Concrete Conversations
In the Shadows of Giants
Previously in Concrete Conversations….
C’est la vie qui a raison, l’architecte qui a tort.
It is life that is right and the architect who is wrong.
— Le Corbusier
Louis Kahn is hiding something. Peering out from a floppy head of grey hair and thick glasses, he looks a bit like a Muppet. He twirls a drafting pencil in his right hand and begins to discuss his younger years, “I was to be a painter. There was no question about it, until my last year in high school, when a course given on architecture just hit me so strongly as something that I wanted to be associated with.” Kahn ends the story of his painting career, failing to mention the watercolor studies of his early projects and conveniently forgetting he spent most of the 1930s composing colorful portraits and landscapes in his bedroom, when the Great Depression meant little architectural work. Watercolors are impermissible for an architect in this time. Kahn, trained in the classical Beaux-Arts style scorned by Le Corbusier’s Modernism, is continually repressing his instinct to paint. Instead he draws in pastel, the closest thing the dogma allows, producing pictures of buildings devoid of scale or ornament. Only light and mass remain in his drawings, architecture removed from linear time due to its lack of context.
Tadao Ando is speaking on the influence of a high school math teacher, the carpenters he apprenticed with in his hometown. His hair is cropped in a bowl cut as it has been for over thirty years and he has a peculiar intensity reminiscent of Christopher Walken. “These two elements -math and carpentry-converse in architecture. That was my starting point. I could not go to university; I couldn’t even afford to go to an architectural trade school. The only option left was to study by myself. I had to think and act by myself. One thing I decided to do was to read architecture books.”
Trinkets gather by one of the pock-marked concrete walls of Ando’s studio. A framed picture leans against the wall, perched atop a stack of thick books that sit on an undulating piece of furniture. The picture is of Ando’s deceased dog, a stray Akita that walked into the office one day. He named her Le Corbusier. The Swiss-French architect has been on Ando’s mind since the beginning. At nineteen he came across a book about Le Corbusier at a thrift store in Osaka. He saved up until he could buy the book, then spent his days tracing the architect’s drawings until every page had turned black. He began to come up with designs for small houses and furniture, all in wood, and he would wonder what Le Corbusier would have done in the same situation.
Not long ago at all in the history of humanity, a building made with multiple concrete slabs and columns at each edge was not yet even an idea, an open floor plan not something every suburban realtor touted to their clients but rather a wholly new concept. Today it all seems so obvious, but nothing is obvious until it has become so common as to be such. The arch, the vault, the dome; all of them began in the mind, an idea before they were ever a thing. While it was a French inventor in the 1840s who created the first prototypes of what is now known as reinforced concrete, it was set loose on popular culture in 1914 by the half-blind renaissance man Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known to the world by his pseudonym Le Corbusier, translated to English as “the Raven”. Le Corbusier’s Dom-Ino concept proposed a building that could stand without bearing weight on the façade. It was the revolutionary origin point of Modernist Architecture and all that has come with it; spaces free of bearing walls, towers with floor to ceiling glass and minimally embellished façades, things most people take for granted today in the urban fabric.
But revolutionaries often develop into tyrants. Ten years after the acclaim of Dom-Ino, Le Corbusier was pushing to have the heart of Paris wiped out and replaced with eighteen sterile towers. While his Plan Voisin was never seriously considered, by mid-century his ideas had been so heavily indoctrinated into the profession that several projects on the periphery of Paris, not to mention in urban centers across the world, had adopted their own versions of Le Corbusier’s proposal, decimating historic quarters and displacing their inhabitants, replacing them with tower after tower that hovered over the landscape with a soulless gaze. As founder and chief propogandist for the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), Le Corbusier created rules and regulations for Architects to abide by, rules that while not enforced by any nation state became so entrenched in the profession they might as well been. Even after Le Corbusier himself had evolved past his early dogmatic beliefs, the rest of the profession seemed to treat his early manifestos as sacred texts. CIAMS standards and rules swallowed up a whole generation of Architects. For some time they swallowed up Louis Kahn too.
When Le Corbusier was entering the third or fourth phase of his career in the 1940s, Kahn was just beginning to search for something without knowing quite what it was. Trying to conform to Modernism had left Kahn a middling Architect. Most of his built work was single-family houses with large walls of glass tacked on in a disorderly fashion, buildings devoid of the spirit and grandiosity of his later architecture. Says one Yale colleague: “He wasn’t bad at it, but he wasn’t exceptionally good at it either. And he would not have become the Kahn we know had he continued to do it. He just didn’t feel it.”
The first glimpse of Kahn’s growing interest in concrete was a treatise he wrote in 1944 that focused on embracing technological innovation, not just with concrete but with glass, laminated woods and metal as well. Kahn used this technical elaboration to put forth a vision of an imagined structure, one that could have easily doubled as an early concept for the Kimbell:
From above we see the noble outlines of the building. Much taller buildings some distance from the site do not impress us with the same feeling of receptiveness…The plans reveal that the vast spans shelter smaller areas designed for specific use, which are divided from the whole by panels of glass, insulated slabs, and marble. These partitions are free of the structure and related only to the circulation pattern. The ground plan seems continuous. The great lobby is a part of the amphitheater which dips down to the stage. The light comes from above through an undulating series of prismatic glass domes.
In 1949 Kahn was hired to explore rapid construction methods for Israeli settlements. The proposals Kahn put forth never materialized, but the funded research had a significant impact on his future work as he came in contact with engineers and institutions involved in innovation across the world. Within Kahn’s rejected proposals for the Israeli settlements were several that utilized concrete shell systems, embryonic concepts of the Kimbell roof.
As Kahn embarked on his exploration of concrete, Le Corbusier was working on the construction of Unite d’Habitation in Marseilles, France. Due to cost issues, Le Corbusier had given up his initial concept of a steel frame and instead constructed in rough cast concrete, béton brut as it was called in French. The result was a building that opened in 1953 to great acclaim. Twelve years later a lanky twenty-four-year-old from Osaka found himself in Marseilles, face to face with the building. Le Corbusier, like Ando, had never received a formal architectural education and had taught himself by traveling in his twenties and experiencing great buildings in person. Planning to meet his idol, Ando had traveled to Europe by boat. When he arrived in Paris, Le Corbusier was dead; against doctor’s orders the seventy-seven-year-old had gone out swimming in the Mediterranean and his body was found in the water several hours later, the victim of an apparent heart attack. Marseilles was Ando’s last stop on his initial trip through Europe and he waited there several weeks for a boat back to Japan, the delay providing ample time to ponder Le Corbusier’s masterwork.
“I like ruins, because what remains is not the total design, but the clarity of thought, the naked structure, the spirit of the thing.”
— Tadao Ando
While Le Corbusier’s shadow hovered over Kahn and Ando, their ability to break away from the Modernist doctrine came through their experience of ruins, particularly those of Rome. Kahn went to Rome in 1950 as a fellow at the American Academy. He visited ancient sites such as Hadrian’s Villa and Trajan’s Market. He drew pastels. He pored over the books of Giovanni Piranesi, finding beauty in the remains, in the fragments of abandoned perfection.
If Le Corbusier was the one who brought concrete back to celebrity status, it was Giovanni Piranesi that pulled the giant from the forgotten crevasse of history it had been trapped in for over a millennium. In the 18th Century concrete’s renaissance was instigated by an interest in hydraulic mortar, a limestone paste that can harden underwater. While innovations took place across Europe, the city of Venice was at the forefront. Venice’s location on marshlands meant its survival was tied to the ability to create durable and waterproof foundations and levees. Shipworms had begun to wreak havoc on these essential Venetian structures and resulted in an urgency to find an alternative to wood. Roman ruins, some that had survived over a millennium submerged in water, seemed to provide the answer. Among those assisting with the upgrades in Venice was Piranesi, then a young architectural apprentice. After his work in Venice, Piranesi spent several decades in Rome evolving from draftsman to master engraver and becoming renowned for documenting the ruins of the ancient empire. Unlike other landscape artists of the time, Piranesi focused not just on the scene but on the architectural details of the buildings. His focus on construction led to a heightened awareness of the ancient methods of Rome and fueled further interest in concrete.
In the time of Piranesi historic restoration was a fluid task. One was not expected to perfectly reassemble ancient works but to reconfigure them in a way relevant to the present. Piranesi’s etchings take this to the extreme, embellishing scale by adding and removing elements, partially reconstructing pieces from imagination and doing so in a way that not only invoked the design tendencies of ancient Rome but also transformed the ruins into something contemporary. When Kahn returned from his stay in Rome he had become obsessed with the idea of “wrapping ruins around buildings”, a concept he would first employ at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California.
Walking through a multi-level courtyard he designed, Tadao Ando explains the Pantheon and Piranesi as it’s inspirations. “I like ruins,” he says, “because what remains is not the total design, but the clarity of thought, the naked structure, the spirit of the thing.” Ando often speaks of his buildings as labyrinths and the skewed perspective of Piranesi’s etchings lend themselves well to this effect. Standing in the back corner of the lowest floor he looks up at the sliver of open air space he has produced, the varied balconies sculpting out a void that’s shape swells and subsides like a piece of great pottery. Ando begins to walk up the stairs and reality appears to bend, the scale of the stairs getting smaller and smaller in relation to Ando’s lean frame, the Architect becoming part of the Piranesian distortion as he ascends.
Dan Edleson is the Principal of STEREO, a Building Information Modeling firm focused on Digitizing existing building conditions, and ZUN, a firm focused on Ecological Optimization of Buildings.
