The story is told that when Mr. Kaufman called to say that he was on his way from Chicago to Taliesin, a trip of about five hours, to see the designs and drawings for the house he had commissioned in Pennsylvania about eighteen months earlier, Frank Lloyd Wright asked a colleague to bring him paper and his colored pencils whereupon he then sat down at his desk and drew out the design of what was to become Fallingwater, completing it just as Mr. Kaufman walked through the door. “Ah, Mr. Kaufman,” Mr. Wright is said to have exclaimed, laying down his pencil, “we’ve been waiting for you.” Other projects from the Wright studios had finished drawings at different times in the design process, some early, some somewhat late…but perhaps none with such a good story attached to them. But whatever the project, it was not always a given that the drawings would have been from the hand of Mr. Wright himself. Every architectural firm has a staff, Cesar Pelli suggests that a staff of 100 is a good size for most firms doing corporate work and large public projects, and on each staff there are three of four persons whose job it is to make the architectural drawings which sell the projects to the clients. But what is a given is that every architectural firm has a consistent style in its presentational drawings.
How that style is achieved and established has everything to do with the man whose name is on the door. Just as that man’s sense of architectural excellence achieves a personal idiom during the years of his apprenticeship so the renderings must be correlative to that personal take: there must be a consistency of style from rendering to completed edifice. In addition the drawings must achieve what all good drawings achieve and that is they must read as expressive form…as understood by that architect.
Now, it might seem unfair to hire an artist and ask him or her to make drawings in a particular style, rather than to display their mastery and to express themselves, but every artist academically trained has mastered the classical styles, a variety of styles, and they accept the work knowing that they will be working for that particular architect and in his personal voice.
As to how the architect achieved that style we must go to the archives.
About four years ago I visited the Architectural Museum at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia
Drawn to scale the drawings were impressively large, about three by five or six feet if not larger. But more impressive was the draughtsmanship. Done, many of them, surprisingly, in charcoal, they displayed an absolutely fluid mastery of drawing. Tonal values were rendered not with hatching and cross hatching but with a freely drawn waving line. Encountered as stand alone drawings each not only elucidated the project at hand, each expressed the poetry of the concept. In fact, they were so eloquent of their love of drawing that I realized immediately that they had been made, if not by Louis Kahn, then to his specific instructions. If so, not only was he a great draughtsman, he understood great drawing and how to instruct someone to achieve it. He had, as Moholy Nagy called it, visual literacy.
This exhibition at the Lori Bookstein gallery, which I saw this past week, has a very nice overview of Louis Kahn’s development as a draughtsman. There are two strictly academic drawings of buildings of a historic period, the kind of tedious work every young student must master at the academy, there is one pen and ink drawing of California houses that is an out and out reference to Rembrandt’s villagescapes, and there are works that reference drawing styles, the southwestern desertscapes and New England seascapes, fashionably current in the years they were made. There are two drawings made in Italy
While none of these drawings show us that moment when he made the transition from drawing like another artist, or artists, to making Louis Kahn drawings, and I suppose those are buried more deeply in the archives, what does becomes evident while looking at these drawings is that Mr. Kahn loved drawing, the physical act of drawing. I have had the same response while looking at the work of Goya, Rembrandt, and Picasso.
It is also evident that he was a colorist, that the drawings achieve their effect through the use of color, and that he loved color, and I felt somewhat sad thinking that he rarely used such colors in his buildings as he did here. I am a firm believer that architecture could be done in colors other than the colors of natural building materials. Fine art requires a mastery of the three plastic elements, color, line, and form, and I see no reason why a great architect could not work with color to create forms harmonious with their environment. But of course the corporate world, the play it safe conservative client, has the last word in modern architecture. It is regrettable that the example of Luis Barragon or Richardo Legorreta cannot find an enthusiast in this country. As Louis Kahn so loved color I wonder if hidden in the archives there might not be something of this nature, some kind of sketch pad musing, something like Frank Lloyd Wright’s original concept for the Guggenheim Museum
Unfortunately this exhibition has closed but the on line exhibition is here:
See good old Wikipedia to refresh your memory of Louis Kahn:
Sketch for the Kimbell Art Museum
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