Interview With John Lobell on The Architecture & Philosophy of Louis Kahn

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Introduction: Today, I had the privilege of speaking with John Lobell. John is a professor of architecture at Pratt in Brooklyn, New York, where he's taught since 1969. His courses have included design planning, Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi, Frank Lloyd Wright, global architecture, creativity, and the social impact of technology. He studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania from 1959 to 1966 and received a post-professional master's degree for work on architecture and structures of consciousness under G. Holmes Perkins. Subsequent to his architectural education, he studied with a range of important cultural figures. His wide range of interests and research addresses the fundamental role of creativity in our lives and how new technology changes our consciousness. He has written numerous articles and contributed to several websites. He's lectured throughout the world. He's the author of several books, two of which we'll be speaking about today, including Louis Kahn: Architecture as Philosophy, and Between Silence and Light: The Spirit in the Architecture of Louis Kahn. Had a fantastic discussion with John, and he provided some additional insight and great stories about his experience and his study of Louis Kahn specifically. I hope you enjoy it.

Mitchell: All right, John, I just wanted to start out and say thank you for joining us today. I'd like to start off by asking you to give us a little bit of background on yourself and your areas of interest.

John: Well, thank you for having me. I'm flattered. You wanted me to talk about Louis Kahn. I got to the University of Pennsylvania in 1959, and Kahn's medical towers were going up outside my dorm. So, I was embedded in the story. They used the building in some of our materials and methods courses we've visited. And then I later wrote two books on Khan. (Louis) Khan: Architecture as Philosophy and Between Silence and Light. And we should always keep in mind Khan was part of what we call the Philadelphia School, which is another one of my books published by Rutledge: The Philadelphia School and the Future of Architecture and there we can see Kahn in the context of, well, the whole city was being reborn. Ed Bacon was the Director, Executive Director of the Philadelphia Planning Commission, Dean, the Dean of the School, Dean Perkins, was chair of the Planning Commission. So, between Kahn, Venturi, Perkins, Bob Gettys, I happen to live through a really great story, which I've been fortunate to be able to tell. I teach a course on Kahn and Venturi, and as I said, I did a book on the Philadelphia School. So, I went to the University of Pennsylvania, I worked in some reading offices, and I've been teaching architecture at Pratt Institute since.

Mitchell: Well, thank you. Yeah, I've had the privilege of reading two of your books and kind of into a third one now, but the two: Between Silence and Light and then Louis Kahn: Architecture as Philosophy. And I've just been really fascinated by the topic. And I think there's some real areas of kind of profound thinking in there and that's what you know drew me to reach out to you. Can you give us a little bit of an overview of where Khan kind of stood in a historical context in terms of where the United States was in the early 20th century in the transition into modernism so that we can have a context?

John: Yeah, Khan sort of tells the whole story. He attended the University of Pennsylvania in 1920 to 1924. He studied under Paul Philippe Cret, great Beaux-Arts master. So, his education was pretty Beaux-Arts. He gets out of school and that isn't what was going on. So, one of his classmates, Norman Rice, was the first American to work for Corbusier. He came back to France with a stack of Corbusier books, which Kahn pored over and he would say, “I spent the 1930s living in a city called Corbusier”, cause he was absorbing those books. In a parallel story, Columbia University was early to move on from the Beaux-Arts to modern architecture. And the effort was led by Hudnut, who was the dean. Hudnut was then called to Harvard, to do the same thing: to bring it from a Beaux-Arts school to a modern school. And Hudnut was able to bring in Walter Gropius to be his chair of the architecture department. And during that time, G. Holmes Perkins, a Harvard grad, was chair of City Planning. Hudnut and Gropius, had a falling out. Gropius was having students do, working from basic design, folding paper. Students loved it because they were Harvard students and it gave them a chance to work with their hands. But Hudnut was very annoyed. He felt “we don't derive architecture from folding paper.” And they were doing apartment building slabs. And they were interested in prefab construction. But it was making an alienated environment. The environment is later to be criticized by Death and Life of Great American Cities, by what's her name?

Mitchell: Jane Jacobs.

John: Jane Jacobs, thank you. And Jacobs criticism was: these slabs destroyed the street. We know the street was where the life of the city was. So Hudnut advocated what he called a postmodern architecture to go beyond limitations of this international style modernism. He was never able to articulate what it was. Penn, University of Pennsylvania, remained in the Beaux-Arts tradition until 1950, long after the other schools had converted. And the students rebelled, particularly the veterans of the war. They were mature enough to be willing to go to the president and say, "This has to stop.” One of the prominent students, later prominent, was Peter Blake, who became an important historian and magazine editor. He described that the students would do two projects, a Beaux-Arts project for their professors, and a modern one that they would show to each other and recruit among themselves. They convinced the president, who brought in Perkins from Harvard, to be the new dean starting in 1951 and gave him a clean sweep. So, he was able to bring in totally new faculty. Who included Ian McHarg, who became a prominent figure in landscape architecture, wrote the book Design with Nature, Ed Bacon who was an important Philadelphia figure, Philadelphia school figure, Robert Venturi, et cetera. And what Perkins was ultimately able to do was get beyond the limitations of the international stuff. So, in 1932, Philip Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock, with the exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art on the international stuff, which brought European modern architecture to America. Most importantly, we recall Mies and Corbusier, but the whole panoply of the modern figures. And that led to international style. Mies coming to this country, from the IIT campus, Lake Shore, Madison Steel apartment buildings, and Gropius coming to Harvard as chair and starting to do those modern houses in Massachusetts.

The problem was, there is a thinness to this international style. It's said, in sweeping away the Beaux-Arts with its familiar symbolism, dark and haggling printing columns, pediments, things we all knew and understood. We could make an aesthetic based on the space, the function, material in the structure of the building. Perfect example is Gropius' Bauhaus building in Germany. But, ultimately, there was a shallowness to this approach. Both the thinness to the architecture in the glass facade, and the thinness in the lack of cultural depth. I like to refer to, and our listeners can look it up, the Bauhaus chess set. So, it's a brilliant abstract set with cubes for the rocks, L-shaped figures for the knights, diagonal figures for the bishops. So, the design of the figures is based on how they move. Because, the chess set that we have with a castle, a knight, a bishop has nothing to do with the strategy of the game. When I show the pieces to my students and I say here's  this piece. What is it? It's the bishop. No it's not the bishop. Oh, what is it? It's the piece that moves diagonally. What are we talking about? We have no roots for our discussion. So, the same problem with the architecture. So, you get Gropius doing a school in Germany, a school in England, a school in North Carolina, a school in Massachusetts,  they’re all the same, no recognition that there's a culture from which they're built, the ground out of which they're coming. So, after the University of Pennsylvania architecture school is in full swing, Bob Gettys and Sasha Novitsky, through the faculty, went to Perkins and said, "Hey, Louis Kahn is teaching at Yale, he should be teaching here, obviously.” So then Kahn came around, in 1955. And two years later, he got to commission the medical towers. And the medical towers, there’s a lot of ways to look at it, but one of them is: you make a diagram of the structure, and you've got the outline of the building. The structure not only holds up to floors but orders the architecture. You see the same thing in Kahn’s earlier Yale art gallery in which the columns could clearly hold up a 20-story building. The building is only four-stories. It's not only there to hold up the building, it's there to order the architectural experience. So, you can see Khan beginning by a denial of Corbusier's five points of a new architecture. So Corbusier said in the old architecture “The bearing walls ordered the spaces” and he said “we've got steel and concrete so we can make thin columns.” The partitions can then go anywhere. And Kahn said “No they can't. Those columns don't become points. They have an impact on our spatial experience in all of the spaces.” So, you could put a bed so that it went between two columns. But Khan said, "You cannot sleep in two rooms at the same time." Those columns implied the division, even though there's no wall there. They have an architectural as well as a structural meaning. So that begins the medical towers. Then he said with two parts to science, measuring, the measurement test tubes. And you come up with data, and the scientist then goes through the light, to the windows, to their desks, to render those measurements into the theory, which is a cultural act. So, you have the two spaces, flexible interior space, and the space at the windows, the scientist's desks. Then you have, you want to keep those spaces open and flexible. So that drives the core, bathrooms, elevators, fire stairs, away from the center, out to the periphery. So, the plan unfolds in this deep analysis of what's going on. The building turned out to be a total disaster in terms of how it functioned. Which is a whole story itself, one that has an architectural happy ending. So, there were four major problems. First of all, as you had three pavilions, scientists said, we were going to prefer this one large, flexible space. And second was, we left the ceiling structure exposed. We want a hung ceiling and we want cardboard in this building. So the structure and the mechanical pipe is exposed. So, dust can get gathered and filter down into the lab discs. And sound can pass over them. We don't have privacy. Next one was his windows were too large. Scientists pinned up aluminum foil and newspaper to protect themselves against the light. Well, finally, after 60 years, the building was too old. Should we tear it down? There's no way it would be really difficult to upgrade it. The demands for electricity, we see were all much greater than they had been at the time they were designed. Instead, they converted it to what they called a wet lab to a dry lab. So, a dry lab is just offices for scientists, but they did a major renovation, there are great YouTube's describing it. The building is totally loved. There's a waiting list to get into it. The spaces are beautiful. The modern A/C is exactly what Khan would have wanted. So the building has a great story. But architects can comment on their own work.

So immediately after the medical labs, Kahn did the Salk Center in La Jolla, California. Jonas Salk had heard Kahn lecture, and he said, "I want the medical labs, medical towers." He kind of said, "You don't get the medical towers, you get your building." So, they worked very closely, collaboratively together in the Salk Building to answer every one of the criticisms of the medical towers. It's the same size, there are one-third as many lab spaces and they're three times as big. The offices for the scientists are in separate pavilions, so they're not squished up against the windows. The overhanging walkways shade the lab spaces from the sun so that they can have fluorescent glass with no light problem. So, the first issue that Kahn addressed was the thinness of international style, how giving away structure, realizing that steel would become minimal. Lost the muscularness in which the architectural structure organizes experience as well as holding up the building. The next thing was the lack of the spiritual or cultural depth we had in the international style. So, the international style is international. It's said: the architectural aesthetic grows out of the function, the spaces, the structure and the material. So Gropius could do what he called the universal theater, which is very clever, rotating stages, so it could be a proscenium stage or a theater in the round. But where is it located? What's across the street? What city is it in? Is it in Africa? Is it in France? Is it in Boston? These things make a difference. So, Kahn reintroduced this cultural depth in part, sort of in turn, both in the wrong way. So, in a way, interestingly I do, of course, in Kahn and Venturi, the first thing I say is that the key historian who addresses these people is Vincent Scully. And Scully talks about the influence they have on each other, Kahn and Venturi. I don't agree, I think they have absolutely nothing to do with each other. So, Kahn’s is an architecture of being, of universal existence. So, it's not the universal space like the international style, but are archetypal logistics. Venturi is rooted in the here and now. There he is, the signs, the street, the neighboring architecture.

Mitchell: Yeah, maybe the idea of consumerism.

John: Right, our consumer culture. I mean, Khan, we live in a world with no automobiles. And Venturi says, “You might have noticed we do have cars.” And so, Camillo Sitte, there was a book in the late 1800’s on cities, in which he looks at Renaissance squares in Italy and they’re a beautiful study of a pedestrian world. We don't live in a pedestrian world. We live in an automobile world. So, Venturi, Scott Brown, Eisenhower, they are both learning from Las Vegas. We can sort of see it as an updating of Camillo Sitte for a world of automobiles. The reason I chose Las Vegas, was because Las Vegas is the first city that was built after electricity in the automobile. So I like to point out to my students to look out the window, the street outside our window was built for horses. There were no automobiles in that road that was built, and the automobile was injected into the existing grid. Las Vegas was built after both the automobile and electricity. But anyway, getting back to Khan, you had asked me about the relationship between Khan and Joseph Campbell.

Mitchell: Yeah, yeah.

John: So Campbell is a great scholar of mythology and his first major book is "The Hero with a Thousand Faces." So Campbell had a strong education in numerous cultures. He studied American Indians. He spent time in Europe. He had his master's degree from Columbia in Medieval Languages. He studied in France and Germany. And later he worked with Heinrich Zimmer, reintroduced him to the mythology of India. He started seeing parallels. So, his book, "The Hero with a Thousand Faces.", outlines an archetypal structure of a figure living in ordinary reality. There's an incipient incident, a call to adventure. We cross over into a realm of fabulous forces. We encounter hero-helpers, one of the mother, the father, the hero-helpers, winning decisive victory and return to a rich world. So, Campbell says that's an archetype. It's a general pattern. Jack & the Beanstalk: He sees his mother is hungry, exchanges their cow for bag of beans. His Mother throws the beans out the window, wakes up in the morning, there's a giant beanstalk. Wooooo, we're not in ordinary reality anymore. Climbs the beanstalk, discovers, it’s held by the fairy figures, discovers the treasure that the giant stole from their father. Slays the giant, returns with the treasure which enriches the world. It's the story of Muhammad, Christ, Quetzalcoatl. It's every fairy tale Cinderella, The Boy With a Thousand Rebukes.

Mitchell: The Odyssey.

John: The Odyssey, right. Those are the manifestations of the archetypal story. So, Khan refers to “silence and light.” So they're going to design a school. So, Khan begins with, might be a project coming to the office or a project for his studio it came. He starts with the question, "What does the school want to be?" The school is a place we go to learn. We've got to amplify on that. That gives us a start. It gives us an archetypal character. Now we've got a program. A site, a size, a culture, budget, valuable materials. So we then start working. So, the archetype common for us is a form diagram. In that form, let's jump over to the Rochester church. We said, designing a church, first of all, you have a sanctuary. The sanctuary is for those who are near, and surrounding the sanctuary is an ambulatory. The ambulatory, is for those who would be near. And then there’s a courtyard and there’s a wall. And those who wish to just wink at the church, wink at the wall. So now he's got a concentric diagram. Then he goes to designing and starts moving around. So that's encountered with the circumstantial release of the design. The building begins. So, let's back up. Kahn asks “What does this building want to be?” So, Khan spoke very poetically, so if any of our watchers have not read the book I edited with Khan's Ideal Lecture, you should, Between Silence and Light: The Spirit in the Architecture of Louis I. Khan. It opens with, “I felt first of all joyous. I felt that which joy was made of. I felt that joy must have been in every ingredient that I'm making.” Well, after I had the text finished, I sent it to Khan’s widow, who said, "I loved your book, it's just like sitting across the breakfast table from him." I said, "Oh My God, he talked like that every day?” But that's they way he spoke. And the way he spoke was dismissed. His buildings are great. We appreciate them. But his poetry is mumbo-jumbo. I think it was not, there was something there. With my background in Buddhist and mythological studies I was able to decipher what Khan was talking about. So, take something like “what does this building want to be?” Well, that sounds good. I mean, we sort of know what that means. What would be a good school? What do we mean by education? How do we understand it? But there are two huge problems with that statement. Well, first is, how can a building want anything, it’s an inanimate thing? Second is, it doesn't exist. We haven't even put the pencil in the paper yet. They don't even have a rough scheme. So, it turns out that unfolds to a whole philosophy. The building does exist, in a realm of potential. That's what Kahn means by “Silence”. The architect should not be imposing their ego or midwifing a process. We hear artists may say “the painting made itself or the book wrote itself. I was just a vehicle for what wanted to come out.” So, the building as it exists in a realm of potential, we as architects act to help it come into being. The other problem is, how can an inanimate thing want something? Well, Kahn poses that it does, it exists in this world. We architects commonly say, "Steel wants to be thin and attenuated in intention. Concrete wants to be massive and squat and in compression." That's the same thing that Kahn means. But beyond that, we see Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright’s mentor is saying, "The germ, the part of the seed that grows, the germ is the real thing, the seed of identity, within its delicate mechanism lies the will to power, the form, which is to seek, the function, I'm sorry, the function, which is to seek is for manifestation in form.” He says the office building wants to be a tall and soaring thing. So, we find that Sullivan and Kahn are saying the exact same thing. We find in Frank Lloyd Wright, what would be the honor of a brick. Not the words of a code, but the nature of honor. That in the brick which makes the brick a brick, there is an essence in the brick. It gathers two, redness, squareness, hardness. So, Kahn is an essentialist, which is dangerous, essentialism is strong and objective these days, but it's part of Kahn’s approach. So there's an essence, or existence will, and it's in the building in its potential realm. So what else did you want to ask me?

Mitchell: So I think the first thing that I want to comment on is: It seems like the moment in time in our culture when Khan came into existence was opportune in that he was able to, there was a kind of a transition or a shift going on in the culture and it was precisely, in my mind, what I see is this shift that catalyzed him or prompted him to begin to develop his ideas about his more spiritual philosophy and architecture. Do you feel like that's a fair thing to say?

John: Yes. Around the same time as the medical towers, we get Saarinen’s TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport, and I'm surprised my students don't know the building. So, anybody watching this flip over to Google image to look it up if you haven't seen it. And if you have a chance, go, it's the lobby of a hotel, but the fact that Saarinen could get away with that, I think it was made possible by the Corbusier’s Ronchamp, who gave architects permission to do something more expressive. And also, at the same time, we get an overdose of art and architecture of the era. So, it was a time when people were tired of the thinness of the international style and were looking to break out and Khan is one of several who do that.

Mitchell: I think that's a courageous act or what I would call a courageous act to witness a shift going on in the culture and especially in the field of architecture and then have a critical approach to that and say I'm going to maybe adhere to some of that, but really pull pieces of my past, my previous education, and what I fundamentally know to be true about architecture into my design. I think that was a courageous act, and I think it created something that was, let's say, in the modernist conversation, but it was also well outside of that, but while still being relevant to the current day. And I feel like that's a very tough thing to do in the moment. That's just my observation on it.

Regarding Joseph Campbell's The Hero Myth, my understanding is that you're drawing a parallel between Campbell's hero myth and the way that a building would come into an existence. They're going through a similar path. Is that fair to say?

John: Relationship between the archetype and the manifestation. Another example is dying and resurrecting God, born of a virgin, and associated with a cross. So it’s Quetzalcoatl for the Mayans, it's Marduk for the Babylonians, Adonis for the Greeks, and a Buddha for the Buddhists, a Christ for the Christians. So, in a similar sense, Khan starts with the archetype, or the form, he calls it the form, it becomes manifested in the material world as the design. So, the medical towers and the Salk Center look very different. They're the same archetype and same form, although the designs are different.

Mitchell: Do you have a knowledge, upon presenting or pitching projects to clients using this type of language and ideas, I feel like today, if you were to discuss a project in these types of terms, number one client would have no idea what you're talking about and would probably, unfortunately, steer away from pursuing a project with you?

John: Well, that's why he had so few commissions and they were very high culture. Being a museum at Yale, a library at Exeter, these are clients, the Kimball Museum. These are clients who knew what they were getting and wanted this. Kahn did a public housing project in Philadelphia, Mill Creek Housing. That eventually got dynamited. But he said, "I'm not doing that again." Because he described being in a meeting with the prospective tenants, who say, "Hey architect, what kind of heating are we going to have?" I don't know, that's the engineer's job. I'm giving you a sense of residence, a sense of community. Well, I wanted to know that the radiators aren't going to leak. So, you realize this approach was not appropriate in all circumstances.

Mitchell: Mm-hmm, and that’s interesting, at that time that's what the culture was probably shifting towards, a more mechanistic, functional approach to architecture and, you know, he had the courage to say that that's really not of his interest. It's mhm-hmm. I just find that, you know, powerful, that he was able to connect with himself and feel that confident in himself to stay in that position.

One of the things I wanted to ask you was about Kahn’s trip to Rome in, I think it was around the 1950s. How do you think that had an impact on his trajectory?

John: Well, that's more for a research historian. I was going to look up the dates. I'm more interested in, if you look at my background, it's Piranesi's map of Rome. Kahn had this map on the wall in his office. And if you look at the baths, Herculaneum on the other side of Vesuvius from Pompeii, you climb to those baths, you realize, you're climbing through Kahn’s Exeter Library. So, the influence is there. To what extent it came from visiting Rome, poring over Piranesi, having a Beaux-Art education, I'm not sure if you recall he wrote the introduction for an exhibit of Ledoux, and so he was in a way liberated by the discovery of these rich geometric forms. So, from the kind of architecture Khan did, Rome is the mother of all architecture.

Mitchell: Do you see maybe any buildings that you visit in our contemporary world that show suggestions or maybe resonance of somebody being of the same philosophy or potentially connected in a similar way that Kahn had or do you feel like that's largely missing from our contemporary work?

John: I think it's missing, but you find the boldness of movie sets. There's a new movie out now, Conclave, about the Cardinals selecting a new pope in Rome. It was not shot in the Vatican, it was shot in the palace. But you just look at the sumptuousness of those forms. He said, "We're a thousand times richer than they were with the power of diesel engines. Why can't we build that kind of stuff?"

Mitchell: I would ask you, why do you think that's missing from our culture?

John: Well, I'm as much a fan of Oswald Spengler as I am of Joseph Campbell and Louis Kahn. And Spangler shows the life arc of a culture. And we’re in a mechanistic age in our culture, so there isn't going to be any more Mozart's, it isn't going to be any more Kahns. All that's over. It's a time of engineering. So, the great architecture today is the North Sea oil platforms.

Mitchell: Interesting. So, you're saying it's a repeating arc, common to several civilizations or multiple civilizations.

John: Each civilization has its own arc, we’re more in the engineering phase of ours.

Mitchell: Do you think there could be a rebirth or maybe a shift in the culture where we could reconnect with those types of ideas and possibly re-instill that type of thought to produce a different type of work with different value sets.

John: That's a long discussion but I doubt it. If you look at music, there’s pop music which is pretty vapid since the Beatles and the Stones and there's academic classical music which nobody listens to and I don't think there's going to be any more popular Mozarts.

Mitchell: Interesting. Do you have any other items you'd like to add to the conversation?

John: If anybody's interested in my work, I made a point a few years ago when my voice was healthy to record all my lectures in my courses. So, there's 180 of my lectures on YouTube, and our listeners are welcome to go and find what I have to say about Kahn, Venturi, Frank Lloyd Wright, etcetera.

Mitchell: Great. And that's your YouTube channel. And then you have a...

John: Just search John Lobell Frank Lloyd Wright or John Lobell Louis Kahn and they’ll pop up.

Mitchell: Alright, well, again, I'd like to thank you, John, and then, you know, reference your books one more time. It's Between Silence and Light and then Louis Kahn: Architecture as Philosophy. Again, I've had the privilege of going through those and I would recommend to anybody interested in these types of topics to dig into those. Thank you so much John.

John: Thank you for having me, I’m flattered.

Mitchell: Well have a wonderful rest of the day and again appreciate it.