(2 of 4)
The tremendous enthusiasm that Kahn's teaching—no less than his buildings—evokes in other architects is partly explained by the decay of the socalled International Style. That system of curtain-wall, frame-and-fill architecture came to America from the Bauhaus, and has dominated the nation's cityscapes ever since. But the past decade has not been kind to the International Style. As the last "rational" abstract mode of building, it has been much attacked as unresponsive to human needs. The architect as master planner, exerting in his structures a pressure, both functional and ethical, on the messy, changing lives of their inhabitants, now seems to some critics an elitist figure, and obsolete as well. And certainly much of classical modern architecture as descended from Gropius and Mies van der Rohe was conceived in a spirit of lofty indifference to social patterns.
Behavior is not a liquid that sets like Jell-O into the mold of a building. Yet all building implies some ordering of life. Fine spaces do not "happen"; they are designed, either by consensus over a span of years (like the town plan of San Gimignano in Tuscany) or else by the authoritative work of one man. There is no consensus of the first kind in America: witness the slurping tide of chaotic architectural mutants that passes for an urban experience in any U.S. city. So we are left with the individual architect as form giver: the responsibilities remain.
Marble Foyers. It was not the fault of the Bauhaus that its formal lessons were so quickly vulgarized by American business. Most architecture is parody, and the International Style's problem, paradoxically enough, was not so much that it failed in the U.S. but that it hardly got a break. For every pure and major act of creation, like Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson's Seagram Building (1958), there have been a hundred ripoffs: bland, scaleless crates with their $50 per sq. ft. marble foyers and 100 Sheetrock offices, their eggbox planning, insipid detail and graceless proportions. The International Style expended itself in these shallows, not in its masterpieces. But what is the alternative? Not the culture of Vegas casinos and duck-shaped roadhouses beloved of Pop architectural theorists like Reyner Banham and Robert Venturi; trash may be language, but it remains trash. The desire for an architecture that is grand, exemplary, responsive and practical still exists. And general expectations of such an architecture have to a large extent converged on Kahn.
He is a fundamentalist: his enterprise has been to rethink the process and nature of architecture, not from Volume I of its history but from what he calls Volume Zero. "Volume Zero," he says, "is what precedes shape, it is the source." His reflections on the nature of building materials express themselves in apparently irreducible riddles, like Zenkoans (Q. "What does a brick like?" A. "An arch"), or bizarrely provocative but elliptical ruminations:
"You cannot really read, or admire, or be in a room unless natural light is there.
We are actually born out of light, you might say. I believe light is the maker of all material. Material is spent light."
They have a practical core, however.