Architectural Aesthetic Speculations by Michael Jasper

Author:Michael Jasper [Jasper, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Spurbuchverlag
Published: 2016-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Louis Kahn, Erdman Hall, Bryn Mawr College. Left: Section, Right: Ground floor plan. Illustrator: Michael Jasper, 2016, after original drawings by Louis Kahn.

I believe that with the characteristics of the Deleuzian line coupled with the Baroque distinctions proposed by Wölfflin, encourage another interpretation of the sensibility at work. The diagonality of the entry points assures that one enters within a spiralling system, one reinforced and redirected by the major built formal elements in the public spaces. In views of the entrance hall for example, the ambiguous character of the space can be immediately perceived. Kahn’s abstract modernist language displaces any single reading of the order or hierarchy of the space in favour of a series of variable readings. Consider, for example, the balcony over the door and the framed fireplace stack above. These devices stave off any closed order or cumulative arrangement typical of a modernist sensibility. In its place, there arises an order of simultaneity and ambiguity, not lucidity. This interpretation is reinforced by an examination of the entry to the living room. 56 The apparent solidity of the canted concrete faced walls is rendered ambiguous due to the slots of natural light washing the wall which passes beyond. This wall itself, because it does not close the room but extends in an overlapped condition beyond those walls, equally destabilises any static reading.

ii. Connections, or Lines not Edges. As almost all the secondary commentators have observed, the architectural problem facing Kahn at Bryn Mawr to a certain degree coincided with the organisational problems: how to resolve the relationships between the three large public spaces and the relationships between these spaces and the much smaller and more numerous spaces of the individual rooms. 57 Kahn’s response was to search for an ‘”architecture of connections”’. 58 In place of an architecture of isolation and separation, Kahn’s used a model featuring overlaps. The effect is that the building and the interiors are never quite assimilable. I have already alluded to this reading in reference to the overlapping walls in the entry hall. This sensation is equally felt in relation to the external views of the building, or buildings. The plural reading is appropriate due to the faceted nature of the wall dispositions. It is not possible to grasp the formal whole from the exterior views, as the shape of the building is highly ambiguous. It is not clear whether there is a separate building projecting from behind the one immediately in front of us or whether, or in what manner, it is linked. Equally of relevance is the absence of the continuous edges or contours to tie it all together. We are confronted instead with independent lines and a dense, multiple skylines. The vertical precast concrete elements do not reveal a closed volume as suggest shallow masses standing about freely. Despite the similar alignments of the median horizontal members, the faceting and strong volumetric vertical modelling continuously interrupts a single reading.

iii. Movement. Bryn Mawr displays Baroque imaginative processes. It deploys the line as a line of movement, a constant theme despite the first glance monumentality of the complex.

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