The Scottish Castle. Thick, thick walls. Little openings to the enemy. Splayed inwardly to the occupant. A place to read, a place to sew [‌]. Places for the bed, for the stair [‌]. Sunlight. Fairy tale. Louis I. Kahn - 1973
Francesco Cacciatore
THE WALL AS LIVING PLACE Hollow structural forms in Louis Kahn’s work
Acknowledgements This study is the result of a research work developed in the context of the PhD Course in Architectural Design and Urban Analysis – XVIII Cycle – at the University of Catania, Faculty of Architecture, over the 2002-2005 period. The author would like to thank the entire Faculty Board for sharing the discussion on the subjects that this book concisely presents. The author would also like to thank: Adriano Cornoldi, Full Professor of Interior Design at the IUAV in Venice for his foreword; Luigi Pellegrino and Gianfranco Gianfriddo, for the continuous exchange of ideas and concepts and for sharing researches and designs which represent a constant reference in the study and practice of architecture; Laura Martorina, for her crucial support and determination in encouraging the publication of this book. Francesco Cacciatore, June 2011
CONTENTS 9 15
Foreword by Adriano Cornoldi Introduction
TRADITION OF THICKNESS An outline of the origin and development of architectural masonry systems 19 21 27
Archetypes of stereotomic construction and plastic-masonry architecture Persistence of forms and characters of the stereotomic wall Evolution of the stereotomic tradition
BACK TO THICKNESS Louis Kahn and the reconstruction of thickness after the modernist season 39 45
Beaux-Arts education and overcoming of modernism Adoption of the hollow structural form
CONTROL OF THICKNESS Kahn’s work and the turning point of the 1951-1961 decade 57 67 79
Thickening of horizontal elements Thickening of vertical elements Thickening of the continuous wall
POETICS OF THICKNESS Invention of the wall as a place for living 97 103
112 113
‘Wrapping ruins around buildings’: the wall as diaphragm and fringe space ‘Living in the wall’: inhabited wall and interstitial space
Bibliography Illustrations sources
This book was first printed in late December 2008. About one month later, Professor Adriano Cornoldi would leave us, taken away by an unforgiving illness. He would not even see it printed. I am deeply grateful for his perseverance and the support he gave to this research up to the end, for his precious advice and the insightful words he desperately pursued at a time when words were going to abandon him. Thank you Adriano.
FOREWORD by Adriano Cornoldi
There is ample evidence as to how the modern masters, in their shared pursuit of formal inventions and constructional inventions, variously referred to past examples they had freely chosen as guides that could inspire and support them in their strenuous pursuit of new things. Perret’s work, for example, offers well-known examples of relations between classic order and new structural rationalities. Even Le Corbusier consistently proved he could treasure tradition: without his journey to the East there would have been no Maisons Domino and the ‘five points’ that would be the foundation of a language. Without the reference to rationalism seen at Katsura or Jefferson, Wright would not have had the tectonic insights of the Prairie Houses, or Larkin and Johnson Wax Buildings. The memory of Schinkel plays a role in Mies’ pursuit of an identity between assemblage of components and formal rigour. The buildings shaped like soft clouds and gelatinous bowels, or the spiked bravura pieces designed by today’s fashionable architects – anything but functional, cost effective and durable – have no relation with either construction or history. Louis Kahn, instead, kept form, structure and history paradigmatically together. As he explicitly Foreword by Adriano Cornoldi
9
INTRODUCTION
14
The wall as living place
“As for the efforts of a so-called ‘new’ architecture to produce something unprecedented and advanced – […] – let us accept once and for all that a truly unprecedented and advanced work is not that which uses superficial brilliance to make a temporary and sensational impact, or that which seeks to take one by surprise by means of ostentatious, acrobatic contortions, based on momentary ‘finds’, but only that which is justified by a continuing, living tradition, that which endures because it is put to test again and again, within each new context, so that it expresses afresh inner experiences, secretly nurtured disciplines, forms that have truly been handled over and over again”1. The Greek architect Aris Konstantinidis wrote this passage in 1975 and stigmatized the ephemeral character that new things acquire when they are pursued as an end in themselves, and refuse to find their place, although with the proper distances and the necessary adjustments to the contemporary spirit, within a precise and established tradition. Today more than ever these words sound meaningful and topical. Indeed, the contemporary architectural scene seems to have an unprecedented interest for the construction of innovative buildings by using what Konstantinidis defined as superficial brilliance, temporary and sensational, combined with ostentatious, acrobatic contortions. In such eagerness to produce the show of so-called new shapes and never seen before scenes, nobody would ever think that an advanced and unprecedented work might see the light through the reinterpretation of a long and ongoing tradition, by exploiting the current potential of what, to quote once more the Greek architect, might be defined as forms that have put to test again and again. This work of modern reinterpretation of ancient forms and themes seems instead to be the keystone used by many Masters of the twentieth century, including those of the Modern Movement considered as the most irreverent and revolutionary towards the past, to successfully change the course of architectural history. Based on such premise, this study reads Louis I. Kahn’s work as a sort of trait-d’union that appropriated and reassessed the legacy of ancient “thick” building tradition and made it available as an experimentation ground for the contemporary architectural world. In particular, the first chapter concisely reviews the origins and development of masonry architectural systems, hints at possible Introduction
15
TRADITION OF THICKNESS An outline of the origin and development of architectural masonry systems
18
The wall as living place
Archetypes of stereotomic construction and plastic-masonry architecture
A major place among the architectural traditions that were founded on masonry construction certainly belongs to Egyptian architecture that, in this sense, might almost be considered as the archetype. This is evident not much in the presence and importance of walls in its structure but rather in how the Egyptian wall encapsulates a way of viewing the essence of making architecture and therefore of building1. Indeed, ancient Egyptians were concerned about the representation of physical matter, and were particularly interested in the tactile and apparent qualities typical of its inert status. Therefore, the real starting point in the process of expression and representation of this architecture is not the purely geometric and constructive dimension of the wall but rather its matter, namely stone, rock in its natural status. Precisely for this reason, in the Egyptian world, rock is not just a building material but has rather a value of basic material that can build, more than the physical ground of the Egyptian country, its architectural and geographical landscape2. Such definition of matter is what controls and gives precise meaning to the different elements of Egyptian architecture, through its physical qualities of weight, solidity and cohesion. Such qualities acquire typical characters in the case of stone, a material that is essentially continuous, solid and isotropic, or has the same apparent characters in every direction. Gottfried Semper himself, in identifying the four categories of fundamental elements in nature, found a correspondence between the art of stereotomy and the physical-mechanical characters of stone. For Semper the first category of materials is that of textiles and hence of textile art; the second category includes pottery; the third category relates to tectonics (or carpentry), while the fourth category, clearly expressing all the characters of stone, corresponds, as said before, to stereotomy or the art of masonry3. The kind of work that reveals and highlights the intrinsic characters of stone is directly related to the activity required to transform stone itself. This corresponds to the concept of carving and, as its in-depth extension, of excavating, a primordial activity that might be performed on the natural material. In Egyptian architecture this concept of excavation seems to transcend its literal meaning, to become, by analogy, the concept of construction itself. We might even say that, paradoxically, what Egyptian architecture tried to build was precisely an excavation4. Tradition of thickness
19
Temple of Horus, Edfu, Egypt, 3000 b.C. - Plan.
August’s Mausoleum, Rome, 1nd century - Plan.
CONTROL OF THICKNESS Kahn’s work and the turning point of the 1951-1961 decade
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The wall as living place
Thickening of horizontal elements
It is quite obvious that the period over which Louis Kahn achieved a turning point both in his professional career and in architectural history, was the 1951-1961 decade. Over that time-span, it is indeed evident how his patient and continuous research of an architecture of hollow forms would lead him both away from the modernist formal vocabulary on which he had based the entire early part of his career and to develop a work that would be increasingly connected to the use and control of mass and thickness. By studying the main works and designs developed by Kahn over these ten years, it is possible to see how such thickening process was gradually achieved through three successive steps: first in the design of the horizontal elements of the building, its floors; secondly, in the geometry of its supports, the pilasters; finally, in the development of the building’s entire masonry envelope, or the continuous wall. If the City Tower project in Philadelphia is paradigmatic in that it summarizes the peculiar traits of the issue we are discussing, the first building where Kahn expressed such tendency towards the thickening of construction’s typical elements is the Yale Art Gallery in New Haven. The period immediately preceding his receiving such commission was, in particular, crucial in leading him on to a new phase of his architecture. “When word came of the Yale commission, Kahn was a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, where, like so many architects before him, he no doubt welcomed the respite from practice to reconsider the direction of his work. His stay there was relatively brief – only three months – yet it seemed to have effect, for afterward the direction of his work began its decisive change. Clearly the physical presence of Rome, which offered fundamental lessons of history, was overwhelming. Shortly after his arrival he wrote to his office colleagues in Philadelphia: ‘I firmly realize that the architecture in Italy will remain as the inspirational source of the works of the future. Those who don’t see it that way ought to look again. Our stuff looks tinny compared to it and all the pure forms have been tried in all variations. What is necessary is the interpretation of the architecture of Italy as it relates to our knowledge of building and needs. I care little for the restorations (that kind of interpretation) but I see great personal value in reading Control of thickness
57
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, 1951-1953. Cross section. Reflected ceiling plan.
one’s own approaches to the creation of space modified by the buildings around as the points of departure’”1. It is not coincidental, then, given such statement, that the early ideas for the Yale Art Gallery, presented a few weeks after Kahn was back from Rome, clearly reflected all the powerful impressions he had received from the ancient Roman buildings. One of the early perspective sketches of the Chapel Street elevation already shows how the building’s volume is proportioned on Edgerton Swartwout’s Yale University Art Gallery of 1928, that, in any case, it remains connected to. But this influence is most extraordinarily expressed in the treatment of ceilings. “The ceiling treatment […] was, of course, crucial to Kahn’s conception, for in answering both structural and mechanical needs in such an orderly manner as to leave structure and utilities exposed, he achieved architecture as basic and timeless as that which he had come to appreciate in Rome. Moreover, the insistent pattern of the ceiling’s triangulated ribs suggested a differentiation of space below in a manner sympathetically aligned with Roman vaulting. In such ways Kahn brought fundamental aspects of history to bear on his architecture, combining them with an image of advanced technology – in this case, the ceiling system – that spoke strongly of its own time. It was a system derived from Buckminster Fuller’s space frames, which Kahn had transformed from a lightweight to a visually heavy structure […]”2. With this solution Kahn showed that he had efficiently assimilated the extraordinary lesson of the Pantheon, the building most frequently portrayed in his Roman trip’s travel notebook, with the coffered vault built with increasingly lighter and thinner material until it dematerialized in the oculus open to the sky, thus visually giving the idea of a heavy and often excavated cover. The possibility to transcend the mere practical function by playing with proportions and emphasizing mass and measure is again a lesson learnt through the direct experience of a Roman building: the Baths of Caracalla. “It is ever a wonder when man aspires to go beyond the functional. Here was the will to build a vaulted structure 100 feet high in which men could bathe. Eight feet would have sufficed. Now, even as a ruin, it is a marvel”3. In the same spirit, Kahn designed in the Yale Art Gallery a massive Control of thickness
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Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, 1951-1953. Drawing showing the integration of the ceiling’s structural and mechanical systems. Detail of the exposed coffered ceiling.