LOUIS I. KAHN STUDY TOUR: CONTEXT: Photos and Text by Amber Wiley

Historical and Geographical

Independence Hall

The tour began in the city of Philadelphia, childhood home of Louis I. Kahn, where he received his education at the University of Pennsylvania, and spent much time in his personal practice and teaching at Penn. The Philadelphia neighborhood where Kahn grew up was an industrial community filled with factories, brick buildings, and smoke stacks, which had a profound influence on his design.

First Bank of the United States

The larger urban context of Philadelphia also encompassed a high concentration of colonial row houses and courtyards such as those found in Society Hill, monuments to the American Revolution such as Independence Hall (1732-56), and the oldest and most high profile banking institutions including the First Bank of the United States (1794-97) by Samuel Blodgett, Jr., and the PSFS Building (1929-32) by George Howe and William Lescaze, considered to be the first International Style skyscraper.

PSFS Building/Loews Philadelphia Hotel

PSFS Building second floor lobby, now reception hall

The tour group had the pleasure of staying at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel in the adaptively reused PSFS building, and visited many of the monuments mentioned. The visits to these historic sites and buildings as well as those designed by Kahn’s predecessors such as Frank Furness and George Howe helped the group understand some of his earliest inspirations in Philadelphia.

Exterior rustication detail of Fisher Fine Arts Library

The opening dinner was held at the Fisher Fine Arts Library (1888-91) designed by prominent eclectic Philadelphia architect Frank Furness. Furness’ method of exhibiting the intrinsic qualities of industrial materials and ability to create spaces that contradicted traditional architectural vocabulary by making playful breaks and highly imaginative gestures was noted as an influence on Kahn, who spent many hours in the library as a student at Penn. The spatial organization and programmatic features of the Fisher Library's interior reminded many of the tour participants of the Kahn masterpiece, the library at Phillips Exeter Academy (1967-72).

Reading room detail

Above is an example of a whimsical gesture- a snail-like accoutrement guarding the interior of Furness’ library. Many of the details in the space were particularly animated and fanciful.

"Conversation Hall" where dinner reception was held

While at the library the tour group was surprised by a visit with Nathaniel Kahn, son of Louis Kahn who wrote, directed, and produced the Oscar nominated documentary “My Architect” (2003). Nathaniel Kahn shared some of his thoughts and memories of his father with the group, and discussed briefly Louis Kahn’s teaching techniques.

Nathaniel Kahn speaking to tour group

The study tour included a walking tour of the Independence Hall area and the Italianate gem of the Athenaeum (1845) by John Notman, as well as the Philadelphia’s Society Hill neighborhood, which boasts the country’s largest concentration of 18th and early 19th century buildings.

Anthenaeum of Philadelphia

The tour of the Athenaeum highlighted its collections, which included plans and elevations for various Kahn projects and an introduction to the Philadelphia Architects and Buildings online database.

Map and atlases on hand for viewing at the Athenaeum

The Society Hill tour emphasized its greenways and courtyard houses which had a very distinct human scale that was pedestrian friendly and reminiscent of similar areas in other pre-Revolutionary cities such Annapolis and Baltimore.

Typical Society Hill row houses

Finally, the tour group enjoyed a visit to George Howe’s “High Hollow” (1916) country house nestled away in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia.

High Hollow front elevation

High Hollow carriage house

Philadelphia is known for its proliferation of exuberant suburban country houses, and this is a well composed articulation of Howe's work. Howe was one of the leading architects in the early to mid-twentieth century, and had collaborated with Kahn on wartime housing projects throughout Pennsylvania. The visits to works by Kahn’s predecessors and examining the urban fabric of Philadelphia added depth and a foundation to historic and geographic context of the study tour.

THE ARCHITECTURE AND LANDSCAPES OF LOUIS I. KAHN STUDY TOUR: Photos and Text by Amber Wiley

July 30 - August 3, 2008

Study tour participants at Kahn's Korman House (1971-73)

This five day tour was a highly concentrated in depth look into Louis I. Kahn the architect, the teacher, and the man. The tour provided analysis of Kahn’s life and work, from his theories on materiality and form, to his influences and collaborations. The tour was led by William Whitaker, the extremely knowledgeable and competent collections manager of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, which houses the largest repository of materials related to Kahn. Tour participants were thoroughly engaged and enthusiastic about the tour, which spanned four states- Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut- and included various examples of Kahn’s work over his lifetime. This study tour report will be divided into five different themes. These themes are special areas of interest that the tour participants were exposed to on the tour which added depth and understanding to the work of Louis I. Kahn. They are: Context, Methods, Residential Work, Institutional Work, and Contemporaries.

Amber N. Wiley
Richard Hubbard Howland Fellowship Recipient

All photographs are by the author and are covered under a Creative Commons license.

14 July 2008

Estates and Gardens of Chicago's North Shore
Baird Jarman

Rather than slackening our pace, the fourth and final day consisted of the greatest number of buildings yet, quite a few of them being recently conserved or currently undergoing restoration. We began with Wright’s spacious Usonian house built in 1951 for Charles Glore. Here the main entrance brings visitors into a central corridor connecting perhaps the two most distinctive features of the house, its dramatic hanging staircase and the polygonal living room with a second floor balcony. Steps also lead gently downward to a wide expanse of patio.

Beside the entrance to the Charles Glore House (1951) by Frank Lloyd Wright

The 1929 James R. Leavell House, a medieval-revival manor designed by Anderson & Ticknor, features a balconied great hall with large exposed wooden beams adjoining a stone turret stairwell and a half-timbered inner courtyard. Additional plans for expanding the estate were abandoned after the Wall Street crash later that year.

The James R. Leavell House (1929) by Anderson & Ticknor

Beyond a winding path through woodland designed by Warren Manning, we next came upon the striking entrance to Wyldwood with its steeply pitched entrance gable of diamond-patterned brickwork above an imposing wrought-iron gateway decorated with signs of the zodiac by the medievalist metalworker Oscar Bach. Behind this imposing doorway lies an octagonal reception area floored in medieval-revival tiles. Appearing as a cottage from the front, the 1916 house by architect Harrie Lindeberg opens out onto lakefront property at the rear, where it takes on the character of a large Tudor manor house.

The entrance to Wyldwood (1916) by Harrie Lindeberg, metalwork by Oscar Bach

The rear facade of Wyldwood (1916) by Harrie Lindeberg

We lunched at Glen Rowan, the Barnes estate, designed by Shaw in 1908 and now owned by Lake Forest College. Built of red brick, the plan features a wide, barrel-vaulted, central hallway that segues at the rear of the house into a far less formal Arts & Crafts study with Mercer tiles incorporated into the fireplace surround.

The patio at Glen Rowan (1908) by Howard Van Doren Shaw

Returning to the lakefront again, we visited Bagatelle, home of the architect Edward Bennett. Born in England and trained at the Ècole des Beaux-Arts, Bennett designed this homage to eighteenth-century French classicism for his own family in 1916 after moving to Chicago. His International Style studio, built behind the house in 1930, demonstrates his newfound interest in modernism.

Bagatelle (1916) by Edward Bennett

After returning to Lake Forest College for a quick peek at the Romanesque-revival Durand Institute by architect Henry Ives Cobb in 1892, we proceeded to the Lawrence Williams House, designed by Walter Frazier in 1928 as a compact cottage with a steeply pitched gable and surrounded by garden landscaping by Thomas W. Seyster.

The Durand Institute at Lake Forest College (1892) by Henry Ives Cobb

The Lawrence Williams House (1928) by Walter Frazier

We then proceeded to the astonishing array of gardens at the restored John T. Pirie estate, anchored by a brick house designed in 1904 by Marshall & Fox that is surrounded by landscapes created by Rose Standish Nichols.

The John T. Pirie Estate (1904) by Marshall & Fox

One of the garden axes at the John T. Pirie Estate

Our tour concluded with a festive dinner at the 1928 Deerpath Inn, modeled on the mid-fifteenth century Manor House of Chiddingstone.

13 July 2008

Estates and Gardens of Chicago's North Shore
Baird Jarman

Our third day began at Ragdale, architect Howard Van Doren Shaw’s own home begun in 1897 in an Arts & Crafts style. The stucco exterior with its crisp geometric forms as well as the wood-paneled rooms on the ground floor have a great deal in common with Voysey’s iconic estates in England’s Lake District. Ragdale was always a hub of artistic activity—Shaw’s mother Sarah Van Doren Shaw was a painter, Shaw’s wife Frances Wells Shaw was a poet and playwright (for whom he designed an open-air theater on the estate in 1912), and his daughter Sylvia Shaw Judson was a sculptor. Appropriately the estate is now a residential artists’ retreat.

Ragdale (1897) by Howard Van Doren Shaw

We next toured one of the landmarks of the second wave of mansion building, the 1928 Noble Judah estate, a Tudor Revival manor by Philip Goodwin, who would design the Museum of Modern Art in New York City a decade later in a far more modern idiom. After exploring the interior we moved to the well-kept axial formal garden where we posed for our group portrait.

The Noble Judah Estate (1928) by Philip Goodwin

The garden of the Noble Judah Estate

We then explored the house and lunched in the garden of Shaw’s 1909 House of the Four Winds, built for Hugh J. McBirney. This structure is an atypical design for Shaw in that it draws upon an unusually wide variety of design motifs, leading some architectural historians to speculate that Adler rather than Shaw was chiefly responsible for handling the commission. As we walked through the house, both Italianate and Moorish prototypes were mentioned in conjunction with the massing and layout of the house and gardens—and inside Macintosh, Voysey, and Luytens were all cited as possible influences for the entryway, hall, and living room.

The House of the Four Winds (1909) by Howard Van Doren Shaw

From the garden at the House of the Four Winds

Our next stop was the Gothic Revival church built in 1888 by Cobb & Frost as the campus chapel for The Young Ladies’ Seminary of Ferry Hall. After the school ceased to operate in the 1970s, this ecclesiastical edifice, along with the large dormitory adjacent to it, was eventually creatively adapted for reuse as domestic structures.

The Ferry Hall Chapel (1888) by Cobb & Frost

We next visited Campbell, designed by architects Walcott & Work with a landscape created by Root & Hollister, which was erected in 1929 just before the onset of the Depression.

Campbell (1929) by Walcott & Work

Then we toured a major commission for David Adler from 1923, just before the second wave of estate building swung into high gear. A decade after leaving Shaw’s firm to start his own partnership (with Henry Dangler), Adler designed the Carolyn Morse Ely House in Lake Bluff, which is based upon the 1787 hunting lodge at Versailles, the Pavillion de la Lanterne.

The Carolyn Morse Ely House (1923) by David Adler

We ended our day at a gathering of the Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Historical Society in the shoreline garden of a 1970 house by Roy Binckley on the same grounds where leading Chicago architect Daniel Burnham had designed a home for Stanley Field called Lakelandwood in 1913 (now destroyed). By the edge of the bluff, Arthur again lectured on the history of the area, this time dealing more specifically upon aspects of the local preservation movement.

The old Stanley Field Estate with a 1970 House by Roy Binckley

12 July 2008

Estates and Gardens of Chicago's North Shore
Baird Jarman

Day two began with visits to two major Prairie School homes by Frank Lloyd Wright. With Arthur’s voice whispering in our ears through radio headsets, we tiptoed around the Ravine Bluffs Development in Glencoe, where Wright designed a half dozen homes in 1915. We wended our way over Wright’s ravine bridge—his only bridge—to the Sherman Booth House with its dramatic setting along the edge of a wooded gorge and its striking interior woodwork.

Bridge entrance to the Ravine Bluffs Development (1915) by Frank Lloyd Wright

After this we traveled to the 1901 Ward Willets House in Highland Park, widely regarded as Wright’s first Prairie Style home, where we discussed the history of the house, its ongoing conservation, and its design innovations. Here Wright created an open plan with four arms branching out from a central brick hearth with multiple fireplaces. Art-glass windows are set into door frames that open onto a porch and allow the wall to disappear, thereby linking indoors with outdoors. A low-pitched, hipped roof with deep cantilevered overhangs appears here in Wright’s first fully realized vision of the Prairie Style.

The Ward Willets House (1901) by Frank Lloyd Wright in Highland Park

During the rest of the day we encountered our first structures by some of the leading, Chicago-based, domestic architects of the Country Place Era, such as Howard Van Doren Shaw and the brothers Irving and Allen Pond. We began with a ‘sawdust tour’ of the James Ward Thorne estate, designed by Otis & Clark in 1912, which is currently undergoing extensive renovation. While lunching we explored Shaw’s 1916 Market Square, an eclectic but largely Tudor Revival mixed-use development opposite Lake Forest’s railway depot.

The Lake Forest Market Square (1916) by Howard Van Doren Shaw

From this iconic suburban city beautification project we transitioned to a fine example of a Downing-inspired Italianate villa, the 1860 Devillo R. Holt residence, called the Homestead. An influential early figure in the Lake Forest community, Holt succeeded in having all businesses pushed west beyond the original railway boundary of the suburb. It is thus ironic that some people have explained the strange fact that the Homestead is a masonry structure covered with wooden clapboards as a subtle form of advertisement for his lumber business. In the library of the Homestead, a design debate over the likely date of an unusual set of built-in bookshelves displaying both Eastlake and Gothic Revival features was settled by trip participant Beverly Brandt, whose book on turn-of-the-century design criticism, The Craftsman and the Critic, will appear in print this fall.

The Homestead (1860) in Lake Forest

Next we viewed Thalfried, the 1909 Wheeler House, with its unusual pairing of high wainscoting and low Gothic arches, and where we first saw Pond & Pond’s distinctive, diamond-pattern, window sashes. After working in Chicago for William Le Baron Jenney and Solon S. Beman, in 1885 Irving K. Pond started an architectural firm with his brother Allen B. Pond. In addition to settlement houses, most notably Hull-House, Pond & Pond designed several elegant North Shore estates that blend Arts & Crafts influenced brickwork and woodwork with a more sparse, geometric, modernist façade treatment.

The Wheeler House (Thalfried, 1909) by Pond & Pond

Following a serendipitous stop at the Charles Dyer Norton House, we ended at Adler’s luxurious William E. Clow, Jr. House, with its Vienna Secession styling, high ceilings, expansive mirrors, and creative use of floor levels within a hilly lot. This structure is a fascinating example of Adler’s creativity and his ability to overcome difficult challenges with the site plan, namely a busy road adjacent to the property and a steep incline. A low wall covered with Greek key designs along the high-ground defines the perimeter of a courtyard for croquet while successfully screening off nearby road traffic. The Doric temple fronts that face onto this green space are actually the second floor of the structure, which is built into the hill. The main entrance, around the corner, brings visitors in on the lower floor of a two-story brick manor.

The William E. Clow, Jr. House (1927) by David Adler

10 July 2008

Estates and Gardens of Chicago's North Shore
Baird Jarman

Our trip commenced with a witty and informative dinnertime lecture about North Shore history by tour leader Arthur H. Miller, Archivist of Lake Forest College. Calmly ignoring a violent thunderstorm, he discussed topics ranging from the role of the Presbyterian Church in the settlement of Lake Forest to the heavy summertime demands on the local water supply created by the popularity of extensive landscape gardening to the vogue for English-style country life that established polo and fox hunting in the greater Chicago area in the 1890s.

Arthur also discussed the enormous impact of income-tax rate changes upon the viability of operating large residential estates, noting that most of the structures on our itinerary were built during one of two periods. A first wave of large estate building lasted from 1896 to 1916, when the upper tax bracket jumped from 15% to 67% to finance World War I. A shorter second wave occurred after the highest bracket fell below 50% in 1924 and lasted until 1932 when the rates were again hiked (from 25% to 63%). Even the wealthiest families found it increasingly difficult to maintain large estates following the Great Depression. At the outbreak of World War I the top bracket paid merely 7% income tax, but from 1936 through 1981 the rate stayed above 70%. The peak years for the abandonment, repurposing, and demolition of North Shore country estates came from 1951 to 1963, when the rate stayed above 90%. Conversely, in the period since 1987, when the top rate has remained below 40%, many of these estates have been restored and refurbished.

Thursday’s downpour cleared the way for great weather during our four travel days, and with the midsummer landscapes in full bloom the tour was like stepping into the scenic pages of Arthur’s book, Classic Country Estates of Lake Forest: Architecture and Landscape Design 1856-1940, coauthored with Kim Coventry and Daniel Meyer.

11 July 2008

Estates and Gardens of Chicago's North Shore
Baird Jarman

We spent most of our first full day exploring the extensive grounds at Crab Tree Farm, a dairy in Lake Bluff whose early history proves instructive regarding development in the region. Grace Garrett Durand, wife of Chicago broker Scott Sloan Durand, originally operated a successful hobby farm in Lake Forest that she named after its location along Crab Tree Road. The couple commissioned a Shingle Style main house from William Carbys Zimmerman in 1896, the same year that Cyrus McCormick, Jr. commissioned his own Shingle Style home, Walden, which ushered in a new era of landed country estates on parcels of land much larger than the approximately four-acre lots typical in the original 1857 Lake Forest plan. Expansive estates soon infringed upon Durand’s growing dairy operation, which earned complaints from her new neighbors about unpleasant odors. In 1905 the Durands bought another dairy farm on the current site and shifted their base of operation. In 1910 a large fire destroyed the extant wooden farm buildings एंड the following year they hired Solon Spencer Beman, known for his design of the planned workers’ village of Pullman, to create a courtyard surrounded by new fireproof structures.

The Entry Drive at Crab Tree Farm

These five courtyard buildings, designed in a style variously characterized as either South African or Scandinavian, have steel frames and walls assembled from terracotta blocks coated with concrete and stucco. The roofs are cast concrete tinted to resemble terracotta. Four of the five buildings, including part of the large central structure with the clock tower, house an outstanding collection of American and English Arts and Crafts furnishings. Crab Tree Cottage, filled with a great deal of Gustav Stickley furniture, also displays TECO and Grueby ceramics as well as English designs ranging from Morris and Voysey textiles to de Morgan ceramics.

The main Farm House at Crab Tree Farm (1911) by Solon Spencer Beman

Nearby the courtyard a bungalow was built in 1993, modeled on drawings by Harvey Ellis that appeared in the December 1903 issue of Stickley’s magazine The Craftsman. The basement of this Ellis house contains a cross-section of English Arts and Crafts design, including chairs by Pugin, Baillie Scott, and Macintosh as well as metalwork by Dresser, Ashbee, and Benson. Contemporary art also appears at the farm; the old grain silos now serve as installation spaces and one wing of the bell-towered farmhouse serves as a large shop with woodworkers in residence.

The Ellis House at Crab Tree Farm (designed in 1903 by Harvey Ellis, built in 1993)

Departing from the Craftsman vein, we then visited two small and significantly older structures both relocated to the eastern stretch of the farm, a rebuilt medieval brick English hermitage with a newly thatched roof and a recently conserved 1830s log house moved from its original site along Green Bay Road.

Medieval English Hermitage

1830s Log House from Green Bay Road

In the afternoon we visited the restored Art Deco gem, the Colonel Robert Hosmer Morse House, built in 1931 by Zimmerman, Saxe & Zimmerman (the Chicago-based firm of the aforementioned W. C. Zimmerman in partnership with his son and son-in-law). Our hosts discussed the lengthy restoration process the house required, including the painstaking refurbishment of scores of light fixtures and etched-glass mirrors. Built adjacent to a golf course, the 25-room mansion was built to entertain, with a locker room for golfing groups in the basement as well as several moderne drink-mixing closets scattered about the house despite its Prohibition Era origin.

Colonel Robert Hosmer Morse House (1931) by Zimmerman, Saxe & Zimmerman

Returning to the Crab Tree Farm estate in the late afternoon, we further explored a medley of architectural treasures on an 11-acre tract of land sold by the Durands to Helen Bowen and William McCormick Blair in the 1920s. Here the Blairs hired David Adler to build them a large house in an early American colonial style, with walls of limestone and white shingles (the wooden shingles are unpainted on the roof and in the dormers).

William McCormick Blair House (1926-28) by David Adler

A walled garden designed by Ellen Biddle Shipman nestles into the west-facing side of the house, where it is sheltered from the lake, which is visible over a bluff to the east. In addition to numerous outbuildings, the estate also contains a Georgian tennis house designed by Adler shortly after the main house.

Shipman Garden at the William McCormick Blair House

Tennis House on the William McCormick Blair Estate

The Blair estate also contains a cottage with neoclassical and Tudor period rooms across from an eighteenth-century Palladian folly (all relocated from parts of the United Kingdom).

The Palladian Folly

The day concluded with two lakeshore sites bearing remnants of the great McCormick family estates, Walden and Villa Turicum. Both houses were designed by East Coast architects, respectively Jarvis Hunt and Charles Platt. Only the Ravello terrace remains of Walden, built in 1896 for Cyrus McCormick II and torn down in the 1950s. An elegant, glass-walled, New Formalist house by New Canaan architect John Black Lee was built beside the Ravello in 1960.

The Ravello at Walden (1896) by Jarvis Hunt and Warren Manning

Perhaps the most famous of the Lake Forest mansions was Villa Turicum, whose tragic history mirrors the troubled life of its owner Edith Rockefeller McCormick. Along the shoreline sit the stairways, cascade, and garden urns that once decorated the lakeside grounds of the majestic mansion. The house had an astonishingly short life as an active home. Platt continued to work on the estate and its sprawling grounds (including a polo field and acres of gardens) for over a decade, from 1908 to 1918 (the house was completed in 1909), but after 1912 Edith Rockefeller McCormick allegedly spent only one night on the property. The house itself was demolished in 1965, but not before a group of investors hoping to repurpose the property lost a sizeable investment.

The remnants of the Villa Turicum water cascade (1909) by Charles A. Platt