December 13–20, 2001

slant

The Worth of Kahn

by Steve Conn

Architect Louis Kahn would have celebrated his 100th birthday this year. A new documentary film about him and his work is currently in production. Let’s hope that Mayor Street attends a screening before he launches his full-scale, $250 million war on blight.

Kahn was surely the most important architect to have come out of Philadelphia in the 20th century, and the competition for that honor is stiff. More than that, it is still probably right to say, as critic Paul Goldberger did in his 1974 obituary for Kahn, that he was among the foremost architects in the nation.

In that sense, Kahn stands as one of those precious gifts the city has given the world over the past three centuries. He is part of a pantheon that includes Benjamin Franklin in the 18th century and Thomas Eakins in the 19th, among others.

Like both Franklin and Eakins, Kahn remains a figure of international reknown whose inspirational roots are thoroughly Philadelphian. Franklin, the quintessential American story, would have been impossible anywhere else but 18th-century Philadelphia. He had to leave Boston as a kid to reinvent himself. Eakins too, bred and trained in Philadelphia, found the muscular, industrial Philadelphia of the late 19th century an endless font for his painting. His images could have come from no other place.

Likewise Kahn. It has long been assumed that Kahn, builder of somber, timeless, almost Platonic buildings, found his architectural voice only after visiting Rome and studying its ruins. But as this new film, made by his son Nathaniel, suggests, Kahn’s inspiration may have had its source considerably closer to home — in the Northern Liberties neighborhood where Kahn grew up.

Walk around that neighborhood, as the filmmaker did, and the simple factory buildings that dot that area, their volumes and voids, begin to remind you pretty quickly of Kahn’s work. Kahn wrestled with the basic architectural issues — how to organize space, light, proportion, materials — perhaps more profoundly than any other architect of the 20th century. So did the simple industrial buildings that populated his childhood.

We would do well to remember this source of Kahn’s architecture now that many of Philadelphia’s industrial buildings, and the neighborhoods that surround them, find themselves on the architectural endangered-species list.

When Kahn walked those streets, of course, the factories were busy. Now they are not, and in the intervening years our appreciation of these buildings has largely tracked their economic decline. Now that these factories no longer produce textiles, or leather, or metalwork, we hold these shuttered buildings in a kind of contempt and have let many of them crumble through neglect or worse.

As an architect, Kahn saw something other than jobs and economic productivity when he stared at these buildings, something more transcendent.

In some of these factories he found a simple grace of design, a sober dignity of form, an elegant presence. We ought to pause and try to see what he saw before we hurry to tear these buildings down.

Looked at with these eyes, ordinary buildings become extraordinary, and the broad, black strokes with which we have painted "blight" across so much of North Philadelphia dissolve into more complicated, intriguing patterns of possibility. A vital, vibrant urban life requires first interesting spaces in which it can take place. Here might be the spaces which, if restored and recycled, could nurture the urban vitality that eventually flourishes into lasting cultural achievement.

Looked at and appreciated individually, rather than condemned en masse, some of these buildings might have new life as housing, as commercial centers, or as artists’ studios. They might also prove formative to the vision of some writer, photographer or designer who turns out to be the next gift the city bestows on the nation’s cultural life.

Through Kahn there is something of Northern Liberties in Texas and in California, in India and in Bangladesh. Simply because an architect as great as Louis Kahn had his architectural vision shaped in part by the factories of Northern Liberties is not reason enough to insist that they be spared execution by bulldozer.

But Kahn’s debt to his old neighborhood reminds us that if he found sublime inspiration here, so we might, too, in the future. It would be a tragedy should we forget that in a mad, destructive rush to "save" these neighborhoods.

Steve Conn, a Philadelphia native, is an associate professor of history at Ohio State University. If you would like to respond to this Slant or have one of your own (850 words), contact Howard Altman, City Paper interim editor, 123 Chestnut St., Phila., PA 19106 or e-mail altman@citypaper.net.