My Architect: A Son's Journey Page #5

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- Thank you.

- Let me get out of your way.

- Thank you very much.

Do you... do you

know Anne Tyng?

- No. Hi, Rob Frey.

- Hi, nice to meet you.

- An honor to meet you.

- Anne was the...

the architect with Lou on the project.

- Unbelievable.

- Wonderful. Wonderful. Okay.

If it's okay if we just

want to look around?

Oh, absolutely.

Gosh.

- It's painted now, huh?

- Terrible.

I mean, it's just such a shame.

"Dearest Annie,

"I must build one of the

great buildings of the time.

"You must help me build

this particular building.

"I doubt if I can do it without you.

"Just think how low

architecture has gotten down.

"We, Anne, you and I, are

going to show them the way.

"All my love, Lou."

Do you think this building

was very important for Lou?

Well, he says so himself,

you know, that the world discovered him

when he built the Richards building,

but he had discovered

himself when he built

that little concrete-block

bathhouse in Trenton.

So that... that says it,

I think, right there

how significant he felt it was.

Do you think about him a lot now?

Well, he's kind of there, you know?

Don't need to think about him.

- Part of you?

- Well, he's there.

He's there in you, he's in Alex, you know...

He's in his buildings. And...

And I think the ideas

that you work on together

connect you always somehow, you know?

Lou split up with Anne

when Alex was about three

and then got involved with my mother

a few years later in 1959.

In spite of everything,

Anne has always felt

that we're all connected

and that we are, in some

strange way, a family.

I wonder if Lou thought of it that way.

Or was each relationship

an entirely new beginning?

The question is often

asked, "Why isn't Lou Kahn

"working directly in the work

which the government is doing

in the actual rebuilding of

Philadelphia at this moment?"

I see it still as being

the most useful plan,

yes, and the most expressive.

It's the most expressive

and the most useful.

Uh, yes.

Expressive.

I repeatedly made the effort

to involve Lou directly

in our work in Philadelphia,

but it's turned out that

the special quality of his genius

could not be brought together

with the reality of the problem.

I'd always heard that Ed Bacon

was Lou's nemesis in Philadelphia.

Bacon was in charge of rebuilding

the entire downtown area

in the '50s and '60s,

and he hired Lou to come up with plans

for how the job should be done.

But something had gone very wrong.

We started work, and

I wanted to communicate

to the stupid public

in the most acerbic

fashion I possibly could

the essence of the idea.

And Lou would say,

"Wouldn't it be nice to

put a curving stairway here?

Or how about kind of

a little tower here?"

And suddenly, I realized that the purity

of my communication was being encrusted

by Lou's fantasies.

So Lou didn't get it?

Lou didn't understand what you wanted?

He didn't understand it.

He did not understand it.

And so he was angry as could be angry.

And he got nice ladies to give tease,

where they would complain about me

not using Lou Kahn for this purpose.

By the way, there's not a single shred

of any way in which

Lou influenced downtown Philadelphia.

Nothing, I know.

Isn't that a tragedy?

Well, I tell you one thing.

It's... thank... would have

been an incredible tragedy

if they had built one single thing

that Lou proposed for

downtown Philadelphia.

They were all brutal,

totally insensitive,

totally impractical. The whole idea

of doing circular garages

up on Vine Street...

Yeah, but the idea of leaving

the cars outside the city

and then letting people

walk into the city...

- it was a great idea, don't you think?

- No!

It absolutely wasn't.

It wouldn't have worked for a damn.

So ultimately, isn't

it just two strong men...

two strong egos that don't get together?

God damn it, no.

It's an absolutely pure ignorance

on Lou's part, and it's

the same damn ignorance

as the American Institute of

Architects is based on now,

that you have no responsibility

to preparing the way

for a system on the larger order,

and you only do the little

things that come along.

So you simply have not

understood a word I've said.

Watch where you're going!

Some of Lou's ideas were utopian

and impractical,

but this was the '60s.

And like a lot of people then,

he was questioning the way we live.

Do we really want the

skyline of every American city

to look more or less the same?

Why can't people leave their cars

outside the city and walk instead?

To express is to drive.

And when you want to

give something presence,

you have to consult nature.

And there is where design comes in.

If you think of brick, for instance,

you say to brick, "What

do you want, brick?"

And brick says to you,

"I'd like an arch."

And if you say to brick,

"Look, arches are expensive,

"and I can use a

concrete lintel over you.

"What do you think of that, brick?"

Brick says, "I'd like an arch."

And it's important, you see,

that you honor the

material which you use.

You don't bandy it

around as though you said,

"Well, we have a lot of material around.

We can do it one way;

we can do it another."

It's not true.

You can only do it

if you honor the brick

and glorify the brick

instead of just shortchanging it.

I remember hearing him talk at Penn.

And I came home, and I said

to my father and mother,

"I just met this man.

"He doesn't have much work, and he's

"sort of ugly... funny voice,

"and he's a teacher at school.

"I know you've never heard of him,

"but just mark this day

"that someday you will hear of him,

"because he's really an amazing man."

Tell me the story of Philadelphia.

What was it that stopped

Lou from building more there,

from being more successful there?

Because he spoke his truth.

And he was not controllable,

and he wouldn't have been controllable

by the powers that be

that really wanted control

of the image of Philadelphia.

They wanted to have

Philadelphia bask in their image

or be connected to it

or get credit for it in some way.

But really fundamentally why?

It's all the obvious stuff.

Blood was important in Philadelphia.

And I think Lou's blood

had a yellow armband.

- Jewish?

- Yes.

I really think so.

I think that was important,

even though they might

not even have known it was,

maybe consciously, I felt it.

I felt it. I felt it.

Frustration and failure

are really the things that make you.

Maybe he was made by

being short and ugly

and Jewish and having a bad voice

and not wanting to be good

with people, or whatever.

Maybe he was made by that,

because it made him go internal.

So you can't just say,

"Oh, isn't it a shame he

didn't build more buildings?"

"Isn't it a shame he

wasn't this or that person?"

We're made by those things.

I think he had trouble,

because he was a mystic,

and he wouldn't be

able to talk the lingo

of the business world.

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