Kahnversation Engaged

Picture this: It is the end of the 1960s. Social unrest consumes New Haven and at Yale, several student groups have gotten caught up in the fervor of it. Ignoring the tenor of the time, American philanthropist Paul Mellon has decided to dump a bunch of money and his extensive collection of British art on New Haven. Suddenly, all the university needs for a new museum is an architect and a director.

In 1969 the latter need was filled by Jules Prown, a tenured professor in the History of Art department and an affiliated curator at the Yale University Art Gallery. Suggestions for an architect flowed from him. Eero Saarinen, known locally for his design of Ezra Stiles and Morse colleges and Ingalls Rink, said he was too busy to do it. Philip Johnson was in the running for a while, but fell out of Prown’s favor with his aggressive use of line in extant buildings. Richard Meier made the short list, but ultimately couldn’t cut it. Enter an older, wiser, but still doggedly precocious Louis Kahn, endeared to New Haven for his work on the YUAG and love for Yale School of Art professors Josef and Anni Albers. 

Last week, the tale behind the building’s genesis set the tone for a Kahnversation of monumental proportions between Prown and Yale professor emeritus Alexander Purves. Their timely subject was Prown’s newly edited text Louis I. Kahn in Conversation: Interviews with John W. Cook and Heinrich Klotz, 1969 – 70, which chronicles the architect’s process in designing Paul Mellon’s British Barbie Dream House. Its release comes as the Center, started in 1972 and completed after Kahn’s death in 1974, closes to the public for an extensive and much-needed conservation project. 

In Louis I. Kahn in Conversation​‘s 288 pages, viewers get an insider look at what it was like to work with Kahn between 1969 and 1970, when the building was in its fetal stages. Richly illustrated, the text is a labor of love: Prown spent summers listening to and transcribing forensically edited interviews, decided what should stay and what could go. 

The lecture spoke to the heart of that. Warm and jovial, with a deep laugh, Prown brought a distinctive voice to the conversation, full of strong memories of ​“Lou” Kahn: the architect’s distaste for natural grass, large windows, and Paul Rudolph’s eyesore of a building down the street; his mirror-like writing capabilities; his philosophy, breaking with accepted architectural ideas of the time, that a building needed to be humane rather than brutal.

“As we at the center find ourselves in the midst of our current project … we are grateful not only for a complete conservation plan, but also for this book, which illuminates Kahn’s approach toward the design of the extraordinary structure in which we have the privilege to work,” said YCBA director Amy Meyers, adding that the publication of the book would be a great boon to architects in months and years to come. 

To find out more about lectures and other upcoming events at the Yale School of Architecture, visit their website.