The architect who puts arch into architecture
The Essential Louis Kahn Photographs by Cemal Emden Prestel, £39.99 Reviewed by Stephen Games
At the end of last year, leading architects and academics around the world were asked to sign a petition opposing the planned demolition of a suite of dormitory blocks designed by the American architect Louis Kahn between 1962 and 1974. The four-storey dormitories, part of the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, were one of three commissions Kahn won in South Asia around 1960 that used humble bricks to create monumental forms.
The Essential Louis Kahn includes all three projects among the 23 masterpieces Kahn designed after an inspirational tour of ancient sites in Italy, Greece and Egypt in 1951. Kahn had been an interesting but not exceptional architect up to this point; suddenly, from the late ’50s, he was producing an entirely new type of architecture — encasing his buildings in massive shells out of which he seemed to carve great arches and circles.
No one had built like this before — the carved-out spaces acting as frames for vistas and unusual configurations of beams and columns — and it earned Kahn a reputation as architecture’s great philosopher, an architect making architecture about architecture.
And yet the IIM wanted to clear the site for something new, forcing outraged petitioners to explain to its head and governing council why the buildings were important and why its proposals would be “cultural vandalism”.
Which raises the question: why was this not obvious to the institute’s council? Or, if obvious, why was it outweighed by other considerations?
From the administrators’ point of view, Kahn’s buildings had reached the end of their life. Some 85 cracked arches had had to be rebuilt in just one of the 18 dormitories and the cost of repairing the other 17 seemed too great. In addition, students no longer used Kahn’s communal spaces, spending most of their leisure time online, and new buildings tailormade for new uses seemed preferable, explained the director,
Great architecture ought to speak for itself; you shouldn’t have to argue for it. But nothing is absolute, especially when questions of cost and upkeep get in the way, and it is not clear that the institute’s council would have behaved differently had it had recourse to Cemal Emden’s new book.
There’s a brief introductory essay and much briefer introductions to the masterpieces, but this is emphatically a book of photographs. They put the case for Kahn visually and you either get it or you don’t. If you do get it, you’ll be charmed by the more gnomic pronouncements of Kahn’s that decorate the images; if you don’t, you won’t.
Here’s one — offered in the context of the Ahmedabad buildings: “If you talk to a brick and ask it what it likes, it’ll say it likes an arch. And you say to it: ‘Look, arches are expensive and you can always use concrete lintels instead.’
And the brick says: ‘I know it’s expensive and it probably can’t be built these days, but if you ask me what I like, it’s still an arch.’”