art for buildings sake

The Richards Medical Building won Louis Kahn the Brunner Prize for 1960, annually awarded by the National Institute of Arts and Letters to the architect who contributes to “architecture as art.” The professional journals rushed to applaud the center, and even MOMA devoted an entire exhibit to it. Few buildings at the time had been so well celebrated.

---The Richards Building was the first multi-story, rigid-frame structure to employ pre-cast, pre-stressed, and post-tensioned concrete construction in the United States. 1 Each independent eight-story tower is supported on eight precast concrete columns, set at one-third points on the facade of the building, supporting a latticework of 47' long primary and shorter secondary Vierendeel trusses in precast, prestressed concrete, each steam-cured to a high finish. ---Read More:http://www.workshopoftheworld.com/west_phila/richards.html

Unfortunately, all the praise had the effect of protecting the Richards Building from the criticism a great structure deserves. The nature of the game, is that it created in Louis Kahn, a hero too quickly, and too few of his fellow architects had listened to the scientists who had to work in the building. The relationship between form, function and the endowment of spirituality with the object meant rhythm, transition and open form took precedence over the more mundane and practical considerations. Crisp, unified geometry that looked good and defined the building’s interior spaces; powerfully three dimensional in its ability to impress on the visitor the functional, structural and mechanical origins, a monumental achievement of form. Yet, rigorous integration of space, structure and services meant the generalized studio laboratory spaces are not easily divided.

Essential equipment like refrigerators, phones, cabinets end up protruding into a maze of corridors because no consideration was given to fitting them in. Secreatries were sitting in hallways and the emphasis on natural light posed glare problems resulting in metal foils being stretched across windows which was an unsightly improvisation that could have been avoided.

ADDENDUM:

( see link at end) This philosophical exploration determined his creation of an answering architectural form. Buildings were not inert configurations of form and space but living organic entities, created by the architect for human use. He constantly asked the question “What does the building want to be?” This was used as a universal ordering principle That was manifested in his later career by the revelation of the constructional process. Function had to accommodate itself to the form, but only insofar as the form itself had been invented from a profound understanding of the overall task in the first place. Beauty was not within his immediate concerns. But true expression and appropriateness to use were. According to him, initially there is something that has the will, the urge to exist. Its basic character and attributes that seek expression must be listened to, comprehended, and given shape. “Beauty will evolve,” he maintained.


For Kahn it was natural light that brought architecture to life; the artificial light had an unvarying “dead” quality in contrast to the ever-changing daylight. Light, for him, was not only an instrument of our perception of things, but the very source of matter itself. It represented nature with all her laws by which all matter is bound together. He was especially attracted to the cyclic nature of light and attributed great psychological and metaphysical significance to its daily and seasonal fluctuations. Kahn saw architectural elements, such as the column, arch, dome, and vault, in their capacity of molding light and shadow. In 1939, Kahn rejected the simple-minded, if socially committed, functionalism in favor of an architecture capable of transcending utility. In his Rational City studies (1939-48) he saw the need to make an explicit distinction between the architecture of the “viaduct” (Le Corbusier’s “Ville Radieuse”) and building at a human scale. In his plan for midtown Philadelphia he attempted to press the forms of Piranesi’s Rome of 1762 into the service of the modern city. In this, expressways were thought as “rivers” and the traffic-light controlled streets as “canals.” Kahn was conscious of the profound antipathy between the automobile and the city and of the fatal link between consumerism, the suburban shopping center and the decline of the urban core.Read More:http://www.rochesterunitarian.org/Kahn/

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