors of the embers.2

Along with his sense of curiosity, Kahn was predisposed to the arts; his mother was an accomplished harp player, commonly filling the household with the beautiful harmony of the instrument. Because the Kahn family was so poor during their early life in the U.S., Kahn was forced to seek musical instruction through his schooling rather than in private lessons. During his stint at the Public Industrial Art School, a professor suggested he turn down a musical scholarship in favor of following his talent in the visual arts. As a result, between 1912 and 1920 – in addition to his instruction at the Public Industrial Art School between 1912 and 1914 – Kahn attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Graphic Sketch Club (later renamed the Fleischer Memorial Art School), and Central High School.3 During the 1919-1920 academic year, Kahn was awarded first prize for best drawings in the high schools of Philadelphia, an award sponsored by the Academy of Fine Arts. Despite his artistic talent, Kahn became enamored with the field of architecture after taking Professor William Gray’s Architectural History course during his senior

year of high school.4 Kahn’s interest in architecture was strong enough to influence him to forgo plans to study painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, instead enrolling in the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Fine Arts to study architecture.

Sigfried Giedion’s “Space, Time and Architecture and Mechanization takes command”

By Arthur p. Molella

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Critical theory of technology

By Andrew Feenberg

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An Architecture for Our Time

An Architecture for Our Time The New Classicism

by Charles Siegel

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Today’s avant-gardist architects congratulate themselves on how cutting-edge their buildings are. But in reality, they are not responding to the needs of our time in the way that the early modernists responded to the needs of the last century.

Modernist architects of the early and mid-twentieth century were politically idealistic. Their architecture expressed their faith that modernization and progress would bring a better world.

Today, this technological optimism has faded, so our avant-gardist architects strain to create novel high-tech forms but have no social ideal to give these forms meaning.

If we look at why today’s avant gardists have lost the idealism of the early modernists, it can help us understand what sort of architecture would meet the needs of our time.

The Ideal of Progress

The radical politics of the nineteenth century grew out of the faith in progress that spread as the industrial revolution made people believe that science and technology could improve their lives.

Around the time of the French revolution, the philosopher St. Simon wrote that industrialization would not only eliminate poverty but would also sweep away traditional forms of authority – the monarchy, aristocracy, and church – and bring a society managed by technical experts. Likewise, Karl Marx wrote a few decades later that the communist revolution would sweep away traditional forms of authority and bring a modern planned economy.

Architecture Continues To Implode

by Justin Shubow

More Insiders Admit The Profession Is Failing

Architecture is suffering a crisis of confidence. More and more mainstream figures in the field are admitting that the profession has lost its way. As I previously mentioned, Frank Gehry, the world’s most famous architect, recently said that “98% of everything that is built and designed today is pure sh*t. There’s no sense of design, no respect for humanity or for anything else.” Architectural thought-leaders seconded and thirded him. And he’s since been fourthed by another.

Last year, recognizing general public’s low opinion of architects, the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the trade organization for the profession, launched an effort to “reposition” the industry by hiring marketing and brand-identity firms. (You can find a PDF of one of the Institute’s public opinion polls here.)

And now The New York Times, the ultimate arbiter of elite opinion, recently published an op-ed that declared, “For too long, our profession [architecture] has flatly dismissed the general public’s take on our work, even as we talk about making that work more relevant with worthy ideas like sustainability, smart growth and ‘resilience planning.’” The authors are not kooks on the fringe but architect Steven Bingler and Martin C. Pedersen, former executive editor of Metropolis magazine, both of them very much in the establishment.

The authors observe that self-congratulatory, insulated architects are “increasingly incapable … of creating artful, harmonious work that resonates with a broad swath of the general population, the very people we are, at least theoretically, meant to serve.” Bingler and Pedersen note that this has been a problem for over forty years (my emphasis), and that things are even worse today.

As a case in point, they mention the 2007 “Make It Right” charity program, founded by amateur architect and furniture designer Brad Pitt. The program invited firms, most of them avant-garde, to design housing for poor New Orleanians whose homes were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. The architecture world was exhilarated: The initiative was to be a showcase for how the best contemporary design could improve lives.

The struggles of the traditional architecture practice

by Eric Reinholdt. Edited by: Apostolos Costarangos | designboom

Eric Reinholdt has made the decision to part ways with the traditional practice of architecture in search of something different. the architect stepped away from a job that supported his family but that ultimately left him creatively unfulfilled. ‘a choice to make’ is a short film, documenting personal struggles in order to pursue a more creative life. these are challenges we all face and questions we all seek answers to. 

‘a choice to make’ – a short architecture film

American based architect Eric Reinholdt made things; every day. most of what I created failed, said the architect, but I took note of the ones that weren’t and learned from them. a reevaluation of what being an architect began; what it meant to Eric Reinholdt, who said: I wasn’t capable of doing only one thing. I loved architecture deeply, but I also wanted to pursue writing and photography, video editing and sketching, model making and paper cutting, teaching and book publishing, marketing and interior design.

when Reindholdt’s definition of what being an architect looked like expanded to include all these things, he discovered a well of creative freedom absent in traditional practice. I set out to prove to myself I could design the life I wanted, support my wife and children and feel professionally satisfied, according to the architect.

Is this the right path for everyone? of course not. is this expanded definition of a creative life perfect or unfailing? hardly. although, experimenting has brought reindholdt closer than ever to his childhood vision of what a fulfilling, creative life might look like.

Each day in Eric Reindholdt’s 30×40 design workshop there is a new experiment in the making. ‘a chance to make’ is just another experiment as well. if it’s successful, it will have helped to empower you to seek out the things that make you feel most alive, most fulfilled; the things that bring you happiness, says eric reindholdt.

Save Louis Kahn’s Concert Boat!

by Yo-Yo Ma

In response to:

A Mystic Monumentality from the June 22, 2017 issue

American Wind Symphony Orchestra

Point Counterpoint II, designed by Louis Kahn and launched in 1976; undated photograph

To the Editors:

I read Martin Filler’s sweeping survey of Louis Kahn’s life and work [“A Mystic Monumentality,” NYR, June 22] with great interest. Louis Kahn has been on my mind lately—not for the striking creations that testify to his decades as “America’s master builder,” so many of which I know and love, but for his brief tenure as a shipwright.

In the mid-1960s, conductor Robert Austin Boudreau—Kahn’s friend and mine—commissioned Kahn to design a unique floating concert hall, one that would carry an orchestra up and down America’s waterways in a grand celebration of the Bicentennial. Launched in 1976, the 195-foot Point Counterpoint II has travelled America’s rivers, lakes, and intercoastal waterways; the Caribbean, Baltic, and Irish Seas; and the rivers of northern Europe. Anchoring in large cities and small towns, in busy shipping lanes and at public parks, the barge opens like a clamshell to reveal a glittering concert stage. Audiences on shore delight in the music, much of it specially composed for Maestro Boudreau and his American Wind Symphony Orchestra.

While Point Counterpoint II might lack the solidity and repose that Martin Filler so eloquently attributes to Kahn’s buildings, it is no less monumental: it sails as a powerful, living testament to American creativity and to the elemental role that culture plays in human life.

After five decades, Robert Boudreau (who just turned ninety) and his wife, Kathleen, have decided that they cannot keep running the barge. Despite their best efforts, they have not yet found a new guardian for it. Lacking an alternative, in late July, at the conclusion of the Orchestra’s 2017 tour, this remarkable, mobile cultural institution will be broken down to scrap in a Louisiana shipyard.

At a time when our national conversation is so often focused on division, we can ill afford to condemn to the scrap heap such a vibrant ambassador for our national unity, so I humbly ask that your readers join Robert and me in finding a new home for Point Counterpoint II. Please share any suggestions with Robert and Kathleen at awso@consolidated.net.

Yo-Yo Ma
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Survival by Design—A Case for Optimism

by Jim Cramer

We all know that the pace of change is exponentially faster than it has ever been. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Yet it can confuse and cause all sorts of misunderstandings. Sometimes the speed of change ironically leads to management paralysis. This paralysis develops in some people an intellectual or behavioral hesitation to embrace change. It is what keeps struggling organizations on the lower end of the value delivery curve.

When we like change, we say that it is transformational. We are inclined to say this when change aligns with what we believe will be a positive professional experience. However, sometimes we say that change is disruptive or unwelcome. Professionals—even the most intelligent—fear change more often than they admit.

The Future Can Be Better

Why fear change? For one reason, we know that not all change is forward motion. For another, we have seen and experienced hyper-speed which has caused derailment and the breakdown of proven systems. Speed can be tricky because it manifests itself differently in each market segment and each geographic consideration. Speed can destabilize the professions in different ways. For example, some organizations currently have an over-reliance on older and less-efficient technologies. Some organizations estimate fees using old metrics and standards and find themselves unprofitable in the majority of their work.

DesignIntelligence is focused on what is new and what is next and what options should be considered in this context. When we do this, we discover that linear innovation is all around us today. Most leaders are comfortable preparing for linear innovation. However, there is also non-linear and unexpected change around every turn in the world we live in.

Our job is to study the disruptive scenarios that can cause brain freeze and to respond with not only insight but foresight.

Game Changers Can Put You Ahead of the Curve

Social media provides an opportunity to transmit images and ideas instantaneously. In minutes, a firm leader can develop a rapid response to solve problems that have not been fully understood just hours earlier. Thus, management can cut through the blizzard of reports, data, and complex statements and focus instead on leveraging foresight with a dose of pragmatism.

Accordingly, leaders in our design professions can build their capacity to change the future for the better. Here are four ways you can embrace change while also committing to wise judgment in business decision making.

1. Anticipate. Expect even more game-changing innovations. We know that developments are already in the pipeline just awaiting release. It is smart to identify cross boundary role models who embrace the future and who see the opportunities of our time unfolding. These mentors should be authentic role models. They can alert you to expanding opportunities and how to take advantage of them.

2. Think paradoxically. Set high standards for both ongoing quality of your services and embrace speed too. It is counterintuitive to think this way, but we believe that it will be fundamental to tomorrow’s most successful organizations. Use this mantra: speed and quality, quality and speed. Repeat.

3. Leverage social capital. The future will depend on networks and relationships. Build the most positive relationships and commit to doubling the social capital in your organization. No in-fighting permitted.  There should be likeability, rapport, respect, and admiration, and it should be genuine.

4. Solve puzzles. Define yourself as a strategic optimist. Blind optimism can be dangerous, but well-informed strategic optimism coupled with foresight is smart. Moreover, you can prove benefits. Each day ask yourself this question: “What did I do today that provided evidence of being a strategic optimist?”

How Soon Is Now? Ten Problems and Paradoxes in the Work of Dogma

by Christophe Van Gerrewey Anyone Corporation

The widespread conviction that architecture has no social role worth speaking of is illustrated in a curious document from the heyday of late 20th-century Dutch architecture culture – a culture that has been crucial in the formation of Aureli and Tattara, who were students and educators at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam before it was closed in 2012 due to government budget cuts.

In 1991, at the Venice Architecture Biennale curated by Francesco Dal Co, the Dutch Pavilion presented a new generation. These young architects – including Ben van Berkel, Wiel Arets, and Willem Jan Neutelings – were not only working in the tradition of Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture; in some cases they had worked for OMA during the ’80s, and all of them profited from public investments in architecture and the growing Salonfähigkeit of Dutch architecture. The curator of this exhibition was architecture critic Hans Ibelings. In the introduction to the catalogue he writes, “There is a renewed interest among younger architects in the intellectual tradition of modernism, an interest legible in their attempts to uphold certain principles. No one, however, harbors the illusion that it is possible or even desirable to revitalize the societal program to which these principles were originally linked.” He concludes with a statement that would prove prophetic in the decades to come: “[These architects] articulate the sentiment that modernism is a valuable source from which inspiration can be freely drawn, with no concern for the idealism attached to it by the first generation of modernists. The result of this liberal and unencumbered involvement with architecture of the recent past is a modernism without dogma, inventive and with a tremendous richness of form.”

Modernism without Dogma served as the exhibition title. There lies an important irony in this formula. As Ibelings unwittingly but succinctly described, in contemporary architecture one major ideological dogma became all the more huge precisely because it was never expressed as such: that architects have no use for ideals, nor for explicit or societal programs that contradict or confront the way of the world.

The name Dogma, chosen by Aureli and Tattara, can be interpreted in this sense: their projects polemically address an architecture culture that is dominated by one dogma, with a working and production method that is no less dogmatic – but it is a dogma that, on the one hand, is put in a theoretical and self-willed pole position and, on the other, uncovers and reverses many of the fetishes and doxas of 21st-century architecture. The work of Dogma is – to borrow from Ibelings’s catalogue once more – not “inventive,” and it does not boast “a tremendous richness of form.” Invention and formal richness are, on the contrary, considered as the true, self-consuming problem of architecture and, as such, are annihilated, not least by the use of one formal dogma: the square. This is the conceptual basis of their approach, and it has often led to bewildered reactions, comic and sad at the same time: How can they be serious? Is that all there is? Squares, lines, and ladders? Shouldn’t architects be at least a bit creative? Dogma shows that in order to be surprising, architects today can only sabotage the very notion of surprising architectural invention.

One of the unresolved tensions in the work of Dogma owes to the singularity of the architectural object. In 11 Projects, Brett Steele begins his introduction to Dogma’s work by stressing the dominance of singularity in contemporary architecture: namely, “the intensified attention directed in theory as well as in practice not only toward the architectural object but also, and more significantly, toward a highly individuated, decidedly episodic accounting of architectural proposals and interventions, conceived no less than received as singular architectural undertakings, whether they are buildings, structures, installations or even larger urban spaces.” According to Steele, Dogma tries to overcome this dominance by returning architecture to more fundamental tasks, not at the scale of the building but at the scale of the city.

The Architectural Imagination

by Cynthia Davidson Anyone Corporation

Two years ago, believing that architecture can catalyze positive change in cities, Mónica Ponce de Léon and I conceived the idea of an exhibition for the United States Pavilion at the Biennale Archittetura 2016 that would present new speculative architectural projects for Detroit. We named it “The Architectural Imagination,” signifying both something yet unseen and something that only an architect would envision. When our proposal for the pavilion was selected by the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs in late May 2015, we set out to try to answer two questions: What is the architectural imagination? And why would the architectural imagination be of value in Detroit?

In architecture, the topic of imagination is seldom far from discussions of creativity. In 2013, Merrill Elam made a documentary film called On Imagination: Conversations with Architects, in which she asked architects known for original and creative outside-of-the-box projects about the role of imagination in their work. Early in the film, Diane Lewis sets an intellectual framework for Elam’s conversations by recalling Descartes’s declaration that the art of the mind is the imagination. In fact, the ideas of the 17th-century philosopher are never far from contemporary discussions of imagination. As the philosopher John D. Lyons writes, “While Descartes is probably not entirely responsible for the modern tendency to value imagination and to suppose it an important criterion of intelligence, he certainly wrote at a turning point in the history of imagination and formulated effective and memorable recommendations about the place of this way of thinking within a structure of mind.” But it is important, Lyons continues, “to recognize [Descartes’s] consistency in telling us that we imagine, strictly speaking, only when we think about material things, things that we perceive, seem to perceive, or could perceive with our senses.” Descartes might as well have been thinking about architecture, for if nothing else, architecture is the materialization of our senses.

Over the centuries philosophers and psychologists from Kant to Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre to Gilles Deleuze, have developed multiple taxonomies of the imagination. Architects too have acknowledged, directly addressed, and demonstrated the importance of imagination, from Alberti to Quatremère de Quincy, from Étienne-Louis Boullée’s Cenotaph for Newton to Rem Koolhaas’s highly imaginative reading of a “delirious” New York. When thinking about the potentials of architecture today, the work of anthropologist Arjun Appadurai suggests yet another provocative idea of imagination that, different from the more private idea of fantasy, “has a projective sense about it, the sense of being a prelude to some sort of expression, whether aesthetic or otherwise.” When the imagination is collective, a form he attributes to mass mediation and global migration, “it can become the fuel for action,” he writes. “The imagination is today a staging ground for action, and not only for escape.” Because architecture is never completely private, I would argue that the architectural imagination is precisely a staging ground for action, with the potential to engage individual subjectivities and cultural movements.

In this era of media and migration, can architecture still ignite a collective imagination? In the history of architecture we can only imagine why or how Vitruvius, in the first century AD, elucidated the conditions of firmness, commodity, and delight as constituting architecture – conditions that haunt the making of architecture to this day. In the poststructuralist 1980s and ’90s, Peter Eisenman frequently questioned this triad, asking whether firmitas meant that buildings must also appear to stand up. Today, the shapes and cantilevers of many contemporary buildings, made structurally possible by advances in design software and new construction techniques, no longer look as if they embody firmness or stability – a quality we take for granted – but suggest malleability. If the meaning of the Vitruvian triad can be reimagined, what other tenets of sociopolitical life can be rethought and transformed through architecture?

Imagination plays a vital role in justifying ideas as well as generating them in the first place. – Timothy Williamson

To conceive of an architecture exhibition without predetermined content is to take a big risk, particularly in the glare of the international spotlight of a Venice architecture biennale. But to consider the idea of architectural imagination, Mónica and I decided simply to frame the conditions for an architectural project: to lay out the idea of architectural imagination and to put it – and architects – to work in Detroit. By commissioning all-new work, rather than selecting completed projects, we risked that the work would not materialize or that the ideas and objects produced for display would fail to engage not only the viewer but also the urban subject. It was, however, a risk worth taking, as the work now shows.

We chose Detroit as the location for “The Architectural Imagination” because of its historical role as a locus of invention and its potential for reinvention. As the home of the automobile industry, the free-span concrete factory, and Motown and techno music, Detroit was an important center of modern imagination in the eyes of the world. Today it looms in the public consciousness as a city with a depleted population and an urban landscape pockmarked with blight. But now that Detroit has emerged from bankruptcy and the city is under new leadership, there is a certain urgency in the air to plan for the city’s possible futures. For some, this means asking how to shore up neighborhoods, for others, how to build equitably, even what to build, and with so much cleared land, new landscape projects are one of the city’s priorities. “The Architectural Imagination” introduces speculative architectural projects into the mix as a way to spark the collective imagination, to launch conversations about design, and to position Detroit as a model postindustrial city, one that is more equitable and prosperous in entirely new ways.

To begin, we set two processes in motion simultaneously. The first was the selection of architects, for which we conducted a nationwide call for expressions of interest in “The Architectural Imagination.” American architects were invited to submit a brief history and design philosophy and to illustrate three or four projects (built or unbuilt) by using a template we provided for a uniform submission and review process. We received more than 250 responses from across the country that together represented more than 600 individuals. These included established, award-winning professional practices and lesser-known designers who formed teams to give depth to their portfolios. The 12 firms/teams we chose reflect the range of these responses, and emphasize creative thinking and design excellence across generations. We hoped that this diversity would bring very different approaches to the challenges posed by the sites.