Getting to Know Louie Kahn

How’s this for Serendipity? Because Greenbelt Knoll, an experimental interracial community in Holmesburg, Northeast Philadelphia, is celebrating its Golden Jubilee this year, I found to my delight that I’ve been living for almost fifty years in a house designed by Louie Kahn, that quiet, quirky architectural genius of twentieth century Philadelphia. We knew from the start that our community had won an AIA award for siting for Bishop-Young Architects, by deftly inserting nineteen houses on the short cul-de-sac Longford Street, off Holme Avenue, leaving our glory of 100 foot century old trees to cool our summers and gladden our falls.

But Louie Kahn? Scuttlebutt has it that he and Oscar Stonorov designed the adjacent wartime workers housing as Pennypack Gardens. But its blue collar ethnics kept blacks out longer than Levittown. (Indeed, I have yet to see one break in their color line.) Not so for Morris Milgram, the leading promoter of integrated U.S. housing after World War II. We just learned about Kahn when the Historical Commission considered a proposal to make our settlement historically registered.

Cannily, Morris (who lived there with Grace, his city planner wife, and two children) got Robert N.C. Nix, the first black U.S. Congressman from Philly, and the Reverend Leon Sullivan, the Lion from Zion (and his wife Grace and their two children!), and Roosevelt Barlow, the first black fire captain, (his wife Virginia and son Ray, now a homicide detective) as lead tenants, steadily maintaining the half white, half black ratio throughout the fifty years.

We lost one house when Jim Rogers, a wonderful neighbor, proved not too good a preservationist. The playwright Charles Fuller moved in some years back, and bought the Rogers residence for one of his sons. He now has the great idea of turning that bulldozed site into a community park, with outdoor furniture designed by James Camp, the internationally renowned artist who had also been an original resident.

I have always been a wildly enthusiastic partisan of Kahn’s ouevre. Not only did he create fresh buildings, but he was as far away from becoming a self-regarding Starchitect as it’s possible to be in the Pritzker Era and still stay out of bankruptcy court. I had only one, unforgettable hour with him when I hosted a TV series, “Man-Made Landscapes,” for WFIL-TV in 1959, the year we moved into 8 Longford Street.

Kahn was in the midst of final plans for the Jonas Salk Center for Biological Sciences in La Jolla, CA, and he brought along the Salk maquette, and was eager to expatiate on how he planned to bring the scientists and humanists together by designing the library in such a way that both had to meet physically if not intellectually. (The squabble over the gulf between the two parts of the clerisy in C.P.Snow’s Two Cultures was then dominating faculty chatter.) Kahn got so carried away by his own rhetoric that he started to escalate right out of the TV camera’s range. It was the only time I ever told a genius to sit down, NOW! He blushed and complied.

Some years later, when I finally got to check out the finished building, I stopped the first white lab-coated person I encountered and asked him the question I had been wondering about ever since the broadcast. “Did Mr. Kahn’s dream of getting the scientists and humanists together work?” Without a hitch, the scientist replied: “Only until Jacob Bronowski died.” For those who were not PBS documentary buffs, he was the mathematician who played egghead compere in the BBC TV series, “Ascent of Man”. As it happens I was the education adviser for Time Life Films (1968-72).

It was the sinecure of my life. Every Tuesday I trekked into New York to mark a copy of the coming week’s “Radio Times” (the BBC’s TV Guide) so they could record in black and white the programs we thought had potential for schools, museums, or PBS. The next week we’d screen them, me and a handful of salesmen, always starting,for mental health reasons, with the latest episode of Monty Python. Our managing director (that’s how BBC-ish we’d become),Peter Robeck, got wind of this bottom-line-mindlessness and chided me. “I’m not paying you a $1000 a month to watch that trash,Hazard.” “But, Peter,” I lamely replied,”that’s what our upper-middlebrow viewers dig!” Luckily, WTTW/Chicago got the word and bought the series, getting us off the fiscal hook.

The summer of 72 Peter had us all assemble in London for a “seminar”. What he hoped would happen was that the Brits would learn to sell better and faster, and the Amis would get a tad more cultivated. A highpoint at Ealing Studio was rushes for the yet to be finished “Ascent of Man”. And Jacob was there to tout it. He explained how reluctant he had been to take so much time from his Math research and his love for William Blake. (Bronowski didn’t need Kahn’s melding library to mix science and humane studies: his idiosyncratic career exemplified such mixing at its apogee.)

He explained how Aubrey Singer, the BBC man in charge of High Culture, had bullied him to committing himself to the series, slyly implying that it was a mitzvah he had a Jrwish responsibility to accept. Then Bronowski explained how he forced himself to sit at the feet of the network’s premier cameraman, one Kenneth Macgowan—to learn how to talk through a TV camera. After the screening I walked up to him to express my appreciation for the results of this high class tutoring. “Macgowan’s tutelage,” I said, “reminds me of my favorite aphorism from William Blake: 'He who would do me good, must do it in minute particulars!’” His eyes literally blazed as he agreed, “Precisely, precisely!”

I had inadvertently arranged for what turned out to be the intellectual high point of the London seminar by organizing a party in a girl friend’s eighth story flat overlooking Regent’s Park. (She was a pal of the newly elected Irish bus inspector mayor of Camden, Paddy O’Connor, which I assume had something to do with her 8 pounds a month rent in this high class venue.) I invited two of the network’s biggest eggheads, both Viennese Jews who had fled Hitler very effectively indeed, Stephen Hearst then head of the Third Programme, and Martin Esslin who invented the term “absurd drama”.

I was still dumbfounded by the autodidact Phyllis O’Leary, a blue collar social worker for retired Camden Town’s golden oldies. She worked her damnedest to get them free winter trips to Spain, or failing that, color TV consolation prizes. She had taken me, an English Department chairman, to Whitechapel Gallery and given me a dazzling improvised lecture on the PreRaphaelites! It confirmed my overoptimism during the Beatles Era that only lack of opportunity kept Phyllises of the world poor and illiterate.

Louis Kahn was another O’Leary. Coming from Latvia at age 5, leading a hard scrabble life in Philly, burning himself almost fatally in a freak accident. His bastard son Nathaniel’s marvelous film about his father is touching in the way it juxtaposes Kahn’s sweetly tortured private life and how “the making of noble spaces” so consumed him that he died of a heart attack, alone, in the toilet of Penn Station coming back from Dakka in Bangladesh.

His masterpieces—The Yale Art Center in New Haven, the Kimball Art Center in Fort Worth, the Library of Phillips Exeter, the Parliament in Bangladesh (not to forget Greenbelt Knoll!)—are not shticks like Gehry’s Bilbao or Meier’s Getty. My filmmaker son Michael recently reminded me of Louie’s incontrovertible aphorism: "A room without natural light is not architecture.” We even forgive him for the fact that scientists at the Richards Medical Center at Penn can’t forget: their noxious fumes don’t exhaust sufficiently.

Michael’s friend in St. Paul, architect Walter Johanson (a student of Kahn’s at Penn) sadly notes that the Richard scientists find the natural light destructive of their close examinations of data and they crudely block the fenestration with a disgusting array of impediments! We don’t ask our architects to be infallible, just that they’re educable! And the attempted splendid water course that runs down the center of the esplanade at the Salk Center is already scuzzy from scum accumulating from unsuccessful water circulation. These venial sins don’t keep us from exulting in Kahn’s ouevre, even though we wish he had made more gems in Philly. We love him retroactively but have to travel the world to relish his creativity. Unless of course you’re lucky enough to live at Greenbelt Knoll!