My intention is to analyze the design of the Roosevelt
Memorial, its place in the New York landscape, and its place
in the architecture of Louis Kahn. My viewpoint – that of
a working architect – is necessarily different from that of
a critic or a historian, such as Brendan Gill or Vincent Scully,
coming as it does from within the discipline and practice
of architecture today.
But first, some personal history. I first met Louis Kahn in 1947,
in Philadelphia. I was 24, studying architecture with Walter
Gropius at Harvard. He was 46, just starting to practice on his
own, in a town-house office on Spruce Street, and starting to
teach at Yale. 1947 was also the year of the «Greater
Philadelphia» exhibition, designed by Edmund Bacon, Oskar
Stonorov, and Louis Kahn, which dramatically showed architectural
possibilities for the city's future.
I saw Lou on many visits to Philadelphia; he was very generous
and eager to talk with me, or anyone, I suppose. At
Harvard, I organized a collaborative thesis on a downtown
plan for Providence, Rhode Island. It was about ideas being
generated in Philadelphia. In the 1950s, on the faculty of
Penn, a group of architects – later to be called «The Philadelphia
School» – came together. Lou was a great teacher, and
his works remain to teach us today. What are the lessons?
First, the importance of origins as the source of understanding
and imagination. Lou believed, as it was believed in the
Enlightenment, that the quintessential character of a thing, an
institution, a landscape, or a building, is not in its sophisticated
development but in its beginnings. He preferred the early to
the late, the essential to the superficial, the authentic to the
faddish and fashionable. In the Roosevelt Memorial, the garden
and the room are «points of departure.» Each one's origin is
made clear: for the garden, a meadow and a forest edge; for
the room, «when the walls parted and the columns became,»
architecture begins.
Second, the meaning of form. Underlying Lou's work is the
classical conception of form, that is, a composition that has
clarity and coherence, an ordered relationship of parts and
wholes. It has origins in geometry: the concept of the center;
the circle and the square; symmetries and asymmetries around
a point or an axis, along a line. The goal is clarity and coherence,
a community of parts.
Where do the parts of the composition come from? For Lou,
they come from classifications, that is, from classifying the
nature of a social institution, the nature of a building's spaces,
the nature of a city's streets. Lou believed that the process of
creating goes through three phases: the unmeasurable, the
measurable, the unmeasurable. The mid-stream phase is
measurable, functional, rational. It is similar to Francis Bacon's
three-part library classification system: memory, reason, and
imagination.
Third, form is created by structure. Structure is a key concept
in modern thought, and it is central to Lou's work. Structure
means organization. It has two meanings in architecture: composition
(that is, the organization of parts to create visual
wholes) and construction (that is, the organization of parts to
create stable buildings). The two meanings need not be in
opposition, and each can be carried forward somewhat
autonomously from each other. In Lou's work, the two types
of structures – as composition and as construction – are
brought together. The integration of structure is clear in the
Roosevelt Memorial's form: the garden, a structure of trees;
and the room, a structure of columns and walls.
Lou challenged modern architecture profoundly by his explorations
of structure. The key to structure – both as composition
and as construction – is the counterpoint of column and wall.
Here are some key examples in Lou's work: the Richards Medical
Research Building's columnar frames; the Kimbell Art Museum's
walls and vaults; the Salk Institute's embedded wall columns; the
wall structures of the capital of Bangladesh. Lou was a devoted
modernist, who was simultaneously an anti-modernist.
Just as Kahn was interested in origins, we can learn about his
architecture by looking at its origins. His work can be divided in
three parts. First, his Beaux-Arts education, at the time of the
City Beautiful movement, which was creating civic monumentality
in American architecture. It had clear principles of composition
for buildings and cities. Philadelphia was a fine place to
experience this civic monumentality. Philadelphia became his
drawing board.
Second, in the 1930s, the emergence of European modernism
in the United States was first expressed dramatically by the
tower of the PSFS building designed by George Howe and
William Lescaze in Philadelphia. For Lou, it was a manifestation
of a new architecture. During the Depression years, architects
in Philadelphia responded with social housing and neighborhood
design, expressing a sense of the importance of social
institutions in community life. Lou's work during the New Deal
period was exemplary. He was involved in the design of the
Jersey Homesteads, later called Roosevelt, New Jersey, and in
some of the most satisfying social housing and community
design in Philadelphia. He joined with his colleagues in forming
professional organizations of architects and planners concerned
with social responsibility.
The third phase of Lou Kahn's career is remarkable for us to
contemplate. It is a modern architecture of Platonic idealism,
of social forms and spatial forms that are created with classical
principles. A question often raised by critics is, what caused
this transformation, this transcendence? I believe it came
about because the third phase of Lou's career closely combined
teaching and work as an architect. His teaching was a
laboratory of architecture. He worked with students in the studio
and in reviews of student work as if they were exploring
the frontiers, as well as the origins, of architecture. The influences
of others were absorbed. The conceptual structures of
Buckminster Fuller and the compositional principles of Joseph
Albers are evident. Lou led the search for order, for coherence
of form. He separated form from design. Form is order. Design
is choice, circumstantial. In that sense, Lou was concerned
with form as the essence of architecture. The search for form
brought him back to his origins, his concern for monumentality,
social institutions, and the civic realm.
Where does the design of the Roosevelt Memorial fit in this
chronology? The memorial is a late work, one of the last. It
embodies the essence of Lou's thought. First, a geometrical
order, a composition of clarity and coherence. Second, a
structure that is both compositional and constructional, in
which the relationship of column and wall, structure and space
is integrated. Third, the materials – the granite, the paving, the
trees – are organized to create both mass and space. The
materials themselves speak without decoration. And finally,
light is created. The light of the sky over the garden and the
room, the light of the vista looking past the United Nations,
overlooking the harbor, framed by the shadows of the
granite walls.
Now, let us consider the Roosevelt Memorial design in its setting
in New York. The memorial is addressed to both nature
and the culture of the city. New York – beyond the conventional
sense of the city, its buildings and streets, its neighborhoods
and districts – is a landscape of rivers and islands bordered by
landmarks. The Statue of Liberty is such a landmark, and so
are the bridges across the rivers and the United Nations building
on the river's edge. The tip of Roosevelt Island lies asleep,
but full of possibilities. Lou's design for the Roosevelt
Memorial would give it a remarkable life, and we would gain a
new landmark in the city of rivers, islands, and landmarks.
Let us consider the memorials in New York. We have a large
collection of memorial sculptures. (The recent announcement
of a figure of Eleanor Roosevelt adds to this fine list.) We have
some green spaces that are dedicated as memorials, such as
Washington Square. We have private monuments, such as the
Towers of Trump, Chrysler, and Woolworth, but few truly public
memorials. An exception is the mausoleum of Ulysses S. Grant
on a hill overlooking the Hudson River. Most of our major
memorials are traffic places: airports named for John F.
Kennedy and Fiorello La Guardia; a bridge named for George
Washington, and a tunnel named for Abraham Lincoln.
But we do not have dramatic public memorials comparable to
those in the nation's capital. Why not? The power of the
Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial comes from
their place in the city, in the architectural landscape. They do
not have anything to say directly about Washington or Lincoln;
indeed their meaning comes from their spatial settings and
from the public realm that they evoke. They are spatial monuments.
They demonstrate Immanuel Kant's philosophical definition
of space, which is the «possibility of being together.»
The Roosevelt Memorial has this spatial possibility: to evoke
the public realm, «the possibility of being together.»
Delivered under the auspices of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt
Institute at the Museum of Modern Art, July 28, 1992. Published
in «Perspectives: “Kahn's FDR Memorial Design,”» Progressive
Architecture, November 1992. |
