"Form Evokes Function"

With the death of Frank Lloyd Wright, U.S. architecture has been sadly wanting in men who are both poet-visionaries and builders as well. One architect who comes close to filling the role is Philadelphia's Louis I. Kahn, 59, a short, wiry figure almost unknown outside his own profession, but whose thoughtful making of spaces provides what many critics consider a whole textbook of new forms.

Last week Lou Kahn found himself unhappily pinpointed in the limelight. At the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Eero Saarinen awarded Kahn the institute's prized Brunner. Award as "a man who has used his superior gifts to tread the hard path of discovery rather than the easy way to success." A few days earlier Kahn had been present at the dedication of the $3,000,000 Alfred Newton Richards Medical Research Building on the University of Pennsylvania campus, about which Architect Philip Johnson predicts, "When this is finished, Kahn will be world-famous."

Poetic Approach. Such public recognition is rare for Kahn, whose high reputation is based on only a handful of buildings. Born on the Estonian island of Osel (Saaremaa), he went to the U.S. at the age of five, showed such promise as an artist that he was twice offered scholar ships at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He chose instead to be an architect, and after studying at the University of Pennsylvania, split his time between teaching and designing a few highly original buildings: a community center in Trenton, N.J., a psychiatric hospital in Philadelphia. The scarcity of commissions has given him time to evolve his own highly poetic approach to architecture, which has influenced a generation of young designers who have been his students at Yale, M.I.T. and Pennsylvania.

For Kahn, the great moment in architecture was when "the walls parted and the column became." But he does not believe that columns need look like classic colonnades--all form and no function except to support the roof. He has planned one towering office structure that looks like giant Tinker Toys studded with pyramid-shaped joints that are used as service areas. "I like my buildings to have knuckles," he explains. "Joints are the beginning of ornament." He has also used daring devices in more down-to-earth buildings. His Yale Art Gallery, for example, uses exposed reinforced concrete tetrahedrons to span the ceilings and incorporate mechanical equipment.

Hollow Stones. "I have learned to respect mechanical equipment," Kahn says. "You can't keep the gimmicks out, so you have to plan for them so they won't ruin your building later." The need to incorporate air conduits and the whole ganglion of mechanical equipment led Kahn to conceive of columns as "hollow stones" in which the clutter could be stored. From there it was only a step to dividing spaces into major, clear areas and subsidiary "servant spaces." By making this distinction, Kahn has revived functionalism once again as a springboard for esthetics.

In his new Medical Research Building at Pennsylvania, Kahn has put his principles to work by erecting great servant towers that suck in fresh air through nostrils at the base, throw off laboratory fumes from stacks that soar 25 ft. above the roof. In place of the usual hallway cubicles, Kahn gave the researchers clear, unpartitioned studio spaces. His next project: a new research institute in San Diego. Calif, for Polio Vaccine Discoverer Dr. Jonas Salk. which Kahn intends to make "a realm of spaces" where form will truly enhance the institute's function as an academy of biology.

Kahn applies his concept of form and function to the greatest single problem facing architects today: finding a solution to the choking clutter of the nation's big cities. Fascinated since his student travels abroad by the medieval walled city of Carcassonne in France, he came to the conclusion that what gave it coherence was that every aspect of the city was ordered around a single principle, namely, defense. Today Kahn believes that the modern city will renew itself around the principle of movement. His fertile imagination visualizes the idea in terms of a river. Great expressways would channel traffic around and beneath the city's center, raised like some Venetian island. As docks. Kahn would erect harbor buildings with parking spaces on the lower levels, a roof plaza with apartments and offices above.

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