Book Review/Essay: You Say to Brick

You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn
Wendy Lesser
Biography, architecture

In some ways I am the wrong reader for this book. I knew that going in. Louis Kahn was a modernist, and I'm not a fan of modernism in any artistic form. For that matter, I didn't know much about Kahn other than his name; the only Kahn building I've been in is the Kimbell Art Museum, and I can't say that the building itself particularly struck me one way or another.

But then I thought: knowledge is what you're supposed to get out of a book, not what you're supposed to bring into it.

By that measure, You Say to Brick was a partial success. I learned a good deal about Louis Kahn himself, his family, and his architectural practice--none of it especially deep, but all of it informative. I learned some about what Kahn himself thought he was doing. I did not learn to love Kahn's buildings. I also did not learn to love Wendy Lesser's writing, which is itself an example of some of the failings of modernism.

The Buildings

One of these buildings was acclaimed as a Kahn masterpiece, "the most consequential building constructed in the United States". The other is the #11 Google image result of a search for "ugliest building ever". Can you tell which is which?

How about these? They're both educational institutions. One is described in You Say to Brick as Kahn's crowning achievement. The other comes from a Travel and Leisure article entitled "America's Ugliest College Campuses".

If you're not certain, You Say to Brick will offer no clarity. It offers nothing more than bare assertions about the wonderfulness of Kahn's designs. To be fair, a good deal of Lesser's enthusiasm goes towards the interiors, rather than the exteriors. However, that leads me to . . .

The Writing

The body of the book, to be honest, is fine. It's a straight biography, a bit light on analysis, but perfectly clear. There are, however, two major things that I found objectionable.

1. Between major sections of the book, Lesser puts descriptions of a number of Kahn interiors, which she writes in the second person present. "You" enter here, "you" see this, "you" react this way. This is pointless, stupid, and irritating. In the first place, it's not true; it's just Wendy Lesser's way of experiencing the building, not mine. In the second place, it's a condescending way of dictating an aesthetic experience. In the third place, it's unverifiable. In the fourth place, it's hard to read. The use of the second-person present adds nothing, conveys nothing, explains nothing.
2. Kahn had scars on his face. Lessing mentions this right up front, and alludes to it occasionally in the text, but doesn't explain what caused it until the very last page. (He was burned when he was three years old.) For the love of God, what purpose is served by this cutesy trick? This isn't Citizen Kane; we're not waiting with bated breath for this sudden flash of illumination that changes everything that has gone before. The scars don't seem to have figured heavily in Kahn's life; they didn't stop him having children by three different women in parallel, for example. There is literally no earthly reason to save this information to the end except to try to impress the reader with how clever your technique is. Once again: it adds nothing, conveys nothing, explains nothing.

I'm harping on these venial sins because they're an example of what's wrong with modernism. In Wendy Lesser's mind, apparently, it's no longer enough to write a book that's clear and informative and readable. Equally, it's no longer acceptable to design buildings that mere commoners will enjoy looking at, or write "classical music" that sounds like classical music, or paint pictures that look like anything whatsoever. Doing any of those things lets ordinary people criticize the substance of what you've done. If you draw a portrait of Benjamin Franklin and it ends up looking like Bozo the Clown, some pedant is sure to kvetch. Who wants that? The modernist idiom turns the tables: it lets you criticize anyone who fails to understand your brilliance, on the basis that they're obviously bourgeois, middle-brow, anti-intellectual, old-fashioned, counterrevolutionary, not transgressive, timid, etc.

Very well. I give you, then, my own architectural design. I warn you in advance that it is not merely transcendantly brilliant, but radical, daring, and visionary. It will challenge you. It vastly outstrips the outmoded and petty concepts of Le Corbusier, Kahn, and van der Rohe, to say nothing of such populist parvenus as Pei, Libeskind, and Gehry. It is nothing less than post-post-postmodern, ironic, witty, reverential, breathtaking, and--in the most overworked adjective of the last architectural century--iconic. If you disagree, you clearly have no artistic taste whatsoever.

Prove me wrong.