ART REVIEW : The Evolution of Kahn : MOCA’s Retrospective Traces the Renowned Architect’s Career and Philosophy

Architecture, said Louis I. Kahn, “is an affair of silence and light.” And, fortunately for us, Kahn practiced what he preached. He preferred monumentality to bombast, elegance to opulence, and spirituality to sentimentality.

His greatest buildings, completed from the mid-1950s to the mid-’80s (Kahn died in 1974 at the age of 73), are massive structures of reinforced concrete or brick and glass--preferred materials of later Modernist architecture--yet they possess a warmth, humanity and transcendent luminosity rarely associated with that style.

The Salk Institute in La Jolla, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth and the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Conn., are among the most acclaimed buildings of the 20th Century, paradoxically because they belong to no time--or at least no fashion. They are style-less and they are timeless. They look modern, yet their power is an ancient one. These are buildings that change your life.

Ask any architect today for a list of heroes, and Kahn’s name appears on nearly every one. A professional late bloomer, an idealist and something of an iconoclast in his time, Kahn’s status in the architectural world now verges on that of a deity.

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How he got there is the subject of “Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture,” an ambitious exhibition opening Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibition, the first retrospective of Kahn’s work, was organized by MOCA director Richard Koshalek, associate director Sherri Geldin and curator Elizabeth A.T. Smith, along with guest curators David B. Brownlee and David G. De Long, both professors at the University of Pennsylvania (Kahn’s alma mater), and Julia Converse, curator of the Architectural Archives at the university and curator of the Louis I. Kahn Collection, from which most of the show’s material comes.

The exhibition was designed by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, who is best known in this country for having designed MOCA’s Bunker Hill home.

Isozaki had a lot to deal with here. The exhibition includes 130 drawings, an equal number of photographs (including Grant Mudford’s stunning photos of Kahn’s American buildings, commissioned for the show), 48 architectural models, and other materials describing 56 of Kahn’s projects as well as aspects of his early life and education.

There are architectural drawings he did as a student in the classical Beaux-Arts-style program at the University of Pennsylvania. There are extraordinary travel sketches done on two trips abroad--one in 1928-29 and the other in 1950-51, when Kahn, as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, also toured Greece and Egypt.

The later sketches, done in pastel crayon in bold colors (Kahn’s boxes of pastels are displayed nearby), make abundantly clear the architect’s understanding of the architectural past, and his astounding talent for translating the power of those ancient forms into modern ones without resorting to direct quotation. His sketch of the great public square in Siena, Italy, the Campo, distills light and shadow in a way that recalls the eerie stillness of De Chirico’s paintings.

The exhibition is organized into six thematic (rather than strictly chronological) sections, tracing the development of Kahn’s career and philosophy. From his early days in practice, Kahn cared deeply about architecture’s role in the public realm. He designed several subsidized housing projects during World War II and numerous urban design schemes afterward.

Kahn wrote that “the street is a room by agreement,” and his designs for cities--like his designs for buildings--offered people places to congregate, discuss ideas or sit alone in quiet contemplation. Ironically, this man who created so many monumental buildings could not have cared less about making monuments. In the hefty catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, De Long quotes Kahn as saying, “I believe that a man’s greatest worth is in the area where he can claim no ownership.” Given our current obsession with signature buildings by “name” architects, this statement is all the more poignant.

It is clear that Isozaki, himself a noted creator of signature buildings, reveres Kahn. Indeed, the massive, geometric forms and dramatic sky-lit galleries that Isozaki created at MOCA owe a clear debt to the master. Isozaki’s design for the show’s installation is inspired by an unbuilt Kahn project, the Mikveh Israel Synagogue in Philadelphia (1961-72).

Isozaki arranged semicircular and straight walls to suggest the plan of the project, almost as if one were walking through a ruin of the actual building. Drawings and photographs are hung on the walls, and architectural models are interspersed among them. Isozaki’s massive walls are clearly meant to evoke the spirit of Kahn’s walls--an honorable intention.

Whether they succeed is another question. The walls are made of birch, stained gray to recall the cast concrete that Kahn loved so much. Yet Kahn would never have disguised a material this way. He used wood--notably, a warm, rich white oak--side by side with concrete, with brilliant results in buildings such as the Yale Center for British Art or the library at Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. By trying to make one look like the other, Isozaki does not do either material real justice.

Also puzzling is Isozaki’s decision to leave the show’s first gallery empty, save for a large monitor playing a video on Kahn, and a selection of Mudford’s black-and-white photographs, which viewers won’t even see unless they turn back toward the lobby. This gallery, with its cube shape and giant pyramidal skylight, is Isozaki’s showstopper at MOCA, and while his clearing the room may be a sincere silence-and-light gesture of homage to Kahn, it also risks being construed as self-aggrandizement at the expense of the work to which he is paying tribute.

The curators have taken great pains to see that each of the projects on display is shown in the various stages of its design (many of Kahn’s projects changed greatly from conception to execution), but the labels do not explain these evolutions. They give only brief descriptions of the images and models, without explaining their significance. The text-panels for each of the six sections offer overviews, but explanations of how at least some of the projects illustrated Kahn’s evolution as an architect would have been welcome.

Those criticisms aside, it should be emphasized that MOCA is one of the few museums in the country that cares enough about architecture to exhibit it on its walls, and the show’s organizers deserve a lot of credit for mounting this long-overdue survey of Kahn’s work. In many ways, Kahn is one of America’s greatest unknown architects. His name, unlike Frank Lloyd Wright’s (the most famous example), is largely unheard of outside the architectural profession.

This exhibition, which has been traveling since it opened in Kahn’s hometown of Philadelphia in 1991 (an admirably selfless gesture on MOCA’s part, since it could have opened its own show in its own museum and gotten more exposure much sooner), should go a long way toward righting that wrong.

Louis Kahn, although not a young man when he died, left this world much too soon--he designed his greatest buildings only in the few years preceding his fatal heart attack in the mens’ room of New York’s Pennsylvania Station, on his way home from yet another long and wearing business trip. The decade following his death saw a civil war of sorts in architecture, a rebellion against the sterile, soulless buildings that were the product of an impoverished, exhausted Modernist movement--the same movement, as it happens, that spawned Louis Kahn.

While Kahn had no interest in producing soulless buildings, he wouldn’t have had a kind word for the revolution that followed, known as Post Modernism. It relied too heavily on direct historical quotation and ornament to make its point, and instead of producing dreary, featureless architecture, it produced--with a few notable exceptions--dreary, overdecorated architecture.

What few architects seem to have grasped (and certainly not the slavish followers of Kahn, who, like the slavish followers of Wright, can’t see the spirit for the letter) is that Kahn captured the majesty of the old in the forms and materials of the new. Contrary to MOCA’s claim in its exhibition’s introduction, Kahn didn’t pave the way for Post Modernism. He wasn’t, as some say, a proto-Post-Modernist. He was simply one of the few Modernists who gave Modernism--in the sense of being of one’s time--a good name.

“Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture” opens Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 621-2766. Museum hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday, Thursdays until 8 p.m. The exhibition has been seen in Philadelphia, Paris, New York and Gunma, Japan, and subsequent to closing in Los Angeles on May 30 will travel to Fort Worth and Columbus, Ohio .