Buildings as friends: #1 Architect J. Kargon, MSU

“We shape our buildings, and afterwards, our buildings shape us.” 

Winston Churchill, House of Commons October 28, 1944

About this series:

Architecture is "background noise" for most, consisting of buildings at the periphery of our vision when we drive, of buildings which we enter for work without looking up, of places that keep us dry, warm or cool per our specifications for all stations of our life. In our home, at a place of worship or when we are ready to board a train or plane.

Even when we get sick, we will wind up in a building, architecture even less on our mind. But one never knows: My then 17 year old

Louis Kahn Yale art museum (see also below): A good friend currently closed

daughter looked up at the lay in ceiling and its fluorescents from a gurney when she was rolled from an ambulance into the hospital hallway in a medical emergency; she could not resist telling her architect father : "The architect did not think of that perspective, daddy, did he"? Adding: "it is ugly".

In fact, emergencies sharpen our senses for impressions we usually take for granted. The bird song, the rising sun, the beauty of the low sun grazing wads of fog hovering over the meadows,  the "face" of building, we wake up to these observations when we are dropped from our daily routines. We are rubbing our eyes and begin to look at the world like a newborn: in wonder. It is then, when we realize, a building can be a good friend and provide familiarity, comfort and protection.

Modern Americans spend more time inside than outside, an aspect that gives buildings heightened importance. In the age of celebrities, some buildings have taken on celebrity status, too: the Louvre in Paris has always been an attraction for its art, but it was Ian Pei's glass pyramid that gained celebrity status and provided the Louvre's iconic brand. The Sidney Opera is more famous for its building than its music. The New York and the Bilbao Guggenheim are known more for their iconic buildings than for the art they contain. Some celebrity buildings have received nicknames like the Gherkin in London for its shape.

We notice what we had when we loose it: WTC New York

The shock of 9-11 came in part from two iconic buildings having been wiped off New York's skyline. The absence of what many considered bland architecture made New Yorkers realize what they had meant for the skyline.

Right now, its not the buildings that are absent, but we are absent from them. Not being able to see them, we begin to miss them.

Naturally, architects have a special relationship to buildings. So now, when architects are struggling with keeping their projects or jobs going from make-shift home offices while also worrying like everyone else about their and their family health, I wondered whether the beauty of architecture can be comfort, and whether the experience of friendship with a building can be shared. Whether an attempt of describing the relationship to a building could be useful introspection in a time of a major reset of values with yet uncertain outcomes.

So I sent to my architect friends a fundamental question: Which building is your best friend? Which piece of architecture do you like most, which influenced you? I am hoping for a series of uplifting articles and images about the beauty of architecture and its importance too the human spirit in the sense that Vetruvius described over 2000 years ago:

Thus man, who, in addition to the senses which other animals enjoy in common with him, is gifted by nature with such powers of thought and understanding, that no subject is too difficult for his apprehension, and the brute creation are subject to him from his superiority of intellect, proceeded by degrees to a knowledge of the other arts and sciences, and passed from a savage state of life to one of civilization. (Vitruvius: De Architectura: Book II).

Cover of "De Architectura" Latin edition of the Vetruvius Books by Augustus Rode

The responses will be published here on this blog as they trickle in.

The first article came overnight from Morgan University architecture professor Jeremy Kargon who sent his homage of the Louis Kahn designed Yale Center for British Art Publications, a building on the campus of his alma mater, the Yale University in New Haven, CT.

The building was completed  after Kahn’s unexpected death at Penn Station in New York in 1974, 23 years after its neighbor, The Yale University Art Gallery was finished. It is an icon of modern architecture and was refurbished in 2016:

Library Court: All images courtesy of Yale Center for British Art
except as noted

Jeremy Kargon:

The Yale Center for British Art (1977)
New Haven, ConnecticutArchitect: Louis Kahn Certain buildings are easy to compare to people because of their appearance. Windows look like eyes; a canopy looks like a mustache. Other buildings evoke not the way people look but the way they are – or, rather, the way we would like them to be, whether “dignified,” “sober,” or even a little bit “crazy.” We are able to characterize buildings in this way because doing so is an essentially human function: learning about people and things, characterizing them, and responding appropriately. 

Library Court Looking Up (Photo Jeremy Kargon)

One building, in particular, is nothing less than an Old Friend: the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA), designed by Louis Kahn and completed in 1977. I first met the building just a few years later, in 1981. After our initial introduction, we became regular companions. For four years, on a weekly basis, I would find a seat in its galleries, or a carrel in its study library. Within its spaces, and with growing familiarity, I learned how architecture can nurture one’s spirit through apparently simple means.
 At first glance, from the exterior, the YCBA’s pewter-colored metal panels, concrete columns, and squat wrestler’s proportions are not much to look at. But from the moment one enters the building, one’s eyes are lifted towards light.

Throughout the YCBA, light is the language with which the building converses – with its paintings, of course, but also with its visitors, like me. My Old Friend is witty and observant; my Old Friend is rigid, too, but accommodating where

YCBA Upper Floor Looking Across (Photo Kargon)

needed. I never tire of the building’s plain oak panels, set in contrast to its sharp-cornered concrete columns. I enjoy touching the brushed satin stainless steel duct-work, suspended unselfconsciously from the building’s exposed structure. I am thrilled by the visual transparency experienced throughout the building, a natural consequence of the building’s grid-based planning. And I am inspired always by the light, filtered through apertures from every direction. The value of friendship is in comfort, of course, and familiarity, but along in delight. 

CBA Exterior, seen facing West

In the decades since I left New Haven, I returned often to spend time with my Old Friend, whose architectural mannerisms I have long since tried to adopt as my own. When I tell my students about the buildings that they’ll one day design, I can give them no better exemplar than Kahn’s Yale Center for British Art, my Old Friend. 

Jeremy Kargon is Associate Professor at Morgan State University’s School of Architecture and Planning. A licensed architect since 1991, he has worked professionally in the US and Israel, the latter for almost a decade. A list of his credentials, professional experience, and publications may be found online HERE

Louis Kahn, 1973 in front of the unfinished Yale building. Institutional Archives, Yale Center for British Art