That trip triggered a consciousness of the enjoyment I derived from my work when offered luminous assignments such as this little foray of discovery. I returned home energized by a momentous meeting with a purposeful being. New to me were his famous axioms-“the brick says: ‘I want to be an arch,” or “the sun never knew how wonderful it was until it fell on the wall of a building.” At the end of our meeting he saw me off, neither of us realizing we would have many future encounters on a variety of projects. I was sensitive to the grace with which Kahn had described his work, including the buildings in Bangladesh and India. There was no time for amenities, and they were not at all inclined to be interrupted. I felt slightly embarrassed to gaze at so many faces without acknowledging them, without an exchange of word as if walking through a zoo or a hospital. Located in a fine brick building, they were modest, with scores of young and older people working at large flat tables and at tilted drafting tables. He gave me a dossier containing a photograph and biographical material with a list of structures built and unbuilt, then escorted me through the offices. He focused on the mission I was relating to him, describing the purpose of New York State’s very first annual awards for excellence in the arts, and the brochure we were to produce-one page per winner, with a photo. We sat face to face at a small wooden table covered with a fabric which, from time to time, he smoothed, or he twiddled with a corner or a pattern in the weave. Kahn received me gallantly at his office on Walnut Street, at the corner of 15th Street. Louis I Kahn Collection, University of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Of this I was aware, holding my mother’s hand as we marched toward our designated tracks, usually headed for New York. The exalting height of the arched doorways and the grandiose scale of the building were a tribute to those who used it. At the 4th Street station, a rush of childhood memories came to me: hearing once again the cavernous echo of travelers’ footsteps and voices on the granite surfaces brought me back to the days when I had crossed these halls many times while we lived in Bryn Mawr in the late 1930s just before World War II. It was with intense anticipation that I traveled from Pennsylvania Station to Philadelphia to meet the grand architect for the very first time. Kahn was the star with students and faculty at Columbia University’s architecture school where I used to lurk and later lectured on Hassan Fathy. He was my hero in the contemporary world of architecture. By 1968, New York State was dedicated to supporting the arts, pressured by Manhattan.
Eventually a ceremony would be held honoring them, my descriptive brochure handed out, and mailed to legislators in Albany who funded the council.
I was to meet and interview the ten awardees.
I was living in Manhattan when the New York State Council on the Arts, one of my clients, assigned me to write up the booklet for its first annual awards of which Louis Kahn was a recipient. Kahn: A Memoir © 2021 Simone Withers Swan