Louis Kahn in : ruin as method Maryam Gusheh

A thesis in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy March 2013

School of Architecture and Design Faculty of the Built Environment University of New South Wales

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Surname or Family name: Gusheh

First name: Maryam Other name/s:

Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: PhD

School: Architecture and Design Faculty: Built Environment

Title: in Dhaka: ruin as method

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE) The capitol complex in Dhaka, , designed by Louis Kahn, resists a neat positioning in architectural history. An iconic example of American modern architecture in a non-Western, newly independent context, this project straddles binary yet interdependent categories: East–West, Pakistan–Bangladesh, modern–postmodern. If Kahn represents a transitional figure within twentieth-century architectural history, then at Dhaka this liminal status is uniquely amplified. This thesis examines the particular manifestation, in the Dhaka commission, of the architectural tropes that are central to Kahn’s attempt to rethink the meaning of a modern monument during the late 1950s and 1960s. The research method is informed by recent trends in critical historiography, in which non-Western, typically postcolonial, modernism is identified as a key agent in the internal critique, revision and ongoing development of mid-twentieth century modernism. The capitol complex of Dhaka presents an important yet hitherto unexamined case for this critical perspective. This occurs through a historiographic analysis of the literature on the project combined with a close architectural reading of the building design. The reception of the project includes distinct and at times contradictory interpretations. It is seen as a key work of American modern architecture, as a precursor to postmodernism, as a neo-colonial practice and as an expression of Bangladeshi modernism. This thesis investigates how these diverse readings are differentiated in the critical literature, yet linked through the metaphor of the “ruin”. The “ruin” serves both as a critical lens for historiography and as a framework for a close reading of the building. This metaphor underlines the tension between form and use identified in this project. The architectural analysis explores how this tension is inherent in the capitol complex across three scales: the building in relation to the city, the thresholds within the building, and the relationship between “centre” and “periphery” as mediated through the spaces of circulation. It is argued that the ambivalence between form and use in this building renders the work particularly open to multiple interpretations, enabling its persistence as a vital monument, both in Dhaka and in architectural history.

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I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only). I have either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have applied/will apply for a partial restriction of the digital copy of my thesis or dissertation.’

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‘I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project’s design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.’

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Date: May 29, 2014

Acknowledgement

This dissertation has been realised with the assistance of many people and several institutions. Significant among these is Dr Peter Kohane, my primary supervisor throughout the candidature. It was in relation to his seminar courses on Louis Kahn that this project was first conceived and he has since responded to my work with exactitude. I am grateful for the support of my secondary supervisors. I thank Dr Catherine de Lorenzo, for her mentorship, humanity and humour and Dr Harry Margalit who with optimism structured my path towards completion.

For their unwavering intellectual and personal camaraderie I thank my friends and academic colleagues Dijana Alic, John Gamble, Paul Hogben, Catherine Lassen, Naomi Stead and Paul Walker. I am especially indebted to Justine Clark, Gevork Hartoonian, and Katrina Simon, for the time they took to read the thesis, and for their support and challenging questions. I acknowledge Justine Clark for editing the manuscript.

I have received institutional assistance from Faculty of Built Environment at UNSW throughout the course of my postgraduate studies and am particularly grateful to Dr Christine Steinmetz for her support this year. I extend my thanks to the staff at the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania and Public Work Department in Bangladesh who have generously assisted my study. I would like to thank Jacki Dupuis and Rowena Robertson for between them copy-editing the document.

Finally, I am grateful to my family; my sister, parents, parents in law, my partner Matthew Rogers and my daughter Uma. Without their care this project would not have been possible.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ...... ii

Introduction ...... 1

Part I – Capitol Complex: Critical Reception

Prelude “Form and Design” ...... 18

Chapter 1 Vincent Scully: Roman Ruins as Modern Buildings ...... 21

Chapter 2 Capitol Complex at Dhaka: Institution? Spectacle? Landscape? ...... 50

Part II – Capitol Complex: Architectural Reading

Prelude “The Development by Louis I. Kahn of the Design for the Second Capital of Pakistan at Dacca” ...... 98

Chapter 3 The Problem of the City: City Within a City ...... 100

Chapter 4 The Problem of the Wall: Hollow Wall, Hollow Column ...... 154

Chapter 5 The Problem of the Circulation: Between Centre and Periphery ...... 219

Conclusion ...... 246

Bibliography ...... 253

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure I.1. Louis Kahn, Capitol Complex, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 1962–83. [Giurgola and Mehta, Louis I. Kahn, 135] ...... 3 Figure P.1 Louis Kahn, First Unitarian Church and School, Rochester, NY, 1959–69, plan diagram, ca. January 1961. [Rowan, “The Philadelphia School”, 134] ...... 20 Figure 1.1. Louis Kahn, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, 1950–53. [Scully, Louis I. Kahn, n.p.] ...... 26 Figure 1.2. Philip Johnson, Kneses Tifereth Israel Synagogue, Port Chester, NY, 1954–56. [Levine, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, 70] ...... 26 Figure 1.3. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Alumni Memorial Hall, Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, 1945–46. [Scully, Louis I. Kahn, n.p.] ...... 26 Figure 1.4. Plate 47–51 in Louis I. Kahn. Trenton Jewish Community Centre, Ewing Township NJ, 1954–59. [Scully, Louis I.Kahn, n.p.] ...... 31 Figure 1.5. Plate 89–91 in Louis I. Kahn. First Unitarian Church and School. [Scully, Louis I. Kahn, n.p.] ...... 31 Figure 1.6. Plate 92–93 in Louis I. Kahn. Goldenberg House, Rydal, PA, 1959. [Scully, Louis I. Kahn, n.p.] ...... 34 Figure 1.7. Plate 100–104 in Louis I. Kahn. US Consulate, Luanda, Angola, 1959–62. [Scully, Louis I. Kahn, n.p.] ...... 34 Figure 1.8. Louis Kahn, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA, 1959–65, early isometric for laboratories and studies. [Scully, Louis I. Kahn, n.p.] ...... 37 Figure 1.9. Teatro Marittima, Hadrian’s Villa, Tivoli. [Scully, Louis I. Kahn, n.p.] ...... 37 Figure 1.10. Salk Institute, plan of meeting house and site with partial plan of Hadrian’s Villa, 1960, unbuilt. [Brownlee and De Long, In the Realm, 334] ...... 38 Figure 1.11. Salk Institute, meeting house model of West elevation, unbuilt. [Scully, Louis I. Kahn, n.p.] ...... 38 Figure 1.12. Salk Institute, plan of meeting house, 1962, unbuilt. [Scully, Louis I. Kahn, n.p.] ...... 38 Figure 1.13. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Campo Marzio in , 1762. [Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, 88] ...... 40 Figure 1.14. Louis Kahn, Midtown Development, Market St East, Philadelphia, PA, 1961–62, unbuilt, sketch plan. [Scully, Louis I. Kahn, n.p.] ...... 40 Figure 1.15. Aldo Rossi, Cemetery of San Cataldo, Modena, , 1971–84. [http://www.talent.leica-camera.it/andrea-pirisi (accessed March 3, 2013] ...... 43 Figure 1.16. Capitol Complex, East Hostels. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] ...... 43 Figure 1.17. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] ...... 43 Figure 1.18. Capitol Complex, West Hostels. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] ...... 47 Figure 1.19. House of Diana, Ostia, Italy, mid-2nd century. [Levine, Representation and Reality, 273] ...... 47 Figure 2.1. Page 79 in In the Realm. National Assembly Building, Mikveh Israel Synagogue and Brunelleschi’s plan for Santo Spirito. [Brownlee and De Long, In the Realm, 79] ...... 58 Figure 2.2. Louis Kahn, Mikveh Israel Synagogue, Philadelphia, PA, 1961–72, plan. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 190] ...... 59 Figure 2.3. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, 1966, plan. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 254] ...... 59 Figure 2.4. Louis Kahn, Palace of Congress and Biennale Venice, Italy, 1968–74, plans. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 372] ...... 59

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Figure 2.5. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, assembly chamber. [Brownlee and De Long, In the Realm, 245] ...... 60 Figure 2.6. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, ambulatory space. [Brownlee and De Long, In the Realm, 82] ...... 60 Figure 2.7. Philadelphia Midtown Development, Market St. East, elevation and perspective sketch. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 37] ...... 65 Figure 2.8. Capitol Complex, East Hostels. [Brownlee and De Long, In the Realm, 252] ...... 65 Figure 2.9. Philadelphia Midtown Development, Market St. East, model. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 37] ...... 65 Figure 2.10. Capitol Complex, plan view of site model, March 1963. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 238] ...... 65 Figure 2.11. Page 429 in “Architectural Culture in the Fifties”, National Assembly Building, Taj Mahal and plate 6 from Wittkower. [Ksiazek, “Architectural Culture in the Fifties”, 429] ...... 73 Figure 2.12. Louis Kahn, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX, 1966–72. [Levine, “The Architecture of the Unfinished”, 338] ...... 77 Figure 2.13. Louis Kahn, Phillips Exeter Academy Library, Exeter, NH, 1965–72. [Levine, “The Architecture of the Unfinished”, 336] ...... 77 Figure 2.14. Kimbell Art Museum. [Levine, “The Architecture of the Unfinished”, 339] ...... 77 Figure 2.15. Page 405 in Modern Architecture. National Assembly Building and Kimbell Art Museum. [Tafuri and Dal Co, Modern Architecture, 405] ...... 80 Figure 2.16. Page 207 in The New Capitals. Capitol Complex, West Hostels. [Nilsson, The New Capitals, 207] ...... 83 Figure 2.17. Village Landscape, illustration. [Haque, Ahsan and Ashraf, to Sherebanlanagar, 9] ...... 88 Figure 2.18. Bamboo Housing in Ramna District, Dacca, 1969. [Nilsson, The New Capitals, 184] ...... 88 Figure 2.19. Frontispiece, Pundranagar to Sherebanlanagar. [Haque, Ahsan and Ashraf, Pundranagar to Sherebanlanagar, n.p.] ...... 91 Figure 2.20. Paharpur Monastery and Temple, Naogaon, 770-810 AD. [Haque, Ahsan and Ashraf, Pundranagar to Sherebanlanagar, 153] ...... 91 Figure 2.21. Kantanagar Temple, Dinajpur, 1752 AD. [Haque, Ahsan and Ashraf, Pundranagar to Sherebanlanagar, 160] ...... 91 Figure 2.22. Nine Domed Mosque, Bagerhat, 15th century AD. [Haque, Ahsan and Ashraf, Pundranagar to Sherebanlanagar, 181] ...... 91 Figure 2.23. , Nawabganj, 1493-1519 AD. [Haque, Ahsan and Ashraf, Pundranagar to Sherebanlanagar, 157] ...... 93 Figure 2.24. Choto Sona Mosque, elevation. [Haque, Ahsan and Ashraf, Pundranagar to Sherebanlanagar, 45] ...... 93 Figure 2.25. Book jacket, Sherebanlanagar. [Haque and Ashraf, Sherebanlanagar] ...... 95 Figure 3.1. Capitol Complex [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] ...... 101 Figure 3.2. Mazharul , Fine Arts Institute, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 1953–55. [Ashraf and Belluardo, An Architecture of Independence, 59] ...... 108 Figure 3.3. Fine Arts Institute. [Ashraf and Belluardo, An Architecture of Independence, 59] ...... 108 Figure 3.4. Dacca City Map (colour added), 1962. [Islam and Khan, “High Class Residential Area in Dhaka City”, 3] ...... 109 Figure 3.5. Demarcation between Pre-Moghul and Moghul Dhaka. [Chowdhury and Faruqui, “Physical Growth of Dhaka City”, 47] ...... 109 Figure 3.6. The Moghul Capital. [Chowdhury and Faruqui, “Physical Growth of Dhaka City”, 51] ...... 109 Figure 3.7. , Dhaka, 17th Century AD, plan. [Haque, Ahsan and Ashraf, Pundranagar to Sherebanlanagar, 73] ...... 113

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Figure 3.8. Lalbagh Fort. [Author’s image] ...... 113 Figure 3.9. Lalbagh Fort. [Haque, Ahsan and Ashraf, Pundranagar to Sherebanlanagar, 169] ...... 113 Figure 3.10. Map of Dacca (1924). [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/77/ Dacca1924.jpg, accessed March 20 2013] ...... 114 Figure 3.11. Curzon Hall, Dhaka, 1904 AD. [Haque, Ahsan and Ashraf, Pundranagar to Sherebanlanagar, 187] ...... 116 Figure 3.12. Governor’s House, Dhaka, 1905 AD. [Haque, Ahsan and Ashraf, Pundranagar to Sherebanlanagar, 187] ...... 116 Figure 3.13. Page 188 in The New Capitals, map. [Nilsson, The New Capitals, 188] ...... 117 Figure 3.14. Google Earth (colour added). [Accessed February 10, 2013] ...... 117 Figure 3.15. National Assembly Complex, site plan, ca. February 1963. [Brownlee and De Long, In the Realm, 375] ...... 127 Figure 3.16. National Assembly Complex, ca. 1963. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 234] ...... 127 Figure 3.17. Capitol Complex, site plan, March 12, 1963. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 238] ...... 129 Figure 3.18. Capitol Complex, site plan, March 1963. [Ashraf, Khaleed and Haque, Sherebanglanagar: The Making of a Capital Complex, 48] ...... 132 Figure 3.19. Capitol Complex, perspective sketch. [Keller and Tansal, “The Development of Dacca”, plate 1] ...... 134 Figure 3.20. Capitol Complex, site plan, May 3, 1963. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 240] ...... 137 Figure 3.21. Capitol Complex, site model, May 1963. [Kahn Collection] ...... 140 Figure 3.22. Capitol Complex, site model, May 1963. [Kahn Collection] ...... 140 Figure 3.23. Capitol Complex, site plan, December 21, 1963. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 244] ...... 140 Figure 3.24. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, public entrance court. [650.NA.170 (F20), Kahn Collection] ...... 142 Figure 3.25. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, public entrance court, detail [650.NA.170 (F20), Kahn Collection] ...... 142 Figure 3.26. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, Presidential Square. [650.MP.13.18, Kahn Collection] ...... 142 Figure 3.27. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, Presidential Square. [650.PS.025(F68), Kahn Collection] ...... 142 Figure 3.28. Capitol Complex, plan, 2 April 1964. [650.MP.076, Kahn Collection] ...... 142 Figure 3.29. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Complex, site plan, April 28, 1964. [650.NA.029 (F2), Kahn Collection] ...... 142 Figure 3.30. Capitol Complex, plan, February, 1965. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 255] ...... 145 Figure 3.31. Capitol Complex, model. [650.13.18 k12 6p.134 (F2), Kahn Collection] ...... 146 Figure 3.32. Capitol Complex, model, 1966. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 254] ...... 146 Figure 3.33. Capitol Complex, site plan. [650.MP.102 (F3), Kahn Collection] ...... 146 Figure 3.34. Capitol Complex, South Podium. [650.MP.076 (F2), Kahn Collection] ...... 146 Figure 3.35. Capitol Complex, model, 1966, detail. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 254] ...... 147 Figure 3.36. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, bridge at Southern entrance. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.] ...... 147 Figure 3.37. Capitol Complex, site plan, 1973. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 265] ...... 150 Figure 3.38. Secretariat Complex, Secretariat Building, ca. 1973, model, unbuilt. [Kahn Collection] ...... 150 Figure 3.39. Capitol Complex, South Plaza. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.] ...... 151

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Figure 3.40. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, viewed from the North. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.] ...... 151 Figure 3.41. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, viewed from the South. [Vale, Architecture, Power and National Identity, 271] ...... 151 Figure 3.42. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.] ...... 153 Figure 3.43. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.] ...... 153 Figure 3.44. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building. [Ashraf and Haque, Sherebanglanagar, 12] ...... 153 Figure 4.1. East Hostels, early perspective sketch, ca. 1963. [Keller and Tansal, “The Development of Dacca”, plate 16] ...... 155 Figure 4.2. Light element diagrams. [Keller and Tansal, “The Development of Dacca”, plate 18] ...... 157 Figure 4.3. Louis Kahn, United States Consulate, Luanda, Angola, 1959–61, model. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 129] ...... 163 Figure 4.4. US Consulate Angola, site plan 1959–60. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 126] ...... 163 Figure 4.5. US Consulate, Angola, chancellery, elevation. [McCarter, Louis I. Kahn, 157] ...... 164 Figure 4.6. US Consulate, Angola, residence, elevation. [McCarter, Louis I. Kahn, 159] ...... 164 Figure 4.7. US Consulate, Angola, axonometric. [McCarter, Louis I. Kahn, 156] ...... 164 Figure 4.8. US Consulate, Angola, model. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 127] ...... 169 Figure 4.9. Louis Kahn, Tribune Review Building, Greensburg, PA, 1958-61. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 115] ...... 169 Figure 4.10. Tribune Review Building, 1958-61. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 115] ...... 169 Figure 4.11. Tribune Review Building, sketches, 1958. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 112] ...... 169 Figure 4.12. Louis Kahn, Fleisher House, Elkins Park, PA, 1959, model. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 151] ...... 171 Figure 4.13. Fleisher House, model. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 151] ...... 171 Figure 4.14. Fleisher House, plan. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 150] ...... 171 Figure 4.15. Fleisher House, section. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 151] ...... 171 Figure 4.16. Fleisher House, section. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 151] ...... 172 Figure 4.17. US Consulate, Angola, residence, sketches. [McCarter, Louis I. Kahn, 159] ...... 172 Figure 4.18. Page 161 in “The Philadelphia School”, wall diagrams. [Rowan, “The Philadelphia School”, 161] ...... 174 Figure 4.19. Page 25 in “Toward a Plan For Midtown Philadelphia”, proposed city hall building, model. [Kahn, “Toward a Plan for Midtown Philadelphia”, 25] ...... 177 Figure 4.20. Yale Art Gallery, isometric drawing. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 68] ...... 177 Figure 4.21. Trenton Jewish Community Centre, plans and section. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 83] ...... 177 Figure 4.22. Mikveh Israel Synagogue model. [Kahn, “Remarks”, 320] ...... 180 Figure 4.23. Mikveh Israel Synagogue plan. [Kahn, “Remarks”, 320] ...... 180 Figure 4.24. Mikveh Israel Synagogue, perspective, 1963. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 193] ...... 182 Figure 4.25. Left, light element diagrams. [Keller and Tansal, “The Development of Dacca”, plate 18]. Right, light element diagrams [Kahn, “Remarks”, 310] ...... 185 Figure 4.26. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, undated, sketch. [The Louis I. Kahn Archive, 131] ...... 187 Figure 4.27. National Assembly Building, November 1963, sketch. [The Louis I. Kahn Archive, 145] ...... 187

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Figure 4.28. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, early sketches. [Keller and Tansal, “The Development of Dacca”, plate 22] ...... 188 Figure 4.29. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, early sketches. [Keller and Tansal, “The Development of Dacca”, plate 19] ...... 188 Figure 4.30. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, early sketches. [Keller and Tansal, “The Development of Dacca”, plate 20] ...... 188 Figure 4.31. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, early sketches. [Keller and Tansal, “The Development of Dacca”, plate 21] ...... 188 Figure 4.32. Light element drawings, detail. [Keller and Tansal, “The Development of Dacca”, plate 21] ...... 190 Figure 4.33. Light element drawings. [Keller and Tansal, “The Development of Dacca”, plate 17] ...... 190 Figure 4.34. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, sketch. [The Louis I. Kahn Archive, 103] ...... 191 Figure 4.35. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, sketch. [The Louis I. Kahn Archive, 102] ...... 191 Figure 4.36. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, sketch, 1964. [650.NA.306 (F24), Kahn Collection] ...... 193 Figure 4.37. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, plan, 1964. [650.NA.306 (F24), Kahn Collection] ...... 193 Figure 4.38. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, plan, 1963. [650.NA.313 (F24), Kahn Collection] ...... 194 Figure 4.39. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, plan detail, 1963. [650.NA.351 (F24), Kahn Collection] ...... 194 Figure 4.40. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, plan detail. [650.NA.351 (F24), Kahn Collection] ...... 194 Figure 4.41. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, section, November 26 1963. [650.NA.351 (F24), Kahn Collection] ...... 195 Figure 4.42. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, elevation, March 1964. [650.NA.141 (F20), Kahn Collection] ...... 195 Figure 4.43. Capital Complex, model, May 1964. [030.650.10 (k12.6p.111.n), Kahn Collection] ...... 198 Figure 4.44. Capital Complex, model, May 1964. [030.650.10 (k12.6p.130), Kahn Collection] ...... 198 Figure 4.45. Capital Complex, model, May 1964. [030.650.10 (k12.6p.143), Kahn Collection] ...... 198 Figure 4.46. Capital Complex, model, July 1964. [030.650.10 (k12.6p.149), Kahn Collection] ...... 199 Figure 4.47. Capitol Complex, construction site. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.] ...... 201 Figure 4.48. National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.] ...... 201 Figure 4.49. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, elevation, July 6 1964. [650.NA.095 (F20), Kahn Collection] ...... 203 Figure 4.50. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, elevation, March 1965. [650.NA.039 (F20), Kahn Collection] ...... 203 Figure 4.51. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, elevation, July 6 1964. [650.NA.095 (F20), Kahn Collection] ...... 205 Figure 4.52. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building [Author’s image] ...... 205 Figure 4.53. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building [Author’s image] ...... 205 Figure 4.54. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.] ...... 206 Figure 4.55. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building. [Brownlee and De Long, In the Realm, 236] ...... 206

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Figure 4.56. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building. [Rykwert, Louis Kahn, 215] ...... 207 Figure 4.57. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, plan, July 1964. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete works, 248] ...... 208 Figure 4.58. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, plan, January 1965. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete works, 250] ...... 208 Figure 4.59. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.] ...... 210 Figure 4.60. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, plan, January 22 1965. [650.NA.048 (F20), Kahn Collection] ...... 211 Figure 4.61. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, plan, January 5 1966. [650.AC.003 (F38), Kahn Collection] ...... 211 Figure 4.62. Assembly Chamber. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.] ...... 212 Figure 4.63. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, mosque plan, June 20 1964. [030.IC.650.116, Kahn Collection] ...... 213 Figure 4.64. National Assembly Building, ca. 1966, plan, detail. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 190] ...... 213 Figure 4.65. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, mosque. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.] ...... 215 Figure 4.66. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, mosque. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.] ...... 215 Figure 4.67. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, mosque. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.] ...... 216 Figure 4.68. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, mosque. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.] ...... 216 Figure 5.1. National Assembly Building section, ca. 1964. [Keller and Tansal, “The Development of Dacca”, plate 33] ...... 220 Figure 5.2. National Assembly Building section, ca. 1964. [Keller and Tansal, “The Development of Dacca”, plate 34] ...... 220 Figure 5.3. National Assembly Building plan, July 15, 1963. [650.NA.157 (F20), Kahn Collection] ...... 226 Figure 5.4. Louis Kahn, First Unitarian Church and School, Rochester, NY, 1959–69, plan diagram, ca. January 1961, detail. [Rowan, “The Philadelphia School”, 134] ...... 226 Figure 5.5. National Assembly Building section, ca. 1963. [650.NA.397 (F25), Kahn Collection] ...... 230 Figure 5.6. National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] ...... 231 Figure 5.7. National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] ...... 231 Figure 5.8. National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] ...... 231 Figure 5.9. National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] ...... 231 Figure 5.10. National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] ...... 232 Figure 5.11. National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] ...... 232 Figure 5.12. National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] ...... 232 Figure 5.13. National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] ...... 232 Figure 5.14. National Assembly Building, ca. 1966, plan. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 190] ...... 234 Figure 5.15. National Assembly Building plan, ca. 1963. [650.NA.314 (F24), Kahn Collection] ...... 237 Figure 5.16. National Assembly Building plan, ca. 1964. [650.NA.111 (F20), Kahn Collection] ...... 237 Figure 5.17. National Assembly Building, mosque, ca. 1966, plan. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 253] ...... 240

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Figure 5.18. National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] ...... 240 Figure 5.19. National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] ...... 240 Figure 5.20. National Assembly Building, mosque, ca. 1966, plan. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 253] ...... 241 Figure 5.21. National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] ...... 241 Figure 5.22. National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] ...... 243 Figure 5.23. National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] ...... 243 Figure 5.24. National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] ...... 243 Figure 5.25. National Assembly Building plan, ca. 1964. [650.NA.727 (F27), Kahn Collection] ...... 244 Figure 5.26. National Assembly Building, roof. [Author’s image] ...... 245 Figure 5.27. Capitol Complex. [Author’s image] ...... 245

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INTRODUCTION

I thought of the beauty of ruins … the absence of frames … of things which nothing lives behind … and so I thought of wrapping ruins around buildings.1 Louis Kahn, 1961

Everybody said, Well, Loony Lou: he’s wrapping ruins around a building. Nobody can do that. It’s like having to build two rooms each time. It’s ridiculous. Of course, Kahn had the last laugh, because just after this he received the commissions for his great projects on the subcontinent of India, where he didn’t have to have glass in most instances, and those great primitive shapes began to appear … What Kahn wanted was mystery, a sense of majestic and ambiguous scale, of function transcending into awe. It is totally, as it were, outside time – has escaped time as a ruin does – containing within it, as always, the sublime. We are reminded of Piranesi’s Carceri, the terrible stairs going up into space, seen through the enormous circles, vertiginous and awesome. 2 Vincent Scully, 1992

Ruin as Metaphor

In April of 1971, with the advent of the Pakistani civil war, American citizens in Dhaka were evacuated, Kahn’s office was closed, his contract was terminated and the construction work on Pakistan’s second capitol came to a halt. During the nine-month conflict that followed, the National Assembly Building came to serve as an ammunition depot and quarters for the East Pakistani and allied Indian troops. According to a local legend, the complex escaped air attack as the large-scale geometric openings that punctuated the building’s outer screen walls projected an image of a structure already in ruin.3

Reflecting on the project’s postwar fate and its relevance to the newly independent Bangladesh in 1973, urban theorist Sten Nilsson re-invoked the “ruin” analogy in his polemical critique.

Perhaps the new government will feel at home in [Kahn’s] heroic buildings; perhaps it will move back into the old city to show that the colonial era has come to an end at last.

------1 Louis I. Kahn, “Discussion in Kahn’s Office,” in Robert Twombly, ed., Essential Texts (New York, London: W. W. Norton, 2003), 98. (First published Perspecta 7 [1961]: 9–28) 2 Vincent Scully, “Louis I. Kahn and the Ruins of Rome,” in Neil Levine, ed., Modern Architecture and Other Essays by Vincent Scully (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 312–315. (First published in MoMA: The Members Quarterly of the Museum of Modern Art 12 [Summer 1992]: 1–13) 3 This anecdote has been cited in numerous sources and in support of divergent interpretations. See, for example, Saul Wurman, What Will Be Has Always Been: The Words of Louis I. Kahn (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 106; Lawrence Vale, Architecture, Power and National Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 242; Carter Wiseman, Louis I. Kahn: Beyond Time and Style, A life in Architecture (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 169–74.

INTRODUCTION 1

Deserted, Louis Kahn’s Dacca would be as magnificent as Fatehpur Sikri. In fact it seems to have been created to be admired in ruins.4 Nilsson argued Kahn’s architecture would best serve Dhaka as an aesthetic spectacle adjacent to, yet deliberately distinct from, the inhabited city.

In his 1992 essay “Louis I. Kahn and the Ruins of Rome,” eminent historian Vincent Scully described Kahn as a “hinge” figure between postwar modernism and the movement’s subsequent internal critique. Scully was Kahn’s friend and colleague at Yale University and arguably the most influential interpreter of his architecture. The 1992 essay is the most complete consideration of the architect’s late oeuvre to date. In it Scully suggests that Kahn’s Piranesian translations of Roman ruins into modern buildings prefigured “the most important development in architecture in the second half of the twentieth century. That is the revival of the classical and vernacular traditions of architecture and their reincorporation into the mainstream of modern architecture.”5 The essay confirmed Scully’s somewhat pre- emptive observation in 1962 that the conceptual basis for Kahn’s disciplinary contribution and legacy was inscribed in his curious aphorism “wrapping ruins around buildings”. The capitol complex of Dhaka, completed in 1983 – nine years after Kahn’s death – had come to serve as a key exemplar in Scully’s thesis.

Whether in popular legend or historical narrative, whether as formal descriptor or by way of a conceptual or critical proposition, the capitol complex in Dhaka has been consistently imagined in analogous relationship to a “ruin” – that is, as an artefact in tension with its contemporary use. As a common thread that runs through otherwise disparate accounts of this project, the trope of the “ruin” has generated multiple associations: the disintegration of the modern movement, the advent of postmodernism, a colonialist pursuit of formal extravagance and experimentation, or an orientalist fantasy. In this, binary terms pertinent to the autonomous realm of architectural history – such as “modern” and “postmodern” – appear entwined with orientalist identity categories such as “East” and “West.” The metaphor of the “ruin” thus alludes to an intriguing nexus between Kahn’s enactment of modernism in a postcolonial context and to his perceived status as a transitional figure within the postwar history of modern architecture in America.

It was the critical conception of Dhaka’s capitol as a “ruin” that first provoked my interest in this project and which instigated the early questions from which this research has ------4 Sten Ake Nilsson, The New Capitals of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies Monograph Series, 12 (Lund: Studentiltteratur, 1973), 212. Fatehpur Sikri was the short-lived capital of the Moghul Empire in late-sixteenth-century in Uttar Pradesh province, India. 5 Scully, “Kahn and the Ruins of Rome,” 298.

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emerged. What did the depiction of this monument as a “ruin” imply about the particular meaning of this work as a civic monument and its significance as a historical subject? What does it reveal about the relationship between a seminal manifestation of American modernism and its non-Western context? (Figure I.1)

Figure I.1. Louis Kahn, Capitol Complex, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 1962–83. [Giurgola and Mehta, Louis I. Kahn, 135]

INTRODUCTION 3

Kahn in Dhaka

The capitol complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh (1962–83), designed by the American architect Louis Kahn, resists a neat positioning in architectural history.6 An iconic example of modern architecture in a non-Western, newly independent context, involving an architect deemed significant to the postwar evolution of the modern movement, this project straddles binary yet interdependent cultural and disciplinary categories: East–West, Pakistan– Bangladesh, modern–postmodern. If Kahn is a transitional figure in twentieth-century architectural history – as is proposed by Scully and others – then in Dhaka the liminal status of his practice appears uniquely amplified.

Embedded in this project is, therefore, a nuanced and distinctive narrative concerning Kahn’s attempt to rethink modern architecture in the postwar years, his ambition to newly invest monumentality into architecture and the core problems encountered in this – namely the relationship between the monument and the city, the status of the facade and the meaning of the architectural “centre”.

These architectural themes have been discussed in relation to Kahn’s oeuvre, by a range of scholars.7 However, there has been no comprehensive examination of them as they were particularly conceived and realised in Dhaka.

This dissertation works within this gap in the research. It combines a historiographical analysis of the reception of the project with a detailed reading of the architectural fabric to develop a new and nuanced contextual interpretation. It thus adds a new interpretive layer as to the value and meaning of this building, both as a historical subject and as a civic monument. This detailed analysis of the particular project, in turn, also allows the broader architectural themes at work in Kahn’s oeuvre to be understood in new ways.

------6 An explanatory note regarding the project title: In Kahn’s pre-1971 office files and drawn documents the project was titled the “Second Capital of Pakistan in Dacca.” In the mid 1960s the title of the precinct was formalised as Ayub Nagar (after the Pakistani president Ayub Khan). After independence in 1971 the name of the precinct was changed to Sher-e-Bangla Nagar (The City of Tiger), a Bengali name chosen in deference to the nom de guerre of the Bengali nationalist leader Abul Kasem Fazlul Huq (1873– 1962). In this dissertation the term “capitol” is used to distinguish the Assembly precinct from the existing capital city of Dhaka. When discussing the project specifically, the term “capitol complex” (as distinct from National Assembly Building) is employed to refer to the larger site, which variously encompasses both the realised and unrealised components of the project. With regard to the Bengali name of the project, the use of hyphens is not consistent. In this dissertation, except in some direct quotations, Sher-e-Bangla Nagar is spelled using hyphens. Another post-independence title change (although it occurred later, in the early 1980s) was the change in the spelling of Dhaka (from Dacca to Dhaka). The newer spelling more closely reflects the Bengali pronunciation. In this dissertation, except in some direct quotations, Dhaka is employed. 7 These themes form the focus of Part II of this dissertation. The relevant scholars are cited with the three associated chapters.

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In the capitol complex in Dhaka, as realised, the relationship between architectural form and the institutional patterns of use are blurred and at times separated or counterpoised. I demonstrate that this architectural ambiguity, although characteristic of Kahn’s late architectural production, is radically amplified in the capitol complex project, where it is achieved with more singularity. I also show that this ambivalent relationship between form and use underscores the project’s appropriation within multiple historiographical narratives – both disciplinary and politico-cultural.

The dissertation makes its contribution in the space between these discrete and at times contradictory interpretations. It offers a historiographic analysis that coalesces and synthesises disciplinary history, architectural reading and political critique. It also presents an original and primary architectural analysis of the capitol complex project. As such, it draws on my training in both architectural history and architectural design.

The thesis aims to provide a better understanding of the project’s development and evolution alongside a better understanding of Kahn’s critical revision of modern architecture in the early 1960s. It develops a methodological approach that accounts for multiple interpretations, rather than seeking to provide a single answer, and explores the anomalies in Kahn’s works as well as the continuities. This approach could also be used when considering other projects that challenge conventional methodologies or sit uneasily within existing paradigms.

Existing Literature

Three broad interpretations prevail in the scholarship relating to the capitol complex of Dhaka.8 Considered one of Kahn’s most ambitious architectural achievements, the capitol complex has been predominantly defined as an authoritative and particularly American proposition for a contemporary civic monument. An alternative and typically cross- disciplinary line of enquiry has linked Kahn’s practice with a neo-colonial or imperialist ideology. The scholars who have developed this second reading have pointed to profound misconnections between Kahn’s idealised architectural proposition and Dhaka’s complex cultural, political and environmental reality – even warning of the authoritarian implications of such fundamentalist architecture. A third interpretation has aligned Kahn’s architectural

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8 The existing literature on this project is discussed in chapter two, where the three critical trajectories outlined here are subject to interpretation and synthesis.

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approach with a Bengali/Bangladeshi geo-cultural setting and associated built traditions, thus framing the project as a productive model for a modern yet regional urbanism.

The intrinsic heterogeneity of the existing literature on this project is striking. However, it is not only the variety of meaning and the contested and polarised claims that characterise this building’s reception. An overview of the discourse also reveals a tendency to avoid definitive conclusions. It is as if there is always a tacit acknowledgement that an alternative, even opposing, reading of the project is permissible. The building, this dissertation shows, evades easy classification.

Yet, despite these diverse lines of argument and critical methods, existing studies commonly present the Dhaka commission as a consistent extension of Kahn’s late oeuvre. For some scholars the architectural program – a house for democratic assembly – coupled with an amplified professional authority, enabled Kahn to clarify and sharpen his own long-standing architectural preoccupations. These scholars have framed the Dhaka commission as the place where Kahn’s previously unbuilt and hypothetical propositions were ultimately realised. These interpretations present the project as both in continuum with and exemplifying Kahn’s late idiom.

But a consideration of the project’s situational particularity is missing from this existing literature.9 How is this work distinct? How were Kahn’s formal preoccupations uniquely resolved in this setting?

Insofar as it has been considered in published literature, the specificity of Kahn’s architectural approach in Dhaka has been described with reference to the postwar theme of “regionalism.”10 This emphasis has been, for the most part, indebted to Kahn’s personal description of his design approach – he underlines local climate, natural landscape and abstract allusions to regional built tradition as the basis for “establishing a new Pakistani Architecture as a link between the glorious past and promising future.”11 Such seemingly

------9 Ed Levin’s critical reflection on the Kahn scholarship is suggestive in this regard. Commenting on the lack of a “genuine” re-examination of the architect’s work by contemporary Kahn scholars, he calls for a critical revision of the architect’s productions whereby “disparate or apparently contradictory aspects of the work” are not denied. See, Ed Levin, “The Berkeley Lecture – A Postscript,” Perspecta 28 (1997): 40–41. 10 The project’s “regional” attributes have been typically described with an emphasis on the architect’s sensitivity to climatic parameters and regional built heritage. Definitions of built heritage have been broad, extending from Moghul mausoleums to vernacular huts. The regionalist interpretation of the project is subject to more detailed consideration in Chapter 2. 11 See for example, Typed document, undated, ca 1963, “PAK. Correspondence–Miscellaneous,” Box LIK 120, Kahn Collection.

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localised strategies have been typically framed as evidence of Kahn’s sensitivity to the regional environment and history, but they have also been subject to critical repudiation.

The synonymous reading of nature and culture, critics have pointed out, reinvokes nineteenth-century colonial stereotypes in which non-Western cultural history was diminished so that only the matter of climatic conditions remained, thus leaving an intellectual void. The modernist representation of regionally specific historical precedents mediated through the processes of “abstraction” has been similarly critiqued. It has been argued that, despite a pretension to aesthetic synthesis or neutrality, the principle of “abstraction” privileges a Eurocentric conceptual device and mode of representation.12

A new approach is thus required to consider the relationship between this architecture and its setting outside that framed by the regionalist discourse. The distinctive historiographic method pursued in this thesis is proposed as one such alternative.

Method: Critical Historiographic Approach

The historiographical interest and questions in this study seek neither to celebrate nor to dismiss Kahn’s practice in Dhaka.13 Nor is this project read an as extension of his late production. Instead, the thesis works across and in between diverse, and at times polarised,

------12 See for example William Curtis, “Authenticity, Abstraction and the Ancient Sense: Le Corbusier’s and Louis Kahn's Ideas of Parliament,” Perspecta, no. 20 (1983): 181–94; and William Curtis, “Presence of Absence: Louis I. Kahn and Modern Monumentality,” Ptah, no. 1 (2002): 21-33; and the lucid critique of this interpretation by Vikramaditya Prakash, Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 23–24. 13 This investigation was initially influenced by early developments in postcolonial theory as related to the study of architecture and urbanism; studies grounded in Edward Said’s seminal thesis Orientalism in particular (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). My research initially posited that Kahn’s approach in Dhaka was implicated in an “orientalist” attitude and mode of practice. However, I ultimately found this interpretive framework limiting as it did not account for the project’s disciplinary significance. In detailing my method here, I have limited my citation to the works that opened the possibility for reading the political implication of cross-cultural practice and yet account for the work’s significance as a work of architecture. For publication of this research in development see Maryam Gusheh “Sher-e-Bangla Nagar: Louis I. Kahn and the Indian Sublime,” in Firm(ness) Commodity De-light?, Proceedings from the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand, Julie Willis, Philip Goad and Andrew Hutson eds. (Melbourne: 1998), 109–115; Maryam Gusheh, “The Individual and the Social Body: Shifting Positions in the Work of Louis Kahn,” in Thresholds: Proceedings from the Sixteenth Annual Conference of The Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (Launceston: 1999), 93-99; Maryam Gusheh, “Sher-e-Bangla Nagar: Between Myth and National Identity,” in Sites of Recovery: Proceedings from the Fourth International Other Connections Conference, Marwan Ghandour, Mazen Labban and Mirjana Lozanovska eds. (Beirut: 1999), 161–169; Maryam Gusheh, “Louis Kahn’s Homage to Participatory Democracy: Living Monument or a Folly?” in In the Making: Architecture’s Past: Proceedings from the Eighteenth Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, Kevin Green eds. (Darwin: 2001), 221–230; Maryam Gusheh, “Monumentality and Spectacle: Gideon and Kahn,” in Additions to Architectural History: Proceedings from the Nineteenth Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand, John P. Macarthur and Anthony Moulis eds. (Brisbane: 2002).

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interpretations of this project to search for the particularities of Kahn’s practice as enacted in Dhaka, and the resultant meaning of this project as both a work of architecture and as a historical topic.

The methodological framework for this dissertation is informed by critical historiography on “marginal” or “other” modernism(s). The literature in this field has drawn attention to the inevitable shifts in meaning that occur as models of architectural practice are transposed to or from one cultural setting to another.14 Particular attention has been paid to the ideological frameworks and power relationships relative to which modernist practices outside the West were inevitably shaped and accordingly transfigured. These nuanced transformations form the focus of my analysis.

The historiographical approach is particularly influenced by recent trends in critical historiography in which disciplinary history and cross-disciplinary methods coalesce. This work identifies non-Western, typically postcolonial, modernism as a key agent in the internal critique, revision and ongoing development of mid-twentieth-century modernism.15 This conceptual approach has opened up a fresh critical framework for examining the relationship between architecture and culture from within a disciplinary matrix but without

------14 Sibel Bozdogan’s line of enquiry has been particularly formative: Sibel Bozdogan, “Architectural History in Professional Education: Reflections on Postcolonial Challenges to the Modern Survey,” Journal of Architectural Education, 52, no. 4 (May 1999): 207–15; Sibel Bozdogan, Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001); Anoma Pieris provides a lucid summation of Bozdogan’s thesis relative to the larger field in her excellent overview of the postcolonial studies as applied to the historiography of architecture and urbanism; see Anoma Pieris “South and Southeast Asia: The Postcolonial Legacy,” Fabrications, The Journal of The Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 19, no. 2 (April 2010): 6–33. 15 The term “colonial modern”, as deployed here, connotes cross-cultural, modernist practices that occurred within twentieth-century colonised environments and, subsequently, in the context of independent nation states. The definition deliberately blurs the pre and post (colonial) frames of reference. In doing so, it foregrounds the continuous trajectory of colonial spatial practices, where colonial architects re-emerged as expert nation builders. In this critical perspective, colonial settings and the newly independent nation states served as a ‘laboratory’ for Western modernity. Treated as blank and undefined environments, projects were typically divorced from the complex reality of their setting – rather than engaging with the “local” via self-referential categories. Two broad themes framed this association: first, the synthesis of the colonised world with “pre modern” traditions, where modernist practices were revitalised with reference to vernacular settlements; and secondly and by contrast, where the appropriation of colonial cities as emergent urban environments informed innovative models for architectural design and urbanism. (Post) colonial “laboratories”, this research thus suggests, allowed for a focused engagement with themes pertinent to the internal critique of postwar American and European modernism. They therefore played a significant role in the evolution of modern architecture in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Exemplary in this regard has been Mark Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire (: Ashgate, 2003); see also Tom Avermaete, Serhat Karakayali and Marion von Osten, Colonial Modern: Aesthetics of the Past Rebellions for the Future (Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2010) and Mark Crinson and Claire Zimmerman, eds., Neo-Avant-Garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2010).

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reducing architecture to an “identity category.”16 As a canonical example of twentieth- century, cross-cultural practice by a significant architect in American postwar modernism, the capitol of Dhaka presents an important, but hitherto unexamined, case.

The approach adopted in this thesis places the emphasis on the designed object rather than design intentionality; on historical and architectural meanings rather than historical record. The aim, therefore, is not to locate Kahn’s views on binary cultural categories such as “East” and “West,” nor to interpret the alignments (or misalignments) between Kahn’s cultural assumptions and the complex cultural reality of the context within which he practised. I am instead looking to discover the specific (and peculiar) manner in which aspects of Kahn’s architectural preoccupations were enacted in Dhaka – a context inevitably shaped by the ideological imperatives that accompany such binary categories. And I further seek to uncover the significance of this work as a historical topic and its potential relevance to contemporary debates.

The central questions in this research are: 1. How were Kahn’s architectural and aesthetic preoccupations, as enacted in this non- Western territory, reproduced, extended, transformed or denied? 2. What was the perceived significance of these aesthetic strategies within architectural history and theory? The focus and structure of this study is informed by three distinct, yet interrelated, components of these questions: 1. What is the critical agency of the Dhaka commission within the historical discourse on Kahn? How does the project conform to the logic of varied and at times contrary historical narratives? What do the evident tensions and disagreements in the critical reception of this work reveal about its architectural particularity? 2. What architectural themes and tropes common to Kahn’s late idiom were employed in the Dhaka commission and how are these strategies uniquely particularised or transformed? 3. What theory of monument or monumentality does this architecture contribute to?

------16 Particularly the work of Gülsüm Baydar Nalbantoğlu. See Gülsüm Baydar Nalbantoğlu, “Toward Postcolonial Openings: Rereading Sir Banister Fletcher’s History of Architecture,” Assemblage 35 (April 1998); Gülsüm Baydar Nalbantoğlu, “The Cultural Burden of Architecture,” Journal of Architectural Education 57, no. 4 (2004): 19–27, and particularly Vikram Prakash’s excellent book on Chandigarh, Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier. I specifically draw on Prakash’s approach to critical historiography, see ibid., 26. Also see the more recent introductory essays by Peter Scriver and Vikramaditya Prakash in Peter Scriver and Vikramaditya Prakash, eds., Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon (London: Routledge, 2007). For me the work of these scholars opened the possibility of thinking about architectural fabric via terms informed by disciplinary history but without the limitation of a formalist interpretation.

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Method: Analytical Approach

The dissertation interprets Kahn’s architectural practice in Dhaka through the combination of historiographical inquiry and architectural analysis. A synthesised reading of the multiple and at times contested views of the Dhaka commission – disciplinary as well as politico- cultural – provides the context and the thematic structure for a new contextual interpretation. The primary sites for research thus include historical discourse as well as the built fabric.

The Concept of the Ruin

The concept of “ruin” is employed as a common thread through this dissertation. It serves both as a critical lens for historiography and as a framework for a close reading of the building.

As outlined at the beginning of this introduction, “ruin” is a dominant term within the historical discourse on the work of Kahn, and is a recurrent analogy in cultural and political evaluations of the capitol complex. As a common theme connecting these otherwise discrete interpretations, the term “ruin” – when employed as an interpretative frame – opens the possibility for moving across and between different interpretive traditions. It also makes visible certain continuities and discontinuities between their respective emphases. It thus serves as a useful point of convergence for disciplinary history and cross-disciplinary critical frameworks.

Moreover, the analogy of the “ruin” hints at the architectural “problem” that lies at the core of critical discourse on the building; that is, the relationship between architectural form, derived from history, and its contemporary use. Considered collectively, the diverse readings of the building made via analogies with a “ruin” provide a rich context for the consideration of this “problem” through a detailed architectural analysis.

Buildings and Archives

Original source material read in this dissertation includes architectural works, sketches and drawings, and office files. Visits to Dhaka allowed for the firsthand study of the capitol complex project and its urban context.17 I have also visited all of Kahn’s major institutions. Architectural drawings and office files have been read at the Bangladesh Public Works

------17 An informal interview was conducted with Bangladeshi architect Mazaharul Islam. My visit to Dhaka was hosted by UNSW Alumni Rahat Chowdhury. I thank him for his generosity. Informal interviews were held with several significant local architects and scholars including Saiful Haque, Shamsul Wares and Bashir-ul-Haqq. My understanding of the city is in particular indebted to conversation with Saiful Haque and his guided tour of the city.

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Department, Dhaka, and at the Louis I. Kahn Collection at the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA.18 The scope of research conducted at the Kahn Collection included the files and drawings related to the capitol complex as well as Kahn’s writings and lectures aligned with this project’s design and evolution. Here the primary focus of research was the examination of architectural drawings.19

The Completely Illustrated Catalogue of the Drawings in the Louis I. Kahn Collection, and Sharad Jhaveri and Heinz Ronner’s Louis I. Kahn: Complete Work 1935–1974 have been important references for my analysis of architectural drawings.20 Supplementary documents have been sourced at the archive of The Aga Khan Trust for Culture, Geneva, Switzerland.

Kahn’s Texts

Parts I and II of the dissertation each begin with a prelude introducing a key statement by Kahn. The first prelude outlines Kahn’s seminal description of his method, “Form and Design,” (1962); the second presents his early description of the conception and evolution of his design for the capitol complex project (1963, first published in 1964). By reflecting on these texts I aim to draw attention to the significance of these discursive works in the critical reception of Kahn’s work, in particular the architecture of the capitol complex. I do not intend to conflate Kahn’s writings with his architectural productions, but rather suggest that clues as to the architect’s influences, biases and privileged traditions are implicit in these texts. Kahn’s writings are referred to throughout the dissertation. Once again these sources are not treated as simple explanations of his approach. Instead, I suggest that the shifts in emphasis in Kahn’s descriptions across a sequence of discursive representations reveal moments of conceptual transition between his projects.21

------18 The documents read at the Public Works Department in Dhaka were, for the mots part, duplicates of those I read in Philadelphia. In this thesis citations have been made with reference to the Kahn Collection. In Philadelphia informal interviews were conducted with Roy Vollmer, Duncan Buell, and Henry Wilcots. 19 Drawings related to the capitol commission held at the Kahn Collection are listed under the project name: Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, Capital of Bangladesh. The principal focus of my research was drawing files related to the conception and evolution of the project master plan, the National Assembly Building and the building’s immediate grounds. These were studied over an uninterrupted period of three weeks. 20 The Louis I. Kahn Archive: Personal Drawings: the Completely Illustrated Catalogue of the Drawings in the Louis I. Kahn Collection. 7 vols. (New York: Garland, 1987); Heinz Ronner, Sharad Jhaveri, and Alessandro Vassella, Louis I. Kahn: Complete Works, 1935-74, (Boulder: Westview Press, 1975), 234. 21 The Kahn Collection holds the most comprehensive inventory of Kahn’s essays and lectures. These have been also published in numerous books and journals and have been the subject of a number of anthologies. Daniel Friedman provides a succinct account of the structure and content of anthologies published prior to 1999. See, Daniel Friedman, “The Sun on Trial: Kahn’s Gnostic Garden at Salk” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1999), x–xi. When referencing Kahn’s texts in this dissertation I have variously relied on original manuscripts and two key anthologies: Alessandra Latour, ed., Louis I. Kahn, ------

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Thesis Structure

The twofold process that informs my analysis of the capitol commission is reflected in the organisation of this dissertation. This consists of two parts, as outlined below.

Part I: Capitol Complex: Critical Reception

Part I offers a historiographical analysis of the critical discourse on the National Assembly Building. Grounded in Kahn scholarship, as well as in cross-disciplinary integrations of the architecture, the discussion is specifically structured in relation to three distinct interpretations. The first is that this project is an exemplar of postwar American modernism. The second, that it is a manifestation of modern architecture within a postcolonial, newly independent, context. The third, that it is an architectural proposition aligned with a Bangladeshi geocultural context and built tradition. My analysis is developed through a close reading of key scholars in this tripartite discourse.

My focus on these selected historians and critics should not be read as an unreflective propagation of master narratives or as a selective literature review. Instead, I am primarily interested in, and draw attention to, the resonances and frictions between these distinct historical paradigms, and the manner and clarity with which the Dhaka commission has been absorbed into the distinctive logic of their respective theses.

This synthesised analysis reveals discursive tension and misalignments, which in turn shed light on the inherent ambiguities that prevent this work from fitting into any neat historical position. This analysis thus offers an opening for an alternative interpretation of the Dhaka project – one that develops a new contextual reading of this work. And while I treat the body of work produced by these scholars as a primary site for research, my intention is not to limit the discussion to their work alone. Their respective historical projects are instead a doorway to a larger network of associated scholars and commentators.

The work of Vincent Scully is the foundation for Part I of this thesis. Why begin with Scully? His writings, completed between 1954 and 1992, are a significant starting point for two reasons. Firstly, Scully’s work forms the background against which the National Assembly Building in Dhaka was framed as a transitional project in the historical trajectory of twentieth-century modernism. Secondly, Scully’s early interpretation of Kahn was pivotal

------Writings, Lectures, Interviews (New York, Rizzoli, 1991) and the more recent Robert Twombly, Louis Kahn: Essential Texts (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003). David B. Brownlee, Shipla Mehta, and Peter S. Reed, compilers, “Louis I. Kahn on Architecture: An Annotated Bibliography,” in David B. Brownlee and David De Long, Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 433–439.

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to the emergence of the term “ruin”/ “ruinification” as significant within the critical discourse on Kahn – on his work in general and the architecture of the National Assembly Building more particularly. Scully’s retrospective account particularly emphasised Kahn’s achievement in Dhaka as the realisation of an architectural form that appeared “beyond function.” This dissertation both provides a close reading of the critical context of the National Assembly Building’s transitional status, and employs the concept of the “ruin” as a critical lens. It must, therefore, engage with Scully’s scholarship and pervasive legacy.

My careful reading of Scully’s work forms the background against which the work of subsequent scholars is considered. What emerges is a sequence of architectural problems that were deemed pertinent to Kahn’s effort to rethink modernism during the 1950s and 1960s, in general, and his approach to the Dhaka commission more particularly. These include the relationship between the capitol complex and the city, the primacy of the wall, and the layered facade and centralised or concentric architectural configuration. The scholarly accounts variously describe these issues, locate them in their historical context, and debate their conceptual significance.

By articulating, synthesising and analysing the critical reception of the Dhaka project, Part I of the dissertation offers a rich context within which a new interpretative reading of the project can be historically situated.

Part II: Capitol Complex: Architectural Reading

Part II offers a detailed architectural analysis of the Dhaka commission. This close-grained study is grounded in a careful mapping of the project’s evolution, with primary reference to architectural drawings. The analysis was also shaped by the firsthand “experience” and study of this work, as well as of Kahn’s other built, predominantly institutional projects. The reading of the building is organised into three chapters, with each addressing an architectural category – the city, the facade and circulation spaces. At one level, this three- part sequence is a transition from a wider to a more detailed view of the project. It begins with the relationship between the architecture and the city and zooms in closer with each subsequent chapter, until it finally considers the architectural thresholds and the order of the interior. On another level, the themes that underpin each chapter draw on and link back to Part I of the dissertation. The tropes deemed critically pertinent to Kahn’s approach and their particular resolution in the Dhaka commission are scrutinised and newly interpreted. The metaphor of the “ruin” is used as a conceptual framework throughout, and the ambivalent relationship between architectural form and associations of use becomes the frame for my analysis.

INTRODUCTION 13

The intention in employing an architectural thematic as the basis for analysis is not to neatly link this project with Kahn’s other work or to create a stylistic succession, as other historians have done, nor is it to present this project as an anomaly. Instead, the aim is to provide a careful reading of the capitol complex at Dhaka, and the associated primary and secondary sources, in order to account for the particular manifestations of the architectural tropes that are perceived as fundamental to Kahn’s late idiom, and to further outline the unique manner in which these strategies have been particularised and/or transformed. Therefore, while the Dhaka commission forms the primary focus of my analysis in this part of the dissertation, my discussion necessarily engages with Kahn’s larger body of work.

Summary of the Thesis Argument

The interpretation offered in this thesis is developed as a sequence of interrelated propositions:

Firstly, I propose that certain themes and tropes, which earlier scholars have deemed to be common to Kahn’s late idiom, are transformed in the capitol complex project. In the process the meaning and architectural affect of these tropes are radically altered. The existing literature on Kahn typically presents the project as an extension and exemplification of his late idiom, which means that the situational particularities in this work have not been subject to detailed analysis. My aim in this dissertation is to develop a more particular reading of this project.

To do this I return to the tropes that have been considered central to Kahn’s late idiom – and critical to his revision of modern architecture and to his ambition to invest monumentality into architecture and the city – and closely analyse how they are manifested in the Dhaka commission. These tropes are: the relationship between the monument and the city, the status of the architectural facade, and between the “centre” and “periphery” as mediated through the spaces of circulation.

My analysis suggests that the relationship between architectural form and evidence of use was blurred in this project. I propose that this ambiguity, although alluded to in Kahn’s earlier works, was architecturally amplified and rendered more extreme at Dhaka. I argue that the value and meaning of civic monumentality in this project lies in its expression as a monument that is liberated from, or is in a critical relationship with, its contemporary situation. I propose that this architectural condition has left the project open to multiple interpretations.

INTRODUCTION 14

This dissertation broadens the received account of Kahn’s disciplinary contribution and further speculates on the relevance of this work to contemporary debates on monumentality and the city.

Thesis Argument by Chapter

Each chapter opens with a short preamble, which “sets the scene” for the discussion. This is followed by a summary of the chapter argument. The detailed material of the chapter then follows.

Part I of the thesis begins with a prelude, which discusses Kahn’s seminal description of his design method, arrived at through the pairing of the terms “Form” and “Design.” This serves as an introductory note to Part I of the dissertation and to the first chapter particularly. Part I is structured as two chapters.

Chapter 1, Vincent Scully: Roman Ruins as Modern Buildings, considers Scully’s views on Kahn’s architecture and his design method and focuses on the emerging significance of the capitol complex in this narrative. A chronological reading of Scully’s key writings between 1954 and 1992 underlines two interrelated themes pertinent to the historian’s evolving discourse. These are the transitional status of Kahn within the trajectory of the Modern movement, its evolution, and internal critique; and the conceptualisation of the term “ruin” as a suggestive analogy for Kahn’s engagement with the past, his design method and the resultant architectural works.

Chapter 2, National Assembly Building at Dhaka: Institution? Spectacle? Landscape?, extends the review of Kahn’s critical reception by focusing on the subsequent generation of scholarship pertaining to the capitol complex. Grounded in Scully’s work, the aesthetic and conceptual trope of the “ruin” is highlighted, not only as a common and recurrent term on the literature on this building, but further, and importantly, as the point of critical overlap and contention regarding the disciplinary and ideological status of the project. The term alludes to the ambiguities that prevent this work from any singular classification. An opening is therefore provided for a new reading of Kahn’s aesthetic process as manifested in Dhaka.

Part II also begins with a prelude. This introduces Kahn’s early description of the conception and evolution of his design for the capitol project, both discursive and visual, and as first published in the now famous article in the North Carolina State College School of Design student publication (1964). Critical reflection on these words and visual sources

INTRODUCTION 15

provides a springboard to an architectural analysis of the project. Part II is structured as three chapters.

Chapter 3, The Problem of the City: City Within a City, analyses the project with a focus on the relationship between the architecture and the city. The analysis is framed through the term “ruin” and the implied ambivalence around architectural form and evidence of contemporary use. My reading of the project is developed with reference to key design stages. I suggest that the design process provides evidence of Kahn’s effort to distinguish and yet balance the expression of the building as a vacant monument with the institutional purpose of the building and associated civic use. However, the project as realised, I argue, appears as a theatrical edifice with an ambivalent relationship to its contemporary function.

Chapter 4, The Problem of the Wall: Hollow Wall, Hollow Column, analyses the project and focuses on architectural thresholds, specifically those defined by Kahn in terms of “hollow” walls and “hollow” columns. I trace the evolution of these tropes in Kahn’s work and interpret their particular instantiation in the capitol commission. This chapter demonstrates that the metaphor of the “ruin” came about in two ways in the development and realisation of threshold conditions in this project: on the one hand through the delineation and radical separation of building parts, on the other through the appropriation of nature as an active force in the shaping of architecture and architectural experience.

Chapter 5, The Problem of Circulation: Between Centre and Periphery, analyses the relationship between “centre” and “periphery” by focusing on the mediating element; that is, the spaces for “circulation.” The chapter argues that in the conception of the spatial support for movement in the National Assembly Building participatory civic engagement and the experience of the architecture as theatre and spectacle were juxtaposed. Through a detailed reading of three distinct paths of movement between the building centre and periphery I argue that the potential for the circulatory and interstitial spaces to act as socially vital environments was gradually diminished throughout the project’s evolution.

The conclusion begins by positioning this research in relation to the most recent major retrospective exhibition on Kahn’s work, Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture, where the metaphor of the “ruin” is again invoked in relation to the National Assembly Building. The vitality of the ruin as a metaphor for reflection on the National Assembly Building, I suggest, alludes to the transitional status of this project as an architectural object and subject of history. The building analysis has demonstrated that the architectural qualities of this project have been pivotal in sustaining such a rich array of cultural and political interpretations.

INTRODUCTION 16

PART I – CAPITOL COMPLEX: CRITICAL RECEPTION

17

PRELUDE: “FORM AND DESIGN”

When personal feeling transcends into Religion (not a religion but the essence religion) and Thought leads to Philosophy, the mind opens to realizations. Realization of what may be the existence will of, let us say, particular architectural spaces. Realization is the merging of Thought and Feeling at the closest rapport of the mind with the Psyche, the source of what a thing wants to be.

It is the beginning of Form. Form encompasses a harmony of systems, a sense of Order and that which characterizes one existence from another. Form has no shape or dimension. For example, in the differentiation of a spoon from spoon, spoon characterizes a form having two inseparable parts, the handle and the bowl. A spoon implies a specific design made of silver or wood, big or little, shallow or deep. Form is ‘what’. Design is ‘how’. Form is impersonal. Design belongs to the designer. Design is a circumstantial act, how much money there is available, the site, the client, the extent of knowledge. Form has nothing to do with circumstantial conditions. In architecture, it characterizes a harmony of spaces good for a certain activity of man.1 Louis Kahn 1961

In November 1960 Louis Kahn delivered a broadcast for the Voice of America radio lecture series on architecture entitled “Structure and Form.”2 The recording of the broadcast became the basis of several subsequent published writings, first “A Statement by Louis I. Kahn” for Arts and Architecture (February 1961) and then, definitively, “Form and Design” for Architectural Design (April 1961).3 In this broadcast Kahn reiterated aspects of his 1959 CIAM address and then went on to further define his methodological approach via the terms “Form” and “Design.”4 Framed as the conceptual starting point in his creative process, “Form” was defined by Kahn as the ideal or essential architectural relationships that are deemed inherent to specific building types or institutions. “Form” is intangible; it transcends the particular priorities of the individual participants, whether the architect or

------1 Louis I. Kahn, “Form and Design,” in Robert Twombly, Louis Kahn: Essential Texts (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), 63–64. (Original text from Voice of America – Louis I. Kahn. Recorded November 19, 1960 folder, Box LIK 53, Louis I. Collection, University of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, hereafter cited as the Kahn Collection). 2 Robin Williams traces the preliminary version of this talk to Kahn’s speech “The Difference Between Form and Design,” delivered on 11 October 1960 to the Southern American Institute of Architects on the occasion of their Triennial Awards Banquet. (The original transcript is held at LIK 15, Kahn Collection.) Robin Williams, “An Architectural Myth: The Design Evolution of Louis Kahn’s First Unitarian Church,” (Master diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1990), Appendix A, 50. 3 Louis I. Kahn, “A Statement,” Arts and Architecture LXXVIII (February 1961): 14–15, 30; Louis I. Kahn, “Form and Design,” Architectural Design 31, no. 4 (April 1961): 145–154. 4 Louis I. Kahn, “Talk at the Conclusion of Otterlo Congress,” Twombly, Essential Texts, 37–61. (1959 address; first published in Oscar Newman, ed., New Frontiers in Architecture: CIAM ’59 in Otterlo, (New York: Universe Books, 1961).

PRELUDE: “FORM AND DESIGN” 18

the client, and gains specificity through “Design.” In this way, the ideal, generic proposition is adjusted and gains material resolution in response to circumstantial parameters.

Kahn’s description was developed through several generic, mostly typological, examples, as well as through reference to his own projects, particularly the First Unitarian Church and School (Rochester, NY, 1959–69). Recalling his discussions with the church congregation, he made note of the initial “Form” diagram and the subsequent “Design” plans that were used to communicate the evolution of the First Unitarian Church and School to the client group.5 For Jan C. Rowan’s subsequent article “Wanting to Be: The Philadelphia School,” (Progressive Architecture, April 1961) Kahn provided annotated drawings to accompany the account of his method. These represented, in sequence, the conception and development of the First Unitarian Church and School project.6 Deliberately didactic, the drawings gave a cogent visual expression to his approach.

The “Form and Design” paradigm and associated drawings are Kahn’s most explicit statement of his creative method and have become consistent reference points in the critical reception of his work. Two distinct and typically divergent readings of Kahn’s method prevail. The first set of interpretations situates the notion of “Form” within the tradition of Western metaphysics – that is, within the Platonic theory of “idea” and the associated distinction between conception and realisation.7 For these critics, “Form” resides beyond the range of historical or material sources. This interpretation relegates disciplinary influence to the realm of “Design.”

An alternative set of readings argues for a historical basis to “Form,” suggesting that Kahn’s conception of the ideal or essential architectural relationships was conceived in relation to historical precedents. This interpretation was made first, and most famously, by Vincent Scully in his canonical 1962 monograph Louis I. Kahn. It remained a dominant theme in his subsequent writings on Kahn.8 Scully’s discourse employed the metaphor of “ruin” as an evocative analogy for Kahn’s creative engagement with the past. This emphasis underwrites

------5 For a nuanced critique of Kahn’s representation of his creative process in the design of the First Unitarian Church and School design see Williams, “An Architectural Myth”. Williams shows that, in an effort to represent his design process in didactic terms, Kahn reconstructed the true chronology of the design of the First Unitarian Church and School and further obscured the range of disciplinary sources that had influenced his design approach in this project. 6 Jan C. Rowan, “Wanting to Be: The Philadelphia School,” Progressive Architecture 42, 4 (April 1961): 130–169. 7 See for example, Stephen Fleming, “Theorising daylight: Kahn’s Unitarian Church and Plato’s Super- Form, The Good,” Architectural Research Quarterly 10, no. 1 (2006): 25–36; and Joseph Burton, “Notes from Volume Zero: Louis Kahn and the language of God,” Perspecta 20 (1983): 69–90. 8 Vincent Scully, Louis I. Kahn, (New York, George Braziller, 1962).

PRELUDE: “FORM AND DESIGN” 19

the work of many subsequent Kahn scholars who have, directly or indirectly, extended or critiqued the specific terms of his proposition. It is this historiographical field that forms the context for my study. In Part I of this dissertation I describe the status of the capitol complex within this discourse.

Figure P.1 Louis Kahn, First Unitarian Church and School, Rochester, NY, 1959–69, plan diagram, ca. January 1961. [Rowan, “The Philadelphia School”, 134]

PRELUDE: “FORM AND DESIGN” 20

CHAPTER 1 VINCENT SCULLY: ROMAN RUINS AS MODERN BUILDINGS

Once more the question of past and present arises. Is Form, “dream-inspired,” really Memory at the last? Is it in some way always pre-existent, a necessary stored pattern (fed by the experiences of the individual mind, not from a “collective unconscious”) without which the transformations suggested by new particulars and fresh experiences have nothing to work upon, nowhere to begin, and so cannot create? It may be so for Kahn … One minor point seems clear: that to make anything in architecture, which has always been a large-hearted art, it is necessary to have loved something first.1 Vincent Scully, 1962

Historically Kahn’s work turned out to be a hinge: Robert Venturi, who was close to Kahn, and European architects who owe a lot to Kahn, like Aldo Rossi, have brought about what is, in my opinion, the most important development in architecture in the second half of the twentieth century. That is the revival of the classical and vernacular traditions of architecture and their reincorporation into the mainstream of modern architecture.2 Vincent Scully, 1992

Preamble

In a 1982 interview with Alessandra Latour, Vincent Scully recalled the letter he wrote to philanthropist, art collector and Yale alumnus Paul Mellon recommending three Yale- affiliated architects – Philip Johnson, Louis Kahn and Robert Venturi – as candidates for the design of the Yale Center for British Art (New Haven, Conn., USA, 1969–74). Scully's preference at that time, he confessed, was for Venturi or other “younger” architects such as Charles Moore or James Stirling, and he expressed his initial discontent with Mellon’s decision: “ … Kahn got it. Curiously enough, I was a little disappointed, and of course [with] that comes a bit of a sorrow, because I think that toward the end of his life Kahn felt that I preferred other architects.” However, Scully reflected, “This wasn’t the case. At any event, the way the building turned out couldn’t be any better. It is just wonderful – I think it is wonderful – so quiet, so soundless, so timeless.”3

------1 Vincent Scully, Louis I. Kahn (New York: George Braziller, 1962), 42. 2 Vincent Scully, “Louis I. Kahn and the Ruins of Rome,” in Neil Levine, ed., Modern Architecture and Other Essays by Vincent Scully (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 298–319. (First published in MoMA: The Members Quarterly of the Museum of Modern Art 12 [Summer 1992]: 1–13.) 3 Vincent Scully, “Interview with Alessandra Latour, New Haven Connecticut, September 15, 1982,” in Alessandra Latour, Louis I. Kahn: l'uomo, il maestro (Roma: Edizioni Kappa, 1986), 151.

CHAPTER 1: VINCENT SCULLY: ROMAN RUINS AS MODERN BUILDINGS 21

Scully had championed Kahn since the mid 1950s and his seminal monograph Louis I. Kahn (1962) declared the architect a major figure in the development of American modernism.4 During the late 1960s, Scully’s critical interest shifted away from the “heroic” forms of the postwar period and towards the more populist and contextual approach of a younger generation of architects. During this time Scully’s interest in Kahn’s work appeared tempered and more reserved. Despite the prolific nature of his critical practice, Scully’s post-1962 writings on Kahn were scant, and typically consisted of short articles in architectural periodicals.5

In the personal interview with Latour, a decade after Kahn’s death, Scully took care to defend his enduring interest in Kahn’s approach and emphasised the work’s relevance to the ongoing evolution of modern architecture. Perhaps addressing Latour’s Italian audience, Scully made special reference to Kahn’s impact on the European context: But I am really touched that it has been Italy that most appreciated Kahn, not only because Italy is the very center of my love for architecture … but mainly because I do believe that Lou was very much an architect in the greatest Italian tradition of all.6 Kahn’s disciplinary contributions, Scully believed, lay partly in the translation of architectural traditions from Europe to America and ultimately back to Europe again. It was the Milanese architect Aldo Rossi, Scully emphasised in this interview, who was the principal heir to Kahn’s disciplinary legacy.7

------4 Neil Levine provides a succinct introduction to the personal and professional relationship between Scully and Kahn. He underlines the significant and influential role of the critic in Kahn’s early critical reception. Neil Levine, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, 250–252. 5 For example: Vincent Scully, “Light, Form, and Power: New work of Louis Kahn,” Architectural Forum 121 (August–September 1964): 162–70; Vincent Scully, Introduction to The Work of Louis I. Kahn, exh. cat. (San Diego: La Jolla Museum of Art, 1965); Vincent Scully, “Recent Works by Louis Kahn,” Zodiac 17 (1967): 58–118; Vincent Scully, “Education and Inspiration,” Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 173 (May–June 1974): vi; and Vincent Scully, “Works by Louis Kahn and His Method,” A+U: A Monthly Journal of World Architecture an Urbanism (special issue: Louis I. Kahn: Sono zenbo, 1973–75): 287–300. 6 Scully, “Interview with Latour,” 155. 7 Anna Sykes provides an account of Scully’s emerging interest in Rossi’s work during mid to late 1970s. The historian’s first experience of Rossi’s architecture, she suggests, took place in 1977 or 1978, on a trip to Milan. She notes that Scully’s visit to Rossi’s Gallaratese project made a first, powerful impression on the historian. The ensuing friendship between Scully and Rossi, she further outlines, led Scully to write the postscript for Rossi’s text A Scientific Autobiography: Vincent Scully, “Postscript: Ideology in Form,” in Aldo Rossi, A Scientific Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 111–116. See: Anna K. Sykes, “The Vicissitudes of Realism: Realism in Architecture in the 1970s” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2004), 360–362.

CHAPTER 1: VINCENT SCULLY: ROMAN RUINS AS MODERN BUILDINGS 22

Chapter Argument

This chapter traces the development of Vincent Scully’s views on Kahn’s architecture and working method, focusing on the emerging significance of the capitol complex project in his writings.

Scully’s work from the mid 1970s onwards assigned Kahn a transitional disciplinary status. He described Kahn as a “hinge” figure between postwar modernism and the movement’s subsequent internal critique, and he framed Kahn’s practice at this time as the precursor to the Modern movement’s most ardent critics – initially Robert Venturi and later, and more emphatically, Aldo Rossi.

The chapter highlights how this alignment was developed through the particular, almost singular, reference to Kahn’s projects in India and Bangladesh. It is argued that the analogous reading of Kahn’s capitol complex in Dhaka (Bangladesh, 1962–83) and Rossi’s anti-functionalist approach, explicit in the historian’s late writings, represents a shift in Scully’s interpretation of the “Form and Design” paradigm and the role of architectural history in Kahn’s creative process. If Kahn was a hinge between postwar modernism and the emergence of postmodernist discourse in the early 1970s, his projects for the subcontinent were presented by Scully as particularly ambivalent in terms of their disciplinary status.

Also emphasised is the way in which Scully employed the metaphor of “ruin” as a suggestive analogy for Kahn’s creative engagement with the past. In Scully’s writings the term had a duality of meaning. On the one hand it served to ground Kahn’s design process within classical, typically Roman, sources. On the other hand, and particularly in Scully’s late writings, the term alluded to the dynamic process by which ancient monuments were formally transformed as abstract, elemental, temporally ambiguous artefacts. Thus the metaphor was at once represented by Scully as resonant with Kahn’s notion of “Form” – that is, an ideal point for beginning – and his notion of “Design”, here a process of formal adjustment and transfiguration. By drawing on the ruin analogy, Scully ultimately emphasised Kahn’s achievements in Dhaka as the realization of an architectural form that appeared “beyond function.”

The discussion is developed using a chronological structure. It begins with Scully’s early essay “Archetype and Order in Recent American Architecture” (1954), in which Scully first

CHAPTER 1: VINCENT SCULLY: ROMAN RUINS AS MODERN BUILDINGS 23

established the theoretical basis for Kahn’s disciplinary significance.8 His seminal monograph Louis I. Kahn (1962) is then reviewed.9 This volume highlighted Kahn’s “Form and Design” paradigm as an instructive framework for understanding his working process and, more significantly, as a cogent register of the role of history in his creative method. Next I consider the “Introduction to the Louis I. Kahn Archive: Personal Drawings” (1987), the text that is considered foundational to Scully’s later essay, “Louis I. Kahn and the Ruins of Rome” (1992).10 In these retrospective essays, Scully reviewed, albeit briefly, the architect’s entire oeuvre. He also focuses on Kahn’s mature projects for the first time, including the design for the capitol complex in Dhaka. Scully’s critical association of Kahn with Rossi was emphatic in these essays.

The discussion developed in this chapter is a significant starting point for this thesis for two reasons. Firstly, it describes the background against which Kahn’s project for the National Assembly Building in Dhaka was framed as a transitional project within the historical trajectory of twentieth-century modernism. Secondly, it details the critical context in which the term ruin/ruinification emerged as significant to the reception of Kahn’s work in general and the architecture of National Assembly Building more particularly.

------

------8 Vincent Scully, “Archetype and Order in Recent American Architecture,” in Neil Levine, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, 64–73. (First published in Art in America 42 [December 1954]: 250–61.) Citations in this chapter are from Modern Architecture and Other Essays. 9 Scully, Louis I. Kahn. 10 Vincent Scully, “Introduction,” in Louis I. Kahn Archive: Personal Drawings. The Completely Illustrated Catalogue of the Drawings in the Louis I. Kahn Collection, University of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. 7 vols. (New York and London: Garland, 1987); Scully, “Kahn and the Ruins of Rome.”

CHAPTER 1: VINCENT SCULLY: ROMAN RUINS AS MODERN BUILDINGS 24

Roman Revisions

The first book on Kahn – Vincent Scully’s Louis I. Kahn (1962) – provides an early and influential interpretation of Kahn’s self-described design process.11 Presenting Kahn as a major figure in the evolution of post-World War Two American architecture, this monograph built on Scully’s previous series of critical essays. These began in 1954 with “Archetype and Order in Recent American Architecture” and ended with the 1962 essay “Wright, International Style, and Kahn,” in which Scully established the theoretical basis for Kahn’s disciplinary significance.12 “Archetype and Order” is a provocative critique of the neo-Bauhaus approach at Harvard. The essay presented Kahn’s addition to the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, Conn., 1951–53), along with concurrent projects by a number of Yale-affiliated architects, including Eero Saarinen, Paul Rudolph and Philip Johnson, as representative of a new and encouraging trend in American modernism. (Figure 1.1, 1.2) This new approach, Scully claimed, was rich in historical allusion and showed evidence of an inventive reintegration of typically classical principles. The late work of Mies van der Rohe was framed as its influence and impetus. (Figure 1.3)

The relevance and meaning of the classical tradition to a revisionary yet thoroughly modern and continually evolving architectural culture was at the core of Scully’s thinking in this essay. Critical of the romantic eclecticism of the early twentieth century, and distancing himself from a historicist approach, Scully privileged an abstract or generic representation of classical principles. The use of the terms “order” and “archetype” in his essay title are indicative of this emphasis. By “order” Scully meant a proportionally conceived architectural relationship of “part to part” – in particular an integral approach to the articulation of structure and space. It also implied a geometrically derived and typically symmetrical pattern of composition.

Extending the discussion to typology, Scully assigned a universal significance to ancient formal types or “archetypes,” thereby rendering them generic. The pavilion, the colonnade, the domed interior and the courtyard were all charged with the capacity to evoke elemental and shared human experiences. Thus, they were framed as appropriate reference points for a revisionary, more civil urbanism. In his review of the representative architectural projects in this essay, Scully paid particular attention to new structural and material possibilities,

------11 Scully, Louis I. Kahn. 12 Vincent Scully, “Wright vs. the International Style,” Art News 53 (March 1954): 32–35; Scully, “Archetype and Order.”; Scully, “Wright, International Style, and Kahn.” Arts 36 (March 1962): 67–71. For a lucid interpretive introduction to the first essay, see Levine, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, 64– 65.

CHAPTER 1: VINCENT SCULLY: ROMAN RUINS AS MODERN BUILDINGS 25

Figure 1.1. Top, Louis Kahn, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, 1950–53. [Scully, Louis I. Kahn, n.p.] Figure 1.2. Bottom left, Philip Johnson, Kneses Tifereth Israel Synagogue, Port Chester, NY, 1954–56. [Levine, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, 70] Figure 1.3. Bottom right, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Alumni Memorial Hall, Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, 1945–46. [Scully, Louis I. Kahn, n.p.]

CHAPTER 1: VINCENT SCULLY: ROMAN RUINS AS MODERN BUILDINGS 26

highlighting their capacity to revitalise generic principles and to transform them as contemporary innovations.

In his 2003 edited collection of Scully’s writings, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, Neil Levine comments on the polemical nature of the 1954 essay, describing it as a “landmark in the postwar critique of the ‘modern movement’ and a fundamental contribution to the prehistory of postmodernism.”13 Levine attributes many of the ideas developed in this essay to the year Scully spent in Italy (1951 to 1952). The social and urban order of the Italian cities and hill towns, Levine argues, profoundly impressed the historian, and his firsthand experience of the Greek temples at Paestum and the ruins of Ancient Rome were particularly formative. Levine notes how Frank Brown, Yale classicist and resident archaeologist at the American Academy in Rome, played an instrumental role “in guiding Scully through the Roman and Etruscan past.” He also identifies a further source of influence in Rudolf Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1949), which opened up “a way of looking at the classicism of Renaissance architecture that made its basic principles of geometric order seem applicable to the present.”14

Highlighting Scully’s original appropriation of the Jungian phrase “archetype,” Levine described the rich resonances of psychoanalytical theory in Scully’s thought: Scully here was one of the first to apply psychoanalytical theory to architecture. He does so in an original and subtly directed way. Temples, domes, courtyards, or colonnades are understood as metaphors of the essential, ur-forms of building that embody deeply ingrained experiences of nature and of place. Seizing on them in their primitive clarity and simplicity ensures an expression of modern abstraction at the same time that it endows the modern memory with access to the universal.15 For Levine, Scully’s allusions to the psychological impact of ancient formal types “provides the sensational core for an emphatic relation to the building that Scully would later always hold to be the basis of architectural meaning.” In his considerations of Scully’s larger oeuvre, Levine attributes the latter’s interest in the theory of “empathy” to Geoffrey Scott’s conception of the term, as expressed in his 1914 book The Architecture of Humanism.16 The methodology, Levine suggests, “would remain central to Scully’s development as an architectural historian.”

------13 Ibid., 64. 14 Ibid., Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism was first published in 1949 (London). 15 Levine, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, 65. 16 Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in History of Taste (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914).

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Levine’s reading of “Order and Archetype” thus identifies several strands of twentieth- century revisionist history that aligned with, and in part influenced, Scully’s approach in this essay. In their respective interpretations, Levine notes, the meaning of the classical tradition was described not only in terms of the past, but was also linked to the particularities of the present architectural culture. Levine suggests that in discussing the classical tradition using a modernist frame of reference, history was treated as relevant to the modernist trajectory and therefore as a valid basis for an internally coherent critique of modern architecture and its subsequent evolution.

Anna Sykes builds on Levine’s analysis in her 2004 doctoral thesis, “The Vicissitudes of Realism: Realism in Architecture in the 1970s.” Reflecting on the nature of Scully’s humanist thought, she labels his approach “humanist realism.” Sykes describes the term “realism,” as employed in the 1970 architectural discourse, as an intrinsically dialectical concept in that it “acknowledges the simultaneity of architecture’s autonomy and architecture’s historical and contextual relativity.”17 Scully’s humanist realism is thus defined as a “seemingly paradoxical combination of the universal and the specific.”18 This argument positions Scully’s emphasis on the transcendental essence of humanity – embodied in the concept of archetype – as necessarily informed by local and cultural particularities. For Scully, Sykes claims, “each architect, regardless of his specific historical position, engages in the search for the appropriate architectural expression for his generation, an expression that derives from architecture’s own history as well as the actual culture of which this expression is a product.”19

Sykes’ argument is developed through a close reading of a broad range of Scully’s writings, including the 1962 monograph on Kahn. Referring to the personal and intellectual relationship between the architect and the historian, Sykes describes the pair as kindred spirits with closely aligned methods. She claims that the dialectical nature of Kahn’s creative approach, as articulated in his “Form and Design” paradigm, corresponds to Scully’s humanist project: “Kahn’s interest, like that of Scully, lies in the transcendental search for order and expression, ideas that shape the working methodology Kahn calls ‘Form and Design.’”20 Sykes suggests that the negotiated play between the general and specific, the eternal and the immediate, and the ideal and material that formed the basis of Scully’s humanist realism were echoed in Kahn’s thought. Sykes’ thesis underlines how, in Kahn’s

------17 Sykes, “The Vicissitudes of Realism: Realism in Architecture in the 1970s,” 373. 18 Ibid., 303. 19 Ibid., 374. 20 Ibid., 326.

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self-described design method, Scully found a profound resonance with his own critical position.

Kahn’s “Form and Design” statement was a consistent theme in Scully’s writings, beginning with his 1962 monograph and continuing in his subsequent writings on the architect. Through a close reading of a number of Scully’s key essays on Kahn, written over the course of several decades, I will trace the historian’s developing account of this design process. It is argued that subtle shifts in Scully’s perspective on Kahn’s design method was reflective of the historian’s broader and evolving critical perspective on modern architecture and its perceived shortcomings. My principal interest is in the emerging significance of the Dhaka commission in this discussion. In this work Scully finds a compelling revision of mid-century American Modern architecture.

Ruin as Method

Kahn’s “Form and Design” was reprinted as an appendix in Scully’s 1962 monograph Louis I. Kahn.21 In his introduction to the book Scully was explicit about the significance of Kahn’s methodology, assigning it the same status as the resulting architectural works: Kahn’s achievement of a single decade now places him unquestionably first in professional importance among living American architects. His theory, like his practice, has been acclaimed as the most creative, no less than the most deeply felt, of any architect’s today.22 The monograph’s appraisal of Kahn’s contribution to American modernism reiterated and further developed the themes of the 1954 essay. Kahn’s recourse and imaginative engagement with historical precedents was emphasised, first in relation to his Beaux-Arts training and then, more emphatically, with reference to his European sojourn to Italy (with side trips to Egypt and Greece) including his residency at the American Academy in Rome during the winter of 1950–51.23 The influence of the Academy’s resident archaeologist

------21 Scully, Louis I. Kahn, 114–121. 22 Ibid., 10. 23 For an overview of Kahn’s residency at the American Academy in Rome see Denise Rae Costanzo, “The Lessons of Rome: Architects at the American Academy, 1947–1966” (PhD diss., The Pennsylvania State University, 2009), 158–172. Costanzo provides a lucid discussion of the significance of Kahn’s residency to his critical reception. For Scully’s more comprehensive discussion of Kahn’s travel drawings and their relationship to the architect’s working method see Vincent Scully, “Marvelous Fountainheads. Louis I. Kahn: Travel Drawings,” Lotus. Quarterly Architectural Review 68 (1991): 48–63.

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Frank Brown was foregrounded. Referring to Kahn’s travel sketches, Scully framed Kahn’s abstract rendering of ancient sources as foundational to his creative method.24

The term “Order” also reappeared, here in direct association with Kahn’s 1955 statement.25 Resisting a detailed analysis of Kahn’s text, Scully interpreted the term’s conceptual connotations by referring to the Trenton Jewish Community Center Bath House project (Ewing Township, N.J., 1954–59). This was the scheme that had, in Scully’s discourse, replaced the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, Conn., 1951–53) as the clearest manifestation of Kahn’s architectural approach in the mid 1950s. (Figure 1.4) Scully’s elevated account of the Trenton project reiterates the ideas first developed in his essay of the same year, “Wright, International Style, and Kahn.” Diverging from his previous alignment with Mies, Scully proposed a parallel between Kahn’s mature phase (1955–60) and Wright’s early work (1902–06). He draws out three principal commonalities: biaxial composition, an integral relationship between structure and space, and a hierarchical volumetric configuration where the minor, yet independently articulated, spaces accommodated the services.

Further to the arguments developed in his earlier essays, the monograph explored Scully’s claim for the significance of Kahn’s disciplinary status. His position is developed with direct reference to Kahn’s 1961 “Form and Design” statement and the associated scheme, the First Unitarian Church and school (Rochester, NY, 1959–67), which was at that time under construction.

Describing “Form” as an idealised and relative arrangement of programmatic relationships, Scully’s interpretation was explicitly architectural: “Form is now the result of an ability to envisage fundamental configuration and order: in an architectural sense the general shape that the program under consideration ‘wants’ to assume.”26 More specifically, and with reference to Kahn’s centralised “Form” diagram for the church, Scully defined “Form” as geometrical systems of composition embodied in historical precedents:

------24 For Brown’s thesis on Roman architecture see Frank E. Brown, Roman Architecture (New York: George Braziller, 1961). 25 “Order” was also published as an appendix in Scully’s monograph. Scully, Louis I. Kahn, 113–114. Scully notes that the term “Order” was ultimately re-conceptualised by Kahn as “Form”. For both Levine and Sykes, Scully’s use of “Order” was indebted to Kahn. See Sykes, “The Vicissitudes of Realism,” 328; and Levine, Architecture and Other Essays, 65. 26 Scully, Louis I. Kahn, 33.

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Figure 1.4. Plate 47–51 in Louis I. Kahn. Trenton Jewish Community Centre, Ewing Township NJ, 1954–59. [Scully, Louis I.Kahn, n.p.] Figure 1.5. Plate 89–91 in Louis I. Kahn. First Unitarian Church and School. [Scully, Louis I. Kahn, n.p.]

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It is clear that for Kahn Form is Symmetry, as it was for the Romans. Can we say that in a practical sense Kahn’s Form is actually his Beaux-Arts background and his early preferences, which, however, he has now learned how to use wholly afresh?27 The concept of “Form,” Scully thus implied, confirmed Kahn’s indebtedness to classical sources, though he viewed them through a contemporary lens. And Kahn’s notion of “Design,” Scully suggested, offered a coherent explanation as to the process by which architectural works from the past would be adjusted to meet the demands of a contemporary culture: “[In the Design] process what the building largely ‘wants to be’ as an ideal scheme is profoundly modified by how it can be built and, perhaps most of all, by what all its specific functions ‘want to be.’”28

Read against his 1954 essay, Scully found Kahn’s “Form and Design” to be a lucid paradigm for the transfiguration of classical precedents as modern innovations. However, his definition of “Design” in this monograph involved a subtle conceptual shift. Whereas in the earlier essay modern technology and material innovation had been nominated as a principal means by which historical works could be revitalised, in this monograph Scully deferred to Kahn’s emphasis. In Kahn’s discussion of the First Unitarian Church and School, the particularities of the program or patterns of use were privileged as the most significant revitalising agent in the transformative process.

The identification of the function as the primary determinant of the project’s material development, Scully at first indicated, aligned Kahn’s practice with the “functionalist” tradition: Perhaps we can therefore say that one part of Design for Kahn derives from the functionalism of the thirties, profoundly intensified by structural demands and by the fact that he desperately wants to be told everything about possible uses for various areas so that he can derive “meaningful” new shapes from the functional processes themselves. He does not sentimentalize those processes but uses them as a way toward articulate specificity and, beyond that, to new visions of Order.29 The ensuing analysis of the church project, however, appeared less concerned with the particularities of unique functional processes. Kahn’s conception of the program or patterns of use, Scully suggested, was based on the hierarchical association of distinct, yet interdependent, culturally shared human activities. The resulting architecture was accordingly described as the hierarchical association of distinct yet interdependent functional spaces: “So at Rochester Design brings Form materially alive. The entrance

------27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid.

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lobby, the library, the women’s workroom, and the stairs want spaces differing from those of the classrooms, and they get them.”30

Scully went on to suggest that the order of structure, and its integral relationship to the modulation of daylight, was what assigned each space its functional “meaning”: Then comes Light, and through it the wall now becomes wholly, three-dimensionally, alive. It does so, typically, through Kahn’s unappeasably wondering consideration of its most intense meaning for the interior spaces: to admit light to them and to shelter them from light. So at Rochester the walls go deep back to give the windows glare-dimming reveals, and step out to provide window-seat spaces, lighted from the sides. The whole wall, inside and out, is plastic with light, with what a window “wants to be.” At the same time, its expression is deeply structural, a buttressed mass.31 In Kahn’s approach, Scully surmised, individuated spaces, articulated by structure and light, provide a particularised setting for human activity and association. (Figure 1.5)

First defined in relation to the Rochester project, the terms “Form and Design” were consistently employed in Scully’s analysis of several later works, albeit with varying emphasis regarding the architectural implication of “Form” and the transformative role of “Design”. In Scully’s description of the Goldenberg House (Rydal, Pa., 1959, unbuilt), for example, “Form” was associated with the geometric order of the early proposition: a cubic volume with a central void. (Here Scully again explicitly reiterates Kahn’s own account of the house design.)32 This “rigidly” symmetrical composition, Scully suggested, was subsequently resolved as a more fluid system via the “Design” process. (Figure 1.6) The delineation of the final composition along radiating diagonal lines was thus interpreted by Scully as a dynamic device that accommodated both the “ideal” geometry of the cube and the specific functional requirements of the contemporary domestic program.

A similar analytic logic informed Scully’s discussion of the proposed scheme for Erdman Hall Dormitories at Bryn Mawr College (Bryn Mawr, Pa., 1960–65), at that time in design development.

------30 Ibid., 34. 31 Ibid. 32 For Kahn’s description of his design process in relation to the Goldenberg House see Louis I. Kahn, “Discussion in Kahn’s Office,” in Robert Twombly, ed., Essential Texts (New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), 105–109. (First published Perspecta 7 [1961]: 9–28.)

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Figure 1.6. Plate 92–93 in Louis I. Kahn. Goldenberg House, Rydal, PA, 1959. [Scully, Louis I. Kahn, n.p.] Figure 1.7. Plate 100–104 in Louis I. Kahn. US Consulate, Luanda, Angola, 1959–62. [Scully, Louis I. Kahn, n.p.]

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The dormitories for Bryn Mawr, now under study, show it. At present they are close to pure Form: three cubes touching at the corners, advanced and recessed walls creating side lights, a general rigid symmetry. He has only begun. Now he wants to know how the use of each space can show him how to Design it; he harasses his assistants to study each functional requirement to that end. Unlike most architects, he will henceforward hang breathless upon specific client demands, the more specific the better. Any one of them may cause him to redesign the building as a whole, which he will do if, in his phrase, “the Form does not hold.”33 “Form” was once again aligned with an elemental geometric order, waiting to be particularised. Scully’s interpretation would in this case prove premature. The geometric rigour and proposed symmetry of the cited early studies for Erdman Hall would remain characteristic of this work as realised.

In his discussion of the United States consulate in Luanda (Angola, 1959–62, unbuilt), however, Scully’s insistence on the transformative function of the “Design” appeared tempered. (Figure 1.7) Describing both components of the project, the chancellery and the residence, as “rigidly symmetrical” compositions, Scully suggested that the proposal remained close to “Form”: Here one has the feeling that the project has otherwise remained fairly close to the first Form stage – perhaps appropriately so in this official program. The residence and consulate are both rigidly symmetrical, but the spaces are organized lucidly within their blocks.34 Despite his attempt to justify the apparently curtailed “Design” process, Scully’s appraisal of the Consulate commission remained tentative. The scheme did not readily conform to his interpretation of the “Form and Design” process, nor did he appear particularly convinced by the depth and architectural complexity of the proposed solution. Uncertain as to the efficacy of the “Design” process in this work, Scully’s description remained more singularly focused on the conceptual merit of the project. For example, he noted that the treatment of the external boundary wall as two discrete layers offered a newly spatialised and integrated relationship between the wall and the apertures for light.

Scully’s principal interest in the Luanda commission was, however, less inspired by the particularities of the architectural proposition than by Kahn’s depiction of the layered wall strategy as “wrapping ruins around buildings.” With reference to Kahn’s statement about the project, he noted: The openings in such walls need no glazing; they can exploit the rare purity of solid and void. “So therefore,” wrote Kahn in Perspecta, 7, “I thought of the beauty of ruins … the

------33 Scully, Louis I. Kahn, 39. 34 Ibid., 35.

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absence of frames … of things which nothing lives behind … and so I thought of wrapping ruins around buildings.” The wall now takes on added layers in space and memory. One thinks again of Rome, but the planes are stiffly propped above their reflecting pools; it is a two dimensional Rome, not a three.35 Previously limited to the geometric systems of composition, the concept of “Form” was thus now extended by Scully to include surviving monuments from ancient Rome – those experienced by the architect as present-day ruins. By drawing on Kahn’s metaphor of the ruin, Scully was able to consolidate his central claim: that Kahn’s 1950–51 residency in Rome was the vital catalyst in the evolution of his creative approach.

The alignment of the “Form” proposition with architectural precedents from ancient Rome informed Scully’s reading of several subsequent projects, in particular the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (La Jolla, Ca., 1959–66), at that time about to commence construction, and the Market Street East Redevelopment studies (Philadelphia, Pa., 1961, unbuilt). Beginning with the Salk Institute, Scully moved beyond the generic notion of a ruin to nominate more specific historical points of reference. He suggested that the “early shapes” for the study units in this project “were pure derivations from the fanning pattern of the lower peristyle of Domitian’s palace on the Palatine or from the ‘Teatro Marittimo’ of Hadrian’s Villa.”36 (Figure 1.8, 1.9) Initially presenting Hadrian’s Villa as formative for both Wright and Le Corbusier, Scully went on to define an alternative, and what he considered to be a more “direct,” lineage to Kahn’s engagement with the Roman precedents. He argued that interpretive representations of classical sources by Auguste Choisy and Giovanni

Battista Piranesi were more explicit influences for Kahn: More directly, the shapes used by Kahn can be found not only in Choisy but also infinitely repeated in the composite photostat of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s maps of Rome, drawn by him for his book on the Campus Martius, probably of 1762, which now hangs in front of Kahn’s desk.37

Piranesi’s illustration of Hadrian’s Villa, Scully went on to suggest, was the inspiration for the Salk Institute Meeting House (1959–65, unbuilt). (Figure 1.10, 1.11, 1.12) Patterns from Rome and, most particularly, from Ancient Rome as imagined by Piranesi at the very beginning of the modern age, have played a part in the process of the Meeting House as well. (An early sketch had been traced by a draftsman, partly as a joke, from a

------35 Ibid., 36. 36 Ibid., 37. 37 Ibid.

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Figure 1.8. Louis Kahn, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA, 1959–65, early isometric for laboratories and studies. [Scully, Louis I. Kahn, n.p.] Figure 1.9. Teatro Marittima, Hadrian’s Villa, Tivoli. [Scully, Louis I. Kahn, n.p.]

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Figure 1.10. Salk Institute, plan of meeting house and site with partial plan of Hadrian’s Villa, 1960, unbuilt. [Brownlee and De Long, In the Realm, 334] Figure 1.11. Salk Institute, meeting house model of West elevation, unbuilt. [Scully, Louis I. Kahn, n.p.] Figure 1.12. Salk Institute, plan of meeting house, 1962, unbuilt. [Scully, Louis I. Kahn, n.p.]

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plan of one of the units of the Hadrian’s Villa itself. “That’s it,” said Kahn.) The major fountain splashes within a colonnade partly untrabeated, a ruin. Rounded shapes, to be found again and again in the Piranesi plan, and contrasting with the austere court inside, now push out from the main mass, recalling the splendid follies of 18th century gardens but mightier than they: Walls “that nothing lives behind,” shielding the glazed spaces from glare.38 The statement suggests that Piranesi’s drawn interpretations of ancient Rome had a twofold significance for Kahn’s practice. Firstly, the geometric order and pattern of the represented monuments were associated with Kahn’s notion of “Form.” This point was made by referring to the cartographer’s meticulous reconstruction of the plan of the ancient city – as, for example, in Piranesi’s map of Rome drawn for Campi Martii antiquae urbis (1792). (Figure 1.13) Secondly, a conceptual common ground between the two practitioners was invoked, in this case by emphasizing Piranesi’s reconstructions of the city based on ruins from the ancient city. Architectural fragments from ancient Rome, Scully implied, both inspired and provided the constitutive architectural elements, for Piranesi and Kahn after him, through which to reimagine the contemporary city anew. (Figure 1.14)

It was with reference to Piranesi again that Scully advanced his reading of Kahn’s hypothetical proposals for the city of Philadelphia, particularly the Market Street East proposal. Here “Form” was once again aligned with Piranesi’s recreation of ancient Rome – an urban constellation composed of formal and tectonic Roman prototypes: At present, in this preliminary scheme, it is “Viaduct Architecture,” the cars raised on long expressways which contain warehouses and so on beneath them … The whole is beyond Rome, its scale large enough to subordinate, no less than to use, the motorcar. Water plays a part, flowing with the cars, since the northern viaduct is set with circular reservoirs, waiting to service fountains, as well as with triangular interchanges: again fragments of Form, Piranesi’s and Scottish, awaiting the chance to be Designed ... Market Street East is clearly still in the realm of Form, of the broad conception of Order.39 Kahn’s “Form and Design” paradigm, Scully ultimately claimed, was the imaginative process through which Roman ruins were transformed into modern propositions. In the concluding passage to his early monograph, the term “ruin” was rendered synonymous with Kahn’s inventive method.

------38 Ibid., 37–38. With reference to Scully’s narrative of the Meeting House’s genesis, Daniel S. Friedman notes: “The draftsman in question was architect Thomas Vreeland, then a younger designer assigned by Kahn to work on the schematic design for the meeting house, and he confirms the tale. According to Vreeland, Kahn had often mused upon Hadrian’s Villa in his attempt to conjure the essence of a “place of the unmeasurable.” Daniel S. Friedman, “Salk Institute for Biological Studies,” in David Brownlee and David De Long, Louis I Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 443. 39 Ibid., 41.

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Figure 1.13. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Campo Marzio in Rome, 1762. [Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, 88] Figure 1.14. Louis Kahn, Midtown Development, Market St East, Philadelphia, PA, 1961–62, unbuilt, sketch plan. [Scully, Louis I. Kahn, n.p.]

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Roman Ruins as Modern Buildings

In 1987 Scully penned a relatively short introduction to the seven-volume catalogue of Kahn’s personal drawings. The essay represents his first, albeit brief, appraisal of the architect’s entire career, encompassing Kahn’s mature projects, including the capitol complex of Dhaka.40 The essay reiterated the central themes of Scully’s 1962 monograph. It emphasised Kahn’s modernist interpretation of classical sources as the basis for his disciplinary contribution. The “Form and Design” paradigm was once again highlighted as an instructive framework for understanding Kahn’s working process and, more significantly, as a cogent register of the role of history in his creative method. With over twenty years separating the two publications, however, and more than a decade after Kahn’s death, Scully’s critical effort in this essay was necessarily retrospective. Reflecting on Kahn’s legacy, Scully noted that it was Kahn’s mediation of mid-century modernism and its subsequent internal critique that underpinned the architect’s disciplinary significance.

This observation was not new. Kahn’s transitional status had been a recurrent theme in Scully’s writing from the mid 1970s – his new chapter for the revised 1975 edition of Modern Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy (first published in 1961) is particularly representative.41 Titled “Twelve Years After: The Age of Irony”, the chapter was treated by Scully as “an opportunity not only to focus on the major new developments in architecture since 1960 but also, in the light of those events, to revise and enlarge the view of modern architectural history as a whole.”42 This “major development,” in Scully’s terms, demonstrated a shift away from the “architectural heroics” of mid-twentieth-century modernism toward a “renewed, if rather ironic, acceptance of reality and new realistic symbolism.” Scully noted, however, that Louis Kahn, like Le Corbusier before him, resisted a neat historical positioning.

He suggested that although both architects were grounded in the idealism of the 1950s, they were also foundational to the critical dissent that gripped architectural culture during the late 1960s and 1970s: Kahn, like Le Corbusier, indeed did something to bring it about – Kahn especially in his role as the most productive teacher of the late fifties and early sixties. It was one his many students and collaborators, Robert Venturi, who took a first step into the new age, and toward the revitalisation of architectural conceptions, programs, and forms.43

------40 Scully, “Introduction to the Louis I. Kahn Archive.” 41 Vincent Scully, Modern Architecture: The Architecture of Democracy (New York: George Braziller, 1975 seventh edition). (First published 1961). 42 Vincent Scully, Modern Architecture, 49. 43 Ibid., 52.

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Scully suggested that Kahn’s explicit engagement with architectural history on one hand, and fundamental concern with patterns of human action and association on the other, were shared by his younger associate, though this was extended by Venturi towards a more “realistic” trajectory. This direct, if tangential, influence on Venturi’s critical position, confirmed Kahn’s ongoing relevance to the evolution of American modernism.44 This proposed alignment was, however, short-lived. With Venturi’s turn towards a more populist and gestural approach, the relationship between the two architects was increasingly distant, and in some respects confrontational. Noting this distinction, and with the scope of Kahn’s legacy in mind, Scully’s writing from the late 1970s onwards locates Kahn’s influence more directly in Europe than in America.

Kahn and Rossi

This shift in emphasis was for the most part indebted to Scully’s emerging interest in the work of Milanese architect Aldo Rossi. (Figure 1.15) It was Rossi’s early work, particularly the Cemetery of San Cataldo (Modena, Italy, 1971–84) in which, Scully suggested, Kahn’s presence was most keenly felt. Highlighting the alignment in his 1981 postscript to Rossi’s Scientific Biography, Scully wrote: Americans cannot help but think of Louis Kahn once more. His famous “ruins,” devoid of glass, which culminate in the timeless masses of Ahmedabad and Dacca, come immediately to mind. They are masonry structures pierced by pure voids and so simplified and so abstractly scaled as to be suggestive of functions not specific but “unforeseeable.” They, too, seem Neoplatonic in their circles and squares. All these qualities are recalled at Modena, but they – if indeed they were “memories” for Rossi – are “transmuted” by Rossi’s special gift for scenography into a noble terrain for the representation of death, a space grander than Mussolini’s Forum, which Kahn also drew.45 In this statement, and indeed in Scully’s subsequent considerations, it was Kahn’s projects in the Indian subcontinent – his “famous ‘ruins” – that were underlined as the most suggestive precursors to Rossi’s project for the “house for the dead.” (Figure 1.16, 1.17) Scully noted that the kernel of Rossi’s anti-functionalist approach was to be found in Kahn’s elementally

------44 Kahn’s formative influence on Venturi had been earlier emphasised by Scully in his introduction to Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Vincent Scully, “Introduction,” in Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: MOMA Press, 1966), 10. 45 Rossi, Scientific Autobiography, 115.

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Figure 1.15. Top, Aldo Rossi, Cemetery of San Cataldo, Modena, Italy, 1971–84. [http://www.talent.leica-camera.it/andrea-pirisi (accessed March 3, 2013] Figure 1.16. Bottom left, Capitol Complex, East Hostels. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] Figure 1.17. Bottom right, Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.]

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abstract and apparently vacant monuments in Ahmedabad (for example, the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, 1962–74) and Dhaka. That is, in buildings whose reason for being was “not, as the functionalists thought, because they carry out a determined function, but because they permit other functions. Finally, because they permit everything that is unforeseeable in life.”46

The metaphor of the ruin, as evoked here by Scully in association with Rossi’s work, thus acquired a specific architectural meaning. The meaning was twofold: the term “ruin” was employed as a formal descriptor for Kahn’s contemporary monuments, but the metaphor also conveyed an ambivalent relationship between architectural form and the particularities of intended use. With this emphasis in mind, I now return to my discussion of Scully’s Introduction to The Louis I. Kahn Archive: Personal Drawings.

The formative influence of Rome on Kahn remained at the centre of Scully’s retrospective account. Kahn’s experience of the city, through which he was guided by the archaeologist Frank Brown, was again confirmed as the most significant creative catalyst in the evolution of the architect’s late idiom. The nominated architectural reference points were also as previously cited by Scully: the House of Augustus on the Palatine, Trajan’s Market, Hadrian’s Villa and Ostia. Forms “out of which,” Scully believed, projects such as the Salk Institute (Meeting House), the Indian Institute of Management and the capitol complex at Dhaka had taken shape. When considering the relationship between these historical precedents and Kahn’s architectural works, however, subtle shifts in Scully’s emphasis emerge. Kahn’s mature projects, particularly those realized in Dhaka and Ahmedabad, were now accorded a formal equivalence with an architectural ruin: “Every one of those groups of buildings was, in one way or another, a Roman ruin – a ruin which specifically triumphed over the International Style by the subordination of glass or its total elimination.”47

The aesthetic alignment between ancient ruins and Kahn’s finished architectural works complicated the logic of Scully’s earlier argument. In Scully’s previous writings the term “ruin” had had dual connotations. The concept was on the one hand associated with Kahn’s notion of “Form,” a beginning point to be developed or brought to contemporary relevance through “Design.” On the other hand, the term had been employed as an analogy for “Design” – the transformative process by which classical forms were reconfigured as abstract yet materially expressive buildings. In this essay, however, the term “ruin” acquired another character. The distinction between Roman ruins and modern buildings was blurred:

------46 Ibid., 113. 47 Scully, “Introduction to the Louis I Kahn Archives,” 255.

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It is true that Kahn subjected those ruins to startlingly Piranesian deformations in order to accommodate contemporary requirements, but their forms suggest functional use much less than they seem to embody a kind of unchanging monumentality.48 Scully’s earlier accent on contemporary materials and the technology of production was now abandoned. Any focus on contemporary patterns of human use and association, previously described as fundamental to the revitalisation of the “rigid” order of traditional forms, was also forgone. Kahn’s approach to “Design” was instead framed as an essentially formal process; one that sought to achieve temporally abstract yet materially expressive works of architecture.

And this “unchanging,” apparently vacant monumentality, Scully suggested, was particular to Kahn’s projects in India and Pakistan (Bangladesh): Those in India and Pakistan especially take on the character of hollow shells, pierced with vast harmonies of circles and triangles at a curiously detached, rather cosmic scale not quite that of mankind. In part for that reason … the buildings became progressively more timeless – much more literally hard to date – and at last utterly still. They were much more platonically ideal and abstract than anything produced by the International Style. They seem pure immaterial music, but their solemn brick and concrete masses are at the same time aggressively material too.49 Scully went on to argue that it was the structural order and elemental material condition of the ancient works that most directly inspired Kahn’s work in the subcontinent. He stated, for example, that Kahn’s composite structural order using brick and concrete was informed by an imaginative “misreading” of a masonry relieving arch over a wooden lintel: “Indeed, out of that Roman union of concrete and brick came Kahn’s special delight, his Brick Order, a marvelous ‘misreading’ of the Roman relieving arch over a wooden lintel as he had seen it used in the brick and concrete warehouses of Ostia.”50 Architectural invention, Scully implied, was therefore achieved through the novel and unexpected representation of exiting forms.51 (Figure 1.18, 1.19)

------48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 The influence of Yale literary historian Harold Bloom on Scully is significant in this regard. Scully’s 1974 book The Shingle Style Today: Or, the Historian’s Revenge (New York: Braziller, 1974) explicitly refers to Bloom’s theory of influence and quotation, as developed in Bloom’s seminal book Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Noting Bloom’s influence on Scully, Levine comments, “The self-consciousness apparent in Scully’s writings of history here is matched by a new psychoanalysis interpretation of the way history works on the creative mind. This Scully owed to Harold Bloom … Bloom’s provocative study … provided Scully with a Freudian framework for theorizing the difference between the ‘strong’ architect and the ‘weak’ architect as seen in the choice of historical models each makes and how, in grappling with it, the former intentionally ‘misreads’ it, or ‘swerves’ from it, to produce the new.” Levine, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, 27.

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The influence of Piranesi was cited once again, in this instance with reference to the cartographer’s formally exaggerated and tectonically expressive etchings of Roman ruins: The little Thermopolium at Ostia, aggrandized by Piranesi’s vision in those etchings of Roman ruins Kahn had collected since boyhood, became the mysterious crypto-portici running under Dhaka and Ahmedabad alike, while the “basilica” of Trajan’s Market adjacent to his forum at Rome was echoed in Ahmedabad’s largest hall.52 In Dhaka and Ahmedabad, Scully claimed, Kahn engaged in an imaginative transformation of Roman ruins and drew on Piranesian representative strategies. Order of construction was here emphasised as the principal medium by which ancient works were understood, “deformed” and represented as new abstract monuments: “Surely integrity of construction,” Scully declared, “had become his ultimate criterion, and as we have noted, he deformed all his Roman forms in accordance with it.”53

In Scully’s retrospective appraisal of Kahn’s architectural production, the metaphor of the ruin was most explicitly evoked in relation to Kahn’s projects for the Institute of Management and the capitol complex of Dhaka. A number of architectural resonances are to be found in this discussion: elemental abstraction, expressed order of construction, and an apparently vacant edifice. Scully implied that the Roman works experienced by Kahn as architectural relics and reimagined through “misreadings” and “deformations” were, in the context of the Indian subcontinent, recast as temporally abstract and functionally ambiguous buildings. A parallel with the work of Rossi was drawn again: The curiously timeless, haunted buildings and projects of Aldo Rossi … are in some fundamental ways the closest of all. They embody much the same kind of static, archetypal order. They, too, avoid gestures in favor of utter quiet and, perhaps most of all, are derived directly from those enduring classic and vernacular traditions from which Kahn drew so much of his strength … Where, however, Kahn sought originality from his study of type, Rossi seeks the type itself.54 In Kahn’s mature approach, Scully claimed, the mid-century fervour for originality and the late-modern return to traditional orders were uniquely bridged. Kahn’s disciplinary significance was once again ascribed to the transitional qualities of his work.

------52 Ibid., 256. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 258.

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Figure 1.18. Capitol Complex, West Hostels. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] Figure 1.19. House of Diana, Ostia, Italy, mid-2nd century. [Levine, Representation and Reality, 273]

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Louis I. Kahn and the Ruins of Rome

With the publication of the seven-volume catalogue of Kahn’s personal drawings, a significant portion of the documents held at the Louis I. Kahn Collection at the University of Pennsylvania was made available to a larger audience. The publication registered both the development of the archive as a significant centre for Kahn scholarship and the expanding critical interest in the revision of Kahn’s approach and legacy. The late 1980s and early 1990s marked the emergence of new, archive-grounded research on Kahn. It was during this time that Scully’s final consideration (to date) of the architect was published –“Louis I. Kahn and the Ruins of Rome” (1992).55

This essay consolidated the core themes of Scully’s thesis: that Kahn’s architecture was indebted to ancient predecessors; that his theory of “Form and Design” presented a lucid framework within which past works were revitalised as modern innovations; and that reference to architectural history, far from hindering the creative process, formed the very basis of Kahn’s architectural inventions. Kahn’s status as a mediating figure between postwar modernism and the discipline’s internal critique was made emphatic in this essay: Historically, Kahn’s work turned out to be a hinge: Robert Venturi, who was close to Kahn, and the European architects who owe a lot to Kahn, like Aldo Rossi, have brought about what is, in my opinion, the most important development in architecture in the second half of the twentieth century. That is the revival of the classical and vernacular traditions of architecture and their reincorporation into the mainstream of modern architecture.56 Scully’s particular focus in this work – as the title of his essay suggests – was Kahn’s “discovery” of Roman ruins and his use of them as an architectural framework for the design process and formal invention. Commenting on the projects in Ahmedabad and Dhaka, he wrote: “Kahn’s use of the ruin is not only visual, it is also conceptual, structural, and systematic.”57 In Scully’s final estimate, Kahn’s “Roman projects” – that is, the architect’s perceptions of Roman ruins – revitalised through Piranesi-inspired transfigurations, underpinned his unique contribution to the twentieth-century modernist canon.

------55 Scully, “Kahn and the Ruins of Rome.” 56 Ibid., 298. 57 Ibid., 315.

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Scully’s interpretations of Kahn’s architecture, developed over more than three decades, formed the background to an emerging scholarly debate concerning Kahn’s creative approach and contribution, with the central themes in his thesis extended or, alternatively, challenged. This scholarly field is the focus of the next chapter. The concept of ruin remained a core, but at times contested, theme within this multifaceted dialogue.

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CHAPTER 2 CAPITOL COMPLEX AT DHAKA: INSTITUTION? SPECTACLE? LANDSCAPE?

Preamble

In October 1991 a two-day symposium focussing on the National Assembly Building at Dhaka took place. Titled “Sher-e-Bangla Nagar: Louis Kahn at Dhaka,” it was organised by the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture (AKPIA) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).1 Prompted, in part, by the capitol project’s somewhat controversial receipt of the 1989 Aga Khan Award for Architecture (AKAA), the symposium underlined the importance of this work, not only as one of Kahn’s most remarkable architectural achievements, but also as an enigmatic manifestation of American modernism in a non- Western and newly independent national context. Referring to the project’s twofold significance, convener Francesco Passanti structured the symposium along two distinct lines of enquiry; one related the project to Kahn’s larger body of work, while the other explored the cross-cultural conditions that shaped its production. The range of invited speakers reflected his agenda. They included American and Bangladeshi scholars, Kahn experts and those who approached his work from cross-disciplinary perspectives. This was a second generation of scholars who, during the late 1980s and early 1990s and with the benefit of historical distance, had begun to newly reflect on Kahn’s architecture and disciplinary status. Through their collective contributions they captured a snapshot of emerging research on Kahn’s work.

Drawing on recently published research, or on work then being done towards subsequent publications, the critical perspectives expressed at this conference were among the most authoritative interpretations of the Dhaka commission. They remain so today. Using the

------1 A full video recording of this symposium is held at the Kahn Collection. The review of the event was featured in the AKPIA affiliated newsletter and journal (MIMAR): “Sher-e-Bangla Nagar: Louis Kahn and Dhaka,” Mimar 12, 42 (1992): 14–15 and Imran Ahmed and Samuel Isenstadt, “The Ontological Centaur, Louis Kahn and Capitol Complex in Dhaka,” The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Newsletter 4, 2 (Spring 1992): 1, 6. In addition to those of the speakers discussed in this chapter, papers were presented by William Porter and Stanford Anderson, the latter formed the basis of Stanford Anderson, “Public Institutions: Louis I. Kahn’s Reading of Volume Zero,” Journal of Architectural Education 49, no. 1 (September1995): 10–21. Prior to this symposium, the most comprehensive study of the capitol commission was by Florindo Fusaro, Il Parlamento e nuova capitale a Dacca di Louis I. Kahn 1962–1974 (Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1985). A short summation of this text was published as Florindo Fusaro, “The Dacca Assembly Building and a New Capital,” in “Louis I. Kahn 1901/1974,” Rassegna 21 (March 1985): n.p. I acknowledge and thank Francesca Bezzone for her translation of this text. Fusaro offers a detailed formal analysis of the project with a particular emphasis on its inherent geometric order. Fusaro’s formal engagement with the project lies outside the scope and particular interest on this dissertation.

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symposium as a springboard, this chapter will trace the critical reception of the capitol complex at Dhaka and frame the scholarly field to which this dissertation contributes.

Chapter Argument

The previous chapter traced Vincent Scully’s views on Kahn’s architecture and design process. Particular attention was paid to the emergence and evolving definition of the term “ruin” in Scully’s narrative as a productive analogy for interpreting both Kahn’s inventive method and his architectural priorities. I emphasised how the capitol commission was assigned a transitional status within the historian’s late writings; it was seen as a work in which the mid-century penchant for originality merged with the late-modern turn to classical types and thus formed the basis for a new urbanism. This chapter extends the review of Kahn’s critical reception through a focus on the subsequent generation of scholarship pertaining to his work, and with particular focus on the capitol complex. I show that the term “ruin” has remained a persistent trope within diverse interpretations of this project. The term, I suggest, both reveals the multiple meanings that this project has acquired and further alludes to the ambiguities that prevent this work from attaining a neat ideological and historical positioning.

Anchored in the material presented at the 1991 symposium, the discussion also draws on associated publications, the ideas of pertinent scholars, and subsequently published sources. The MIT symposium is thus treated as a beginning point from which the discussion expands.

This chapter develops with reference to three distinct interpretations of the capitol commission: as an exemplar of postwar American modernism, as a manifestation of modern architecture within a postcolonial and newly independent context, and as an architectural proposition aligned with a vernacular built tradition and thus framed as a model for a regional modernism.

I begin with the polemical debate concerning the significance of Kahn’s work to the postwar evolution of American modernism. My focus is on the critical agency of the Dhaka commission in this exchange. Scully’s work forms the background to this debate, with his critical paradigm either extended or radically challenged. What emerges is an intriguing debate regarding Kahn’s affiliation with the codified disciplinary terms “modern” and “postmodern,” and contested views as to the meaning of civic monumentality in this project. I draw attention to the resonances and frictions between these distinct yet interrelated historical paradigms, and to the manner and the clarity with which the Dhaka

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commission has been absorbed within the logic of their respective theses. This synthesised analysis reveals discursive tension and misalignments that, in turn, shed light on particularities of this project in relation to Kahn’s larger body of work.

I then consider the reception of the Dhaka commission from a broader historical and cross- disciplinary perspective. A key purpose of this analysis is to foreground existing interpretations of the relationship between the capitol project and its cultural setting. These interpretations have been for the most part negative. Scholars have, for example, pointed to profound misconnections between Kahn’s idealised architectural proposition and Dhaka’s social, political and environmental reality, and some warned of the authoritarian implications of the proposed strategy. Moreover, it is implied that “orientalist” stereotypes have informed this architecture and its historical depiction and therefore demand scrutiny from a postcolonial perspective. Despite such emphatic misgivings, however, these scholars have mostly withheld a final verdict on the project. The emergence of the capitol project as a popular site of public gathering and its symbolic association with the Bengali struggle for independence has prevented it from attaining a simple ideological classification and indeed from being categorical dismissed.

This chapter concludes with the project’s perceived relationship to the built tradition and ongoing architectural culture in Bangladesh. Here, I principally draw on the work of , a Bangladeshi architect and scholar with postgraduate training within the US academy (MIT and University of Pennsylvania). Ashraf’s dual institutional/cultural affiliation provided him with a uniquely two-edged agency and legitimacy as a critic, and his considerations of the project have been published within Bangladesh as well as internationally. Although by no means representative of the project’s local reception, Ashraf’s discourse provides a significant and alternative voice in the scholarship on this project. This discussion emphasises an alignment between Kahn’s architectural priorities and vernacular built traditions. The architecture of the capitol complex is thus framed as a model for a modern yet regional urbanism. In this narrative the significance of the project is considered as independent from its proposed contemporary civic role, that is, as a house for contemporary democratic actions and processes. In this discourse the relationship between the monument and its contemporary use is blurred.

The term “ruin” is a common thread throughout the discussion. Among the scholars who defend Kahn’s status as a strict and particularly American modernist the term has been problematised and dismissed as a nostalgic phenomenon with overtly formalist connotations. Within postcolonial criticism the term evokes an orientalist fantasy and thus

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attracts a negative critique. For scholars who align the project with regional architectural tradition, the monument has acquired meaning beyond the particularities of its contemporary function; it is viewed as an emblem of an idealised past or a promise of a vital future.

This chapter highlights the multiple and at times contested meanings ascribed to the capitol project. Moreover, it demonstrates how the project resists a straightforward historical and/or ideological classification. I suggest that the recurrent use of the term “ruin” in the critical work on the building is founded in the architectural ambiguities that have opened up this project to both laudatory and dismissive interpretations.

What emerges in the discussion is a sequence of architectural problematics that are mutually considered pertinent to this architectural work. These are the relationship between this monument and the existing city, the primacy of the wall and the layered facade, and the problem of the ambulatory. Each is variously described along with the scholarly debate about their conceptual significance; the ideological implications are then discussed and historically contextualised. The historiographical analysis developed in this first part of the study therefore offers a rich context within which a new interpretation of this architecture can be historically situated. An architectural reading of the project relative to these categories forms part two of this dissertation.

------

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American Modern: Ruin or Monument?

He’s building Piranesi: the sublime, the ruin.2 Vincent Scully, 1992

Accounts of the evolution of [Kahn’s] work have not fundamentally challenged Vincent Scully’s forty-year-old model of Kahn’s intellectual development, based on an admixture of assumptions about the origins of a person’s thought paradigms which Scully distilled from Freud and Proust: after receiving a Beaux-Arts training under Cret, Kahn supposedly buried that training in order to become a modernist, only to excavate it in a single, epiphanic moment while a fellow at the American Academy at Rome in 1950–1951, when he, with singular heroism and prescience, realized the inadequacies of modernism and the self evident value of history.3 Sarah Goldhagen, 2001

Kahn’s work did change in the 1950s, not solely under the influence of his Roman sojourn, but certainly not in spite of it. As the most serious and successful architect of his generation to resuscitate the muse of history, he must be assigned a role in the historicist tendency of recent decades, although he cannot be blamed for all the mauve porticos of the suburban strip.4 David B. Brownlee, 2002

As an opening to the Aga Khan symposium, David Brownlee and David De Long offered a historical overview of Kahn’s architectural development, situating the Dhaka commission in this context.5 Brownlee and De Long were members of faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and co-curators and principal authors of the major exhibition and associated monograph Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture.

Commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles, and nearly a decade in the making, In the Realm had opened only six days prior to the symposium. Initially staged at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it travelled to Paris’s Centre Georges Pompidou (spring 1992); New York’s Museum of Modern Art (summer 1992); the Museum of Modern Art, Gunma in Japan (fall 1992); Los Angeles’s MoCA (spring 1993); and the Kimbell Art ------2 Vincent Scully, “Louis I. Kahn and the Ruins of Rome,” in Neil Levine, ed., Modern Architecture and Other Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 313. (First published in MoMA: The Members Quarterly of the Museum of Modern Art 12 (Summer 1992): 1–13.) Quotations in this chapter are from the Levine compilation. 3 Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Louis Kahn’s Situated Modernism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 205. 4 David B. Brownlee, review of Louis Kahn’s Situated Modernism by Sarah Goldhagen, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61, no 2 (June 2002): 240. 5 David Brownlee and David De Long, Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1991). The exhibition was displayed in an installation designed by Arata Isozaki based on Kahn’s unbuilt project for the Mikveh Israel Synagogue (1961–72). For review of the catalogue see Fikret K. Yegul, review of Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture by David B. Brownlee and David G. De Long, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 52, 1(March 1993): 115–118; Richard Ingersoll, “Louis I. Kahn: The Last Master,” review of Louis I Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture, by David B. Brownlee and David G. De Long, Design Book Review 21(Summer 1991): 7–8.

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Museum in Forth Worth (summer to fall 1993), and concluded its tour at Peter Eisenman’s Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University (winter 1993–94). The exhibition catalogue provided a rigorous historical review of Kahn’s work and disciplinary contribution and featured interpretive essays by Brownlee and De Long. A group of project-based biographies formed a second layer to the catalogue and these traced the design history and development of selected key projects.6 This retrospective was the first comprehensive historical review of Kahn’s work since Scully’s 1962 Louis I. Kahn.7 Centred at the Louis I. Kahn Collection (University of Pennsylvania), it also involved a number of graduate students who were doing active research on Kahn.

Brownlee and De Long’s symposium opening remarks addressed their respective introductory chapters to the exhibition catalogue, the titles of which draw on quotations from Kahn – “Adventures of Unexplored Places: Defining a Philosophy, 1901–51” and “The Mind Opens to Realization: Conceiving a New Architecture, 1951–63.” Both the symposium talks and the essays adopted the generally accepted bipartite representation of Kahn’s professional trajectory, that is, that he went through an early and a mature phase.8

------6 Thirteen authors reviewed nineteen key projects. These projects were typically studied as part of larger and independent research projects. They include Patricia Cummings Loud, The Art Museums of Louis I. Kahn (Durham: Duke University Press in association with Duke University Museum of Art, 1989); Daniel Friedman, “The Sun on Trial: Kahn’s Gnostic Garden at Salk” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1999); Kathleen James, “Louis Kahn’s Indian Institute of Management’s Courtyard: Form Versus Function,” Journal Of Architectural Education 49, no. 1 (September 1995): 38–49; Peter Kohane, “Louis I. Kahn and the Library: Genesis and Expression of ‘Form,’” Via 10 (1990): 98–131; Susan Solomon, Louis I. Kahn’s Trenton Jewish Community Center (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000); Peter Reed, “Toward Form, Louis I. Kahn’s Urban Designs for Philadelphia, 1939–62” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1989); Robin Williams, “An Architectural Myth: The Design Evolution of Louis Kahn’s First Unitarian Church” (Masters diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1990). Other important publications during the late 1980s and early to mid 1990s included the collation of Kahn’s writings and lectures first by Richard Wurman, What Will Be Has Always Been: the Words of Louis I. Kahn (New York: Rizzoli, 1986) and the more comprehensive work by Alessandra Latour, Louis I. Kahn. Also considered at this time were Kahn’s drawing and paintings: Jan Hochstim, Paintings and Sketches of Louis I. Kahn (New York, Rizzoli, 1991) and Eugene J. Johnson and Michael J. Lewis, Drawn From the Source: The Travel Sketches of Louis I. Kahn, (Williamstown, Mass.: Williams College Museum of Art, 1996). 7 Earlier overviews of Kahn’s work (produced during the last decade of his life) included two exhibitions: one at Museum of Modern Art in New York (Spring 1966) and the other at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule in Zurich (1969). His work was, in addition, represented in special issues of L’architecture d’aujourd’hui (1969), Architectural Forum (1972), Architecture and Urbanism (1973). In the year before he died a book on his work by Romaldo Giurgola and Jaimini Mehta was in preparation: Romaldo Giurgola and Jaimini Mehta, Louis I. Kahn (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1975). At this time a major book on the drawn evolution of his major works was also in preparation: Heinz Ronner, Sharad Jhaveri, as well as Alessandro Vasella’s Louis I. Kahn: Complete Work, 1935–1974 (Basel and Boston, Birkhauser, 1977). 8 David Brownlee’s talk at the conference was introduced by a slightly modified title: “Adventures of Unexplored Places: Early Themes in the Work of Louis I. Kahn.”

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In this view, first advanced by Scully, Kahn’s mature, historically grounded idiom dates back to his 1950–51 sojourn, where the firsthand experience of ancient sources in Rome, Egypt and Greece inspired a radical shift in his creative method.9 This alignment with Scully was broadly emblematic of Brownlee and De Long’s critical approach, which, in deference to Scully’s early insights, upheld the core tenets of his argument and framed interpretive deviations as nuanced inflections rather than counter-arguments. Scully introduced the catalogue, indicating his broad support for the project. Situating Kahn within the postwar evolution of modern architecture, this introduction later formed the basis for Scully’s essay “Louis Kahn and the Ruins of Rome” (1992).10

Considered by De Long, in particular, the capitol commission was depicted as one of Kahn’s “greatest” realised works and as encapsulating the central tenets of the architect’s mature vocabulary: the reintroduction of mass, spatial differentiation, “actively” juxtaposed geometry and richly layered architectural definitions. De Long’s broad alignment with Scully was explicit. He reiterated the significance of disciplinary history to Kahn’s mature design method and framed “Form and Design” as an explicit register of the role of history in Kahn’s inventive method. His emphasis was, however, more explicitly typological.11 For De Long, Kahn’s concept of “Form” implied a search for elemental institutional types, with the “ideal image” for each institution derived from history. He uses institutions for study or assembly as his examples: “for study, the St. Gall plan, which diagrammed a series of extended, separated spaces for a monastery; and for assembly, the Pantheon, with its single holistic space.”12

This typological categorisation of Kahn’s late idiom, in particular his institutional projects of 1960’s and 1970’s, was a distinguishing aspect of the In the Realm catalogue. Three consecutive, typologically themed, interpretive chapters were dedicated to Kahn’s designs for “assembly,” “study” and the hybrid institutional program described as “choice” (chapters three to five). The first and last chapters are by De Long, and the second chapter by Brownlee. In the first of these three chapters De Long proposed that Kahn’s

------9 Vincent Scully, Louis I. Kahn (New York: George Braziller, 1962). 10 Scully, “Kahn and the Ruins of Rome.” Neil Levine notes that Scully’s introduction to the In the Realm Catalogue was first developed as a lecture given at the Design Center in Washington, D.C. (April 1992) and then again at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, when the exhibition was shown there (June 1992). Levine, Modern Architecture and Other Essays, 300. 11 For exploration of Kahn’s work with a focus on building types see Peter Kohane, “Louis I. Kahn and the Library,” and Patricia Cummings Loud, The Art Museums of Louis I. Kahn. 12 Brownlee and De Long, In the Realm, 73. For Kahn’s reference to the Pantheon see Robert Twombly, Louis Kahn: Essential Texts (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2007), 9. The most detailed discussion of the relationship between the National Assembly Building in Dhaka and the Pantheon is by Florindo Fusaro, Il Parlamento e la nuova capital a Dacca di Louis I. Kahn 1962/1974 (Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1985).

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architectural response in Dhaka shared its conceptual basis with a constellation of largely unrealised design propositions for “assembly,” encompassing both secular and religious programs: For [Kahn], places of meeting shared essential qualities that rendered differences between secular and religious use secondary in importance, and commissions as diverse as the Mikveh Israel Synagogue in Philadelphia (1961–72, unbuilt), the National Assembly Building at Sher-e-Bangla Nagar in Dhaka (1962–83) and the Palazzo dei Congressi in Venice (1968–74, unbuilt), thus drew together as a common endeavour.13 In De Long’s interpretation, Kahn’s institutions for meeting, whether secular or religious, were conceived of as inspirational and yet participatory environments, which explicitly distanced themselves from the formalised and prescriptive patterns of traditional religious ceremony. (Figure 2.1) Two distinct yet inherently integrated architectural forms characterised this institutional type: an elemental, geometrically derived, centralised volume, dedicated to a single and elevating, yet not deterministic, purpose; and an adjacent ambulatory that allowed the participants a degree of choice in their engagement with the “centre.” (Figure 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6)

In this description Kahn’s historically located institutional prototype for assembly, derived from the Pantheon, was developed through integration with an “ambulatory”: Kahn developed his ideal prototype by adding an ambulatory. As eloquently explained in regard to the design of the Unitarian Church, the form of centralized volume was thus modified to allow participants to elect degrees of commitment. Kahn seemed drawn less to centralized churches of the fourth and fifth centuries than to their pagan prototypes; perhaps the particularized provisions for religious ritual and established axial hierarchies of those churches defeated the participatory experience he sought to foster.14 The Pantheon – which due to its inherently non-hierarchical yet “inspirational” monumentality was regarded by Kahn as the ideal prototype for places of public gathering – was revitalised through an integrative process as a modern, more democratic setting for assembly and associated ceremonies.

------13 De Long, “Assembly,” 78. This thesis is more fully developed by Susan G. Solomon in Louis I. Kahn’s Jewish Architecture: Mikveh Israel And the Midcentury American Synagogue (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2009). 14 David De Long’s reading of the National Assembly Building was developed in the third chapter of the In the Realm monograph: David De Long, “Assembly … a Place of Transcendence: Designs for Meeting,” in Brownlee and De Long, In the Realm, 78.

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Figure 2.1. Page 79 in In the Realm. National Assembly Building, Mikveh Israel Synagogue and Brunelleschi’s plan for Santo Spirito. [Brownlee and De Long, In the Realm, 79]

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Figure 2.2. Top left, Louis Kahn, Mikveh Israel Synagogue, Philadelphia, PA, 1961–72, plan. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 190] Figure 2.3. Top right, Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, 1966, plan. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 254] Figure 2.4. Bottom, Louis Kahn, Palace of Congress and Biennale Venice, Italy, 1968–74, plans. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 372]

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Figure 2.5. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, assembly chamber. [Brownlee and De Long, In the Realm, 245] Figure 2.6. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, ambulatory space. [Brownlee and De Long, In the Realm, 82]

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De Long’s interpretation drew on Kahn’s idealised concept for a non-denominational chapel; he had famously invoked the proposal in his 1959 CIAM address: So, what is a chapel really? A chapel, to me, is a space which one can be in, but it must have an excess of space around it, so that you don’t have to go in. That means, it must have an ambulatory, so that you don’t have to go into the chapel; and the ambulatory must have an arcade outside, so that you don’t have to go into the ambulatory; and the object outside is a garden, so that you don’t have to go into the arcade; and the garden has a wall, so that you can be outside of it or inside of it.

The essential thing, you see, is that the chapel is a personal ritual, and that it is not a set ritual, and it is from this that you get the form.15 By assigning an equivalent significance to the “periphery” and the “centre,” and by proposing a radial and negotiated path of movement between the two, Kahn reconceived the traditionally static and hierarchical model as a dynamic arrangement open to multiple patterns of use. The proposition had formed the basis of Kahn’s “Form” diagram for the First Unitarian Church and School (Rochester, NY, 1959–69). (See Figure P1.1)

De Long interpreted the proposition in socio-political terms. He believed that Kahn’s idealised conception of a secular chapel was a novel proposition for contemporary civic architecture: inspirational yet democratic, timeless yet of its time, and seeking to restore a moral dimension to modern architecture: “Few of these designs were realized, but in those that were, his visions for eternal, timeless principles assumed tangible form, and the promise of a new architecture, so fervently sought by his fellow architects, was fulfilled.”16As one of the few realised examples of this institutional type, the Dhaka commission, De Long implied, was a significant register of Kahn’s vision for a new and democratic “monumentality.”

A third speaker affiliated with the In the Realm cluster was Peter Reed. At that time a recent doctoral graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, Reed had directed the archival research for the retrospective. His 1989 dissertation “Toward Form: Louis I. Kahn’s Urban

------15 Kahn, “Talk at the Otterlo Conference,” in Twombly, Louis Kahn, 44. The account of a negotiated approach, from the periphery to centre, was first invoked when Kahn recalled his visit to the Leaning Tower of Pisa. On this occasion, however, he did not employ the term ritual; see Louis I. Kahn, “Space Order and Architecture,” in Latour, Louis I. Kahn, 74. (First published in Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Journal 34, 10 [October 1957]: 375–377). When reiterating the narrative in his “Form and Design” statement, the term “personal ritual” was replaced with the term “inspired ritual.” See Kahn, “Form and Design,” in Twombly, Louis Kahn, 67. For Kahn’s theory of ritual see Peter Kohane, “’Movement and Arrest’: Vaulted Space in Antiquity and the work of Louis Kahn,” in Cultural Crossroads: Proceedings of the 26th Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand Conference, edited by Julia Gatley, 256–60. Auckland, New Zealand, (2009). Kohane offers the most developed analysis of the relationship between Frank Brown’s theory of Roman architecture and Kahn’s concept of inspired ritual. 16 De Long, “Assembly,” 78.

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Designs for Philadelphia,” advised by Brownlee, was one of the earliest doctorates on Kahn and the first in-depth consideration of the architect’s critical engagement with the city.17 A contributing author to the catalogue, Reed had prepared two of the project-based biographical entries: “Philadelphia Urban Design” and “Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, Capital of Bangladesh.”18 For Reed the conjunction was logical. He stated that Kahn’s urban vision for the capitol of Dhaka – “in essence a small city” – was founded on the urban ideals that Kahn had first developed when working on design proposals for the city of Philadelphia, in particular his more theoretical propositions generated between 1959 and 1962: After many years of unrealized designs for Philadelphia, Kahn received the commission for his most ambitious project, the National Capital of Bangladesh (1962–83).

For this new capital with its extensive program of buildings, Kahn was able to realize his whole vision. The forms and philosophy explored and developed in the Philadelphia plans bore fruit in this quintessentially monumental and symbolic complex.19

In his symposium paper, “Professor Kahn’s Great Game: Building Dhaka’s National Symbol,” Reed presented a sequential analysis of the capitol project’s urban development, focusing on the process by which Kahn’s conceptual and generic urban propositions were developed and particularised. Proposing that there were regionalist principles at work, he suggested that the tectonic resolution of the building was determined with reference to local parameters – both the traditional built fabric and the local climatic conditions. By focusing on the correspondence between Kahn’s office, his representatives in Dhaka and the city’s Public Works Department (PWD), Reed provided new insights into the relationship between Kahn’s office and the PWD. He shows that, despite the bureaucratic and logistical complexities that beset the project, the PWD’s respect for Kahn and its faith in his architectural vision for the capitol buffered the architect from the Pakistani central government and further secured him an extraordinary level of architectural control and formal freedom. In Reed’s view, the entangled set of political, cultural and personal interrelationships that shaped Kahn’s practice in Dhaka allowed the architect to build architectural propositions that had been previously considered only in a theoretical, and deliberately polemical format. (Figure 2.7, 2.8, 2.9, 2.10)

------17 Peter Reed, “Toward Form, Louis I. Kahn’s Urban Designs for Philadelphia, 1939–62” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1989). 18 Peter Reed, “Philadelphia Urban Design,” in Brownlee and De Long, In the Realm, 304-311; and Peter Reed, “Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, Capital of Bangladesh,” in Brownlee and De Long, In the Realm, 374–382. 19 Peter Reed, “Toward Form,” 280-281.

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Louis Kahn’s Situated Modernism

The In The Realm retrospective and the associated research cluster at the University of Pennsylvania had a dominant presence at the Kahn Collection during the late 1980s. However, a parallel and somewhat competitive investigation by Sarah Williams Ksiazek, a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, was concurrently taking shape. Ksiazek’s project broadly focused on the postwar evolution of Kahn’s ideas on public architecture and a close reading of the capitol complex formed a significant component of her investigation. Ksiazek’s presentation at the symposium outlined her critical perspective on the Dhaka commission and drew on her research in progress, particularly the latter chapters of her dissertation. Titled “Monumentality, Regionalism and New Humanism in Kahn’s National Assembly Building,” this paper formed the basis for Ksiazek’s 1993 published essay “Architectural Culture in the Fifties: Louis Kahn and the National Assembly Complex in Dhaka.”20 Her reading of the Dhaka commission was further explored in the concluding chapter of her 1995 PhD dissertation, which was subsequently developed and published as the 2001 book Louis Kahn’s Situated Modernism (by this time the author was known as Sarah Williams Goldhagen).21 In these works Goldhagen established her status as an important Kahn scholar, and had particular critical authority on the Dhaka commission. For the purpose of my discussion, I begin with the most developed version of her research – her 2001 book – and then integrate her earlier writings during the course of the discussion.

At the core of Goldhagen’s method was a radical critique of the existing scholarship on Kahn. Deliberately provocative, she dismissed the field as incomplete and inaccurate. She claimed that a series of false “myths” had shaped the codified account of Kahn’s architectural approach; so pervasive was their influence that they continued to govern the ongoing analysis of his contribution. Goldhagen’s criticism was, for the most part, aimed at Vincent Scully and his scholarly legacy. This historical trajectory, she believed, had propagated two distinct yet interrelated fallacies. The first was that Kahn’s late idiom was fundamentally shaped by his residency at the American Academy in Rome (1950–51), after which time he relinquished the language of the early modern movement and moved towards a historically informed formal vocabulary. The second was that Kahn was the founder of American historicist postmodernism, with its key protagonists – Robert Venturi for example – being his direct descendants. Goldhagen argued that, to the contrary, Louis

------20 Sarah Williams Ksiazek, “Architectural Culture in the Fifties: Louis Kahn and the National Assembly Complex in Dhaka,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 52, no. 4 (December 1993): 416–435. 21 Sarah Williams Ksiazek, “Changing Symbols of Public Life” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1995). Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Louis Kahn’s Situated Modernism, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). I will henceforth refer to the author as Goldhagen.

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Kahn was, and fundamentally remained, a modernist – his inherently optimistic and elevated ethico-political agenda differentiated his approach from the postmodernist discourse that dominated American architectural culture in the 1970s.

Dismissing what she considered to be a historicist/formal bias in Scully’s narrative, Goldhagen located Kahn’s approach within the immediate and particularly American intellectual and disciplinary context in which it evolved. Kahn’s late idiom, she argued, was informed by the progressive ideals of American participatory democracy and the aligned architectural ambition to balance communal aspiration with the particularity of the individual experience. In this narrative, the capitol complex in Dhaka was described as the culminating point in Kahn’s career and was viewed as the project where he most successfully captured an American vision for a new and idealised democratic monumentality.

Two broad themes formed the basis of Goldhagen’s critical retort to Scully: Kahn’s status relative to the codified disciplinary terms “modern” and “postmodern,” and the parameters that defined Kahn’s practice as a particularly American mode of modernism. I examine each theme in sequence.

Kahn’s Disciplinary Status: Modern or Postmodern?

Goldhagen’s criticism of Scully was in essence directed at the broader and more contemporaneous historiographical record on Kahn, which in her assessment had failed to move beyond Scully’s early interpretive model. The In the Realm project was particularly implicated in this criticism. Presenting a contrary critical posture to that of Brownlee, De Long and research associated with the 1991 retrospective, she suggested that the bipartite representation of Kahn’s architectural trajectory must be revised.

Underpinning Goldhagen’s claim for Kahn’s modernist status was her broader critical perspective on the evolution of modern architecture after World War Two. Historiographical reflection on postwar architectural culture was an emergent field of enquiry during the 1990s within North American, particularly east coast, academic institutions.22 Goldhagen’s doctoral research on Kahn’s postwar work and her associated publications established her reputation as an important voice in the field. Joining the faculty at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University in 1995, she co-led two high-profile academic conferences on postwar architectural culture in the late 1990s and edited the

------22 See for example, Edward Eigen and Joan Ockman, Architecture Culture, 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology (New York: Rizzoli, 1993).

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Figure 2.7. Top, Philadelphia Midtown Development, Market St. East, elevation and perspective sketch. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 37] Figure 2.8. Middle, Capitol Complex, East Hostels. [Brownlee and De Long, In the Realm, 252] Figure 2.9. Bottom left, Philadelphia Midtown Development, Market St. East, model. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 37] Figure 2.10. Bottom right, Capitol Complex, plan view of site model, March 1963. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 238]

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associated compilation Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture with Réjean Legault (2000).23 Featuring essays by emerging scholars on the post-1945 evolution of the Modern movement, the monograph was critically well received and is cited as an important contribution to the field.24

In their final and concluding chapter to this volume, “Coda: Reconceptualising the Modern,” Goldhagen and Legault challenged the existing accounts of the modern movement and its supposed culmination in postmodernism. They proposed a new theoretical framework for rethinking postwar architectural history and its relationship to the earlier modern movement. Particularly contested was the representation of twentieth- century modernism as two distinct episodes mediated by World War Two. Instead, an emphasis was placed on the movement’s continuous trajectory. Goldhagen and Legault argued that the modern movement – from its inception in the 1920s to its post-World-War- Two manifestations – although internally complex and varied in its formal expression, was unified by the consistent socio-ethical conviction that architecture should foster positive social change and contribute to the ethical formation of society through innovative reform: If the first dimension of this era’s modern architecture is a cultural determination to cast off the shackles of tradition to promote innovation, the second dimension is a political one … all modernist architects, unlike architects who accepted the tradition of academic design, shared the conviction that it was their obligation to employ the tools of their discipline politically to facilitate social betterment and progress.25

Published several months prior to Goldhagen’s monograph on Kahn, Anxious Modernisms’ conceptual framework appeared intended as a prelude to Louis Kahn’s Situated Modernism. This book framed Kahn as an ardent modernist, a position that was rooted in Kahn’s faith in architecture’s potential for social transformation. For Goldhagen, Kahn’s architectural agenda throughout his career – from his early propositions in the 1930s to his canonical works of the 1950s and 1960s – was underpinned by the consistent belief that public buildings should foster community within a democratic society:

------23 Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault, eds., Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2000). 24 The featured essays were particularly well received, with the editors’ conceptual framework subject to a more ambivalent reception. See for example Diane Yvonne Ghirardo, review of Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture by Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 60, no. 4 (December 2001): 528–530. 25 Goldhagen and Legault, Anxious Modernisms, 304–304.

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In the 1930s and 1940s he designed a number of low-cost housing projects; from the 1950s until his death in 1974, he focused on public building … The connection between these two phases of his practice has not been systematically examined, yet it is in their continuity that the heart of his lifelong enterprise can be discerned.26 Goldhagen’s emphasis on the continuous evolution of modern architecture was thus one thread by which she distinguished her thesis from that of Scully. It is Goldhagen’s alternative conception for a democratic architecture to which I now turn.

Modern Architecture in America

Goldhagen’s research methodology and associated claim for scholarly originality was, in part, predicated on a critique of the biographical monograph as an intellectual form. Inherently singular in their focus, art historical monographs on Kahn had, in her view, failed to adequately capture the immediate, and particularly American, socio-political field within which his practice had evolved. Privileging an integrated analysis, and by way of contrast, her study sought to contextualise Kahn’s artistic response.27 Goldhagen claimed that a vigorous critique of “mass-culture” and its perceived erosive impact on the notion of “community” was central to America’s post-World-War-Two socio-critical debates. More specifically, she argued that this critical perspective, as absorbed by progressive postwar architects and architectural historians, activated a disciplinary search for an idiom that could newly and mutually inspire “communal identification” and “collective enterprise.” Accordingly, she claimed that Kahn’s postwar architectural productions, although original in their formal vocabulary, were “powerful aesthetic propositions” to solve a socio-ethical dilemma that “preoccupied many.”

This argument suggested that evident shifts in Kahn’s postwar vocabulary could be more fully understood when examined in synchronistic relationship to the prevailing socio-ethical debates about the meaning and nature of an ideal community. The evolution of Kahn’s approach – “from a Corbusian-inspired modernism, to organically-derived modular geometries, to an abstracted historicism” – was interlaced with a discursive interrogation of their respective and particularly American socio-technical underpinnings. This stretched from the “quasi-socialist” principles of communitarianism in the early 1940s, to the

------26 Goldhagen, Situated Modernism, 4. 27 Goldhagen’s method was grounded in Michel Foucault’s notion of “discourse” and Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of the “field.” Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” in the Archeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972): 215–237; Pierre Bourdieu, “The Intellectual Field: A World Apart,” in In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, trans. Matthew Adamson (Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 1990), 140–149. Also see Sarah Williams Goldhagen, “Something to Talk About: Modernism, discourse, style,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 64, no. 2 (2005): 144–167.

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internationalist vision for a “world community” in the late 1940s, culminating with the more conservative democratic idealism of the 1950s and 1960s. The transformations in Kahn’s postwar architectural approach, Goldhagen surmised, were fundamentally a response to an evolving conception of community.

For her presentation at the MIT conference, Goldhagen drew on her dissertation to develop a contextual historical reading of the Dhaka project. The thematic core of Goldhagen’s discussion was the “problem of the individual and the collective” – that is, the seemingly contradictory political ambition to balance collective representation with the autonomy and agency of the individual citizen. She observed that influential critics and social commentators during the 1950s had forewarned that cultural homogenisation and the consequent demise of communal life would engender social apathy. Civic participation and the fulfilment of social obligations were in turn deemed the necessary basis for a vital democratic life. This interpretation held that a progressive democracy was served when communities of free and equal individuals gathered to deliberate about matters of public concern.

Goldhagen’s characterisation inferred that the idealised 1950s views of the principles of participatory democracy created a twofold association between the individual and the collective. Firstly, by referring to bonds that gather individuals as a community, traditional continuities were highlighted, and secondly, in promoting an active relationship between each citizen and his or her community, the freedom and agency of the individual was underlined. Through intellectual and creative insights, the latter emphasis held, individual citizens were able to advance culture and contribute to the betterment of the society at large. Set against the background of the Cold War, this dynamic conception of the relationship between the individual and collective, Goldhagen suggested, had patriotic underpinnings. The critical promotion of “individual expression within a participatory community,” she argued, operated as a defence against totalitarian systems of governance, and against communism.

In Goldhagen’s view, the impact of this intellectual climate on the architectural discipline was first and most directly evidenced by the discourse on “new monumentality,”28 in particular, in the 1950s and 1960s manifestations of this theme, firstly in Europe and subsequently in the United States: ------28 For a general discussion on the postwar theme of monumentality in modern architecture see Christine C. Collins and George R. Collins, “Monumentality: A Critical Matter in Architecture,” Harvard Architecture Review: Monumentality and the City 4 (Spring 1984): 14–35, and Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1228–1960 (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000), 150–152.

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That the new urban monument should encourage a participatory public – as opposed to a mass public – came to be repeated again and again. The problem seems to have been addressed in Europe first. British architects Alison and Peter Smithson, with whom Kahn became quite close after 1957, wrote in their article of 1955, “Urban Re-Identification,” that “the task of our generation is place – we must re-identify man with his house/his community/his city” … By 1960–61, the problem of the relationship of the individual to the collective was being deliberated among Kahn’s colleagues in the United States.29 While encapsulating the disciplinary search for a newly democratic monumental expression, the “new monumentality” debate, Goldhagen noted, remained formally evasive, offering no tangible architectural solutions to this dilemma. She proposed that the parallel disciplinary trends of “new humanism” and “regionalism” were more definitive. These approaches variously identified classical and “regional” traditions as productive reference points for a new civic monumentality: The new humanism posited certain primary geometric motifs derived from the Italian renaissance as bearers of Universal significance. Regionalism, by contrast, demanded that the architect consider local climate, topography, social patterns, and built heritage.30

Although conceptually distinct, and somewhat oppositional in their emphases, Goldhagen suggested that the common ground between the “regionalist” and “humanist” trends lay in their respective accord with the principles of participatory democracy. Both upheld the status of the individual within the larger collective: In spite of ideological differences, Palladian humanism and postwar regionalism fused in one important way. Ideologies born not only of a reaction to modernism, but of the cold war, both insisted on the value of individual identity within the collective sphere. For the antithesis of man-centered humanism was collectivism – or communism, in so many words. The antithesis of regional identity was mass culture.31 In this interpretation, “new humanism” and “regionalism” emerged during the 1950s in response to a particularly American philosophy of democratic idealism and the aligned, if seemingly paradoxical, architectural ambition to balance collective identification with the particularity of individual experience.32

------29 Ksiazek, “Architectural Culture in the Fifties,” 419. 30 Ibid., 420. 31 Ibid., 422. 32 With regard to regionalism, Goldhagen refers to a “sensitivity to indigenous climate and native materials” – a significant interwar notion on the west coast that had continued resonance after the war. She, in addition, suggests this came to “imply that practitioners should analyze a culture’s built heritage.” She notes that the latter emphasis was, in part, spurred by the architect’s increased exposure to non- Western cultures. Edward Durrell Stone, Paul Rudolph and James Stirling are cited as proponents of such an approach. In her analysis of the capitol complex both definitions were invoked. Goldhagen’s discussion of humanism is developed with a more particular focus on the discourse on this theme, with Colin Rowe and Vincent Scully as dominant reference points. Ibid., 421.

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This analysis of postwar American architectural culture and the embodied narrative about the relationship between architecture and democracy was developed via a critical reflection on Vincent Scully’s contribution to this theme, particularly his influence on the postwar currency of the term “new humanism.” She suggested that the change in the meaning of the word “humanism” in the United States – from one associated with an “individualistic romantic design approach” to one aligned with “the forms and ideals of the Italian Renaissance” – was “initiated by Vincent Scully in an article of 1957 in which he described recent work by Philip Johnson, and Eero Saarinen’s chapel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as the ‘architecture of democracy,’ marking a ‘new humanism.’”33 Scully’s positive appraisal of the classicism of 1950s American architecture, Goldhagen suggested, framed humanist principles, in particular the humanism that took Renaissance forms as an appropriate reference point for a contemporary civic monumentality. Citing Rudolf Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1949) as an influence, Goldhagen further suggested, Scully privileged a generic description of Renaissance models, thus rendering their geometric and proportional order applicable to the present.34

In her 2001 monograph Goldhagen advanced her consideration of Scully’s contribution to the new humanist debate, noting the historian’s reference to Geoffrey Scott’s The Architecture of Humanism when he argued that “the center of that [i.e. Renaissance] architecture was the human body.”35 In Scully’s depiction of “architecture of democracy” the human figure was assigned a generative status within the larger whole, whether in terms of elemental geometries (typically symmetrical and centred formal configurations) or the proportional reference to the human scale.

For Goldhagen, then, the late-1950s turn by the architectural community towards disciplinary history, and the humanism of the Renaissance in particular, was motivated by the desire to express, in architectural terms, the progressive ideals of democratic associations.

------33 Ibid., 420. 34 For a discussion on the impact of Wittkower on the postwar evolution of modern architecture, see Henry Millon, “Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism: Its Influence on the Development and Interpretation of Modern Architecture,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 31 (1972): 83–91 and “Rudolf Wittkower and Architectural Principles in the Age of Modernism,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53 (September 1994): 322–42. For Wittkower’s influence at Yale see Robert A.M. Stern, “Yale 1950–1965,” Oppositions 4 (October 1974): 35–62; and William Huff, “Kahn and Yale,” Journal Of Architectural Education 35, no. 3 (Spring 1982): 22-31. 35 Goldhagen, Situated Modernism, 147.

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Goldhagen’s 1993 essay on the National Assembly Building was published one year after Scully’s “Louis I. Kahn and the Ruins of Rome.” Therefore, as Scully galvanised his emphasis on the “ruin” as a “not only visual, but … also conceptual, structural and systematic” framework for Kahn’s design approach in Dhaka, Goldhagen posited a counter interpretation.36 In her article the capitol complex in Dhaka was framed as a profound response to the postwar American architectural discourse. The themes of “humanism” and “regionalism,” which were explored by Kahn in projects such as the First Unitarian Church and School and the United States Consulate (Luanda, Angola, 1959–62 unbuilt), respectively, in her view most authoritatively coalesced in Dhaka: In plan, elevation, scale, detailing, and sequence, Kahn drew from the ideologies of both the new humanism and regionalism to make the National Assembly a monument to the values of American democratic idealism in the fifties: the force of the individual voice, the gravity of civic responsibility, the separation of church and state, the defense against homogenizing mass culture.37 Kahn’s revitalisation of “human”-centric classical compositions, climatic sensitivity and references to regional built tradition, she concluded, successfully played out in the National Assembly Building: communal identification was balanced with the particularity of individual experience. (Figure 2.11)

Goldhagen’s critical response to Scully’s thesis was more sharply defined in her 2001 book. Focusing on the extension to the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, Connecticut, 1951–54), she framed Kahn’s aesthetic development in relation to his immediate intellectual and artistic circle at Yale’s School of Art, where Kahn also taught (from 1947). She particularly highlighted the influence of painters Josef Albers and Willem de Kooning, writing that the elemental abstraction and “blunt” material condition characteristic of Kahn’s gallery design was indebted to the prevailing art movement of abstract expressionism, as embodied in the work of Kahn’s colleagues at Yale.38 She argued that this aesthetic tradition was charged with the broader thematic of existentialist philosophy, which formed “the intellectual ethos of many architects, artists, and intellectuals in Kahn’s discursive community.”39 This discussion galvanised Goldhagen’s central position: that Kahn’s elementally abstract yet materially expressive projects of the late 1950s and 1960s

------36 Scully, “Kahn and the Ruins of Rome,” 315. 37 Ksiazek, “Architectural Culture in the Fifties,” 435. 38 Josef Albers came to Yale in 1950 as the department chair and appointed Willem de Kooning soon afterwards. For a discussion of architectural education at Yale during the 1950s see Robert Stern, “Yale 1950-1965,” Oppositions 4 (October 1974): 35-62. 39 Goldhagen, Situated Modernism, 42.

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were not grounded in Roman antiquity, nor were they spurred by the profound impact of personal aesthetic experience.

The theme of the ruin was therefore doubly challenged. The term was considered neither an adequate lens through which to view Kahn’s engagement with architectural history, nor was it suggestive of the process by which ancient sources were aesthetically transformed. By locating Kahn’s aesthetic evolution within his immediate intellectual context Goldhagen posited the analogy as fallacy.

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Figure 2.11. Page 429 in “Architectural Culture in the Fifties”, National Assembly Building, Taj Mahal and plate 6 from Wittkower. [Ksiazek, “Architectural Culture in the Fifties”, 429]

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Common Ground

Despite Goldhagen’s overt criticism of Scully (and by extension the In the Realm project), and notwithstanding their methodological differences and distinctive points of emphasis, Goldhagen and De Long’s respective readings of the Dhaka commission had broad commonalities. For both scholars, the capitol project represented a culminating point in Kahn’s career and was an exemplary manifestation of his late idiom, in particular his architectural thoughts on assembly. Both privileged his architecture as a spatial projection of socially established patterns of engagement and use. Perceived shifts in dynamics of social behaviour were thus viewed, in both interpretations, as a significant agent in the revitalisation of historically derived prototypes. A negotiated play between the architectural centre and periphery and the problem “ambulatory,” foregrounded in Kahn’s statements, was viewed as foundational to the architect’s proposition for a participatory architecture.

Goldhagen’s description was also in accord with aspects of Reed’s analysis, in particular his reading of the regionalist principles in Kahn’s work. Their respective formal descriptions emphasised Kahn’s regard for, and engagement with, the local environment in Dhaka, its climate and the regional built tradition. Kahn’s double-layered treatment of the National Assembly Building’s outer facade was, for example, described by both scholars as a tectonic defence against the region’s “unforgiving” local sun and monsoonal rain; the compositional and material resolution of the project, they both suggested, drew on regional architectural precedents, particularly the Moghul mausoleum-gardens. In both interpretations the aesthetic of abstractions was nominated as the principle by which regional references were brought into alignment with modernist priorities.

Within these parallel narratives, Kahn’s design for the capitol complex was mutually represented as a powerful response to the post-World-War-Two search for a democratic, civic “monumentality.” These narratives ultimately placed a special value on Kahn’s unique and particularly American contribution to restoring a moral order to modern architecture.

The Unfinished

Neil Levine, Scully’s former student and a key interpreter of his work, has added a third dimension to this critical exchange.40 Presenting Kahn’s architectural works between 1950 and the early 1970s as the concluding point of modern architecture’s historical evolution,

------40 Neil Levine, “The Architecture of the Unfinished and the Example of Louis Kahn,” in Fragments: Architecture and the Unfinished, eds. Barry Bergdoll and Werner Oechslin (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006) and Neil Levine, Modern Architecture: Representation and Reality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 323–342.

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Levine maintained Kahn’s status as a modernist while also acknowledging the relevance of his work to the advent of postmodernism. Levine critically reflected on Scully’s observation that the ancient and medieval ruins of imperial Rome were significant to Kahn’s creative process, and imaginatively reconfigured the conceptual logic of this proposition. He suggested that the “ruin” experienced by Kahn through a modernist aesthetic lens was appreciated for its incomplete or (in Levine’s terms) “unfinished” quality: it was an artefact in “arrested development” rather than one in decay. Kahn’s appreciation of the ruin, he therefore suggested, was not driven by a nostalgic or historicist impulse, but by a modernist one. Levine’s thesis offered a nuanced meditation on Scully’s work and, at a time when Scully’s contribution to Kahn scholarship was subject to scepticism, he maintained Scully’s significance as productive starting point for further speculations.

A close reading of the Levine’s discussion, however, reveals subtle yet substantive distinctions between the two scholars’ interpretations of Kahn’s work. Despite Scully’s positing of the Dhaka commission as a powerful transfiguration of Roman ruins, Levine, particularly in his discussion of “the unfinished,” treated the Dhaka commission as a relevant, but not the most coherent, manifestation of this aesthetic trope. Instead Levine reserved his critical acclaim for Kahn’s American institutions of the same period: the Exeter Library (Exeter, New Hampshire, 1965–72), and the Kimbell Art Museum (Fort Worth, Texas, 1966–72). (Figure 2.12, 2.13, 2.14)

(Post) Colonial Modern: Ruin as Spectacle

In the conclusion to her paper for the MIT symposium, Goldhagen addressed a critical query that she anticipated her interpretation was likely to provoke. The question was: If the Dhaka commission was an exemplary manifestation of postwar American architectural culture and associated disciplinary priorities, did the project constitute an example of American postwar cultural imperialism? Goldhagen circumnavigated and ultimately resisted this implication, stating: “In a way, it does, but the conceptual flexibility and abstraction of Kahn’s forms are such that it has not retained this meaning for long.”

Sponsored by the Aga Khan Program, the question of the National Assembly Building’s cultural and contextual efficacy was at the core of the symposium agenda – an emphasis that was somewhat amplified by controversy surrounding the project’s receipt of the 1989 Aga Khan Award for Architecture. First nominated for the 1986 award cycle, the assessment of the project had been initially withheld. Noting that “the building has not so far been used fully enough to be tested socially and functionally,” the jury recommended the assessment

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of the project be postponed to the subsequent cycle.41 The decision was particularly contentious due to Robert Venturi’s presence on the jury. Although not directly attributed to Venturi, the citation report resonated with his contemporaneous reflections on Kahn’s approach. “Some jury members,” the awards citation noted, “did question certain qualities in the design: a tendency to over-formalism, a lack of connection with indigenous traditions and symbolism, a lack of connection to the city in which it is placed and finally the enormous expense in a country with very few resources and very low income levels.”42 As this quote suggests, the verdict was not unanimous, with jury members and architects Mehmet Doruk Pamir and Hans Hollein formally noting their dissent.43 The AKF’s explicit emphasis on architecture as a culture category had set the background, and moreover provided the legitimate foundation, it appeared, for a vigorous debate concerning the socio- cultural relevance of not only this project, but also postwar modernism more broadly. Although the capitol project’s ultimate receipt of the AKAA in 1989 was broadly received

------41 Aga Khan Development Network, “Aga Khan Award for Architecture: Report of the 1986 Master Jury,” accessed March 5, 2013, http://www.akdn.org/akaa_award3_master.asp. 42 See Robert Venturi “Louis Kahn Remembered (Notes from a Lecture at the Opening of the Kahn Exhibition in Japan, January 1993),” in Iconography and Electronics Upon a Generic Architecture: A View from the Drafting Room (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge and MIT Press, 1996), 87. 43 Dissenting reports allude to the tension surrounding the 1986 decision. Mehmet Doruk Pamir noted: “The bias of the jury did not accrue from a lack of endeavor … Beyond the polemical nature of the jury’s criteria lay a kind of professional discourse, which is irrelevant to the high purpose of the Award. That the Sher-E-Bangla Nagar Capitol Complex in Dhaka should be excluded based on insufficient user evaluation does not succeed in overshadowing the less overt criteria, having to do, among other things, with the ‘prestige’ of fashion. That the project is a masterpiece in the eyes of world architects can hardly be changed by the jury’s decision. But its exclusion does raise questions about the jury’s criteria which unfortunately are destined to remain obscure.” And Hans Hollein noted: “The result of the judging does not reflect the opinion of a specific minority of jury members. It is clearly accepted that, in a democratic process, the majority wins. However, pluralistic tendencies are manifested in the fact that not one but several awards are attributed. An outsider would assume that the distribution to many diverse projects would reflect these pluralistic tendencies. The appointment of jurors of different persuasion seems to take care of having advocates for various opinions and secure such honouring of projects of different attitudes. This was not the case. Projects of unquestionable superior architectural merit and quality – such as the Sher-e-Bangla Nagar Capitol Complex in Dhaka – have been voted out because of a constant bias of the majority of the jury. In the light of history this judgement [sic] will be reversed. To the aims of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, a judgement [sic] against architecture is a disservice.” For Mehmet Doruk Pamir’s earlier consideration of the projects’ local impact see Mehmet Doruk Pamir, “Sher-E- Banglanagar, Dhaka: The Impact on Local Design,” in Continuity and Change Design Strategies for Large-Scale Urban Development (Design in Islamic Cultures 4), Margaret Bentley Ševcenko, ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, 1984), 73–78. Despite the project’s limitations, in Pamir’s final assessment the new capitol was a significant asset to Bangladesh; a source of pride to the local populations and an icon with international visibility. See Aga Khan Award for Architecture, “Jury Statement,” (1989), www.akdn.org/architecture/jury_statement.asp?tri=1986 (accessed March 5, 2013). The combined documentation of the project associated with the two award cycles, particularly the 1986 report by Kenneth Yeang, represents a comprehensive description of this project. For the 1986 Cycle Master Jury Statement and project reports see Aga Khan Award for Architecture, “Project Brief,” (1989) www.akdn.org/architecture/project.asp?id=75 (accessed March 5, 2013).

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Figure 2.12. Top left, Louis Kahn, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX, 1966–72. [Levine, “The Architecture of the Unfinished”, 338] Figure 2.13. Top right, Louis Kahn, Phillips Exeter Academy Library, Exeter, NH, 1965–72. [Levine, “The Architecture of the Unfinished”, 336] Figure 2.14. Bottom, Kimbell Art Museum. [Levine, “The Architecture of the Unfinished”, 339]

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as a vindication of this work’s architectural merit, the provocations posed by the 1986 jury were felt as a probing undercurrent at the symposium.44

For MIT urban historian and critic Lawrence Vale the political implications of this work were worthy of more detailed critical scrutiny. Approaching the project from a cross- disciplinary perspective informed by critical discourse on nationalism and national identity, Vale expanded the discussion beyond the bounds of architectural history. His paper “Government by Urban Design: Twentieth Century Capitol Complexes” drew on his then forthcoming publication Architecture, Power and National Identity (1992) in which the capitol of Dhaka was a major case study. He compared the parliamentary complex in Dhaka to other capitols; each was considered typologically and in light of both political history and political implication. He explained that governmental complexes are organised according to their most important function. This could be an executive function (as in New Delhi), a legislative function (as in Washington, D.C.) or a general assembly or “plaza-centered function,” such as in Canberra. The capitol of Dhaka, he suggested, was a hybrid of the legislative and the plaza-centred types. The fusion was, in Vale’s view, a result of a compromise between the client’s priority and Kahn’s idealised vision for assembly. In the course of his discussion Vale subtly alluded to a disconnection between the architecture of the assembly complex and its social, political and urban setting. His scepticism regarding the project’s contextual fit had been previously noted in his 1987 letter to The Architectural Review and was more emphatically outlined in his chapter “The Acropolis of Bangladesh” in Architecture, Power and National Identity.45 Focusing partly on postcolonial national capitols, Vale scrutinised the architecture’s implicit role in the expression of state power and the associated project of nationalist image-making.

Employing a rhetorical play on Kahn’s well-known aphorism “architecture of connections,” Vale’s discussion in this chapter pointed to a sequence of “misconnections” or contradictions between Kahn’s approach and the political, cultural and environmental context for his commission: There are four chief discontinuities embodied in Kahn’s “Architecture of connection”: The misleading emphasis on the National Assembly building as the locus of political transcendence; The inappropriateness of a capital design that, paradoxically, ------44 For a discussion of the AKAA awards criteria with reference to the 1989 awards see, Peter Davey, “Islam Teaching,” in “The Aga Kahn Award for Architecture,” The Architectural Review 186, no. 1113 (November 1989): 88. 45 Lawrence Vale, letter to the editor published as “Doubts About Dacca,” The Architectural Review (April 1987); Lawrence Vale, Architecture, Power and National Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 236–271. For skepticism regarding the projects’ cultural fit see also, Brian Brace Taylor, “Megaprojects: Visions of Grandeur,” Mimar: Architecture In Development, no. 6 (October 1982): 41.

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overcompensates for and underestimates the demands of climate; The excessively strong reliance on the connection between the mosque and the National Assembly, in a changing society in which the role of Islam remains contentious; The extreme disjunction between the citadels and the city.46 For Vale, Kahn’s transcendental monumentality, his “regionalist” or tropical modernism, his amalgamation of religious and secular modes of assembly and his exploration of an ideal urban order were founded on a highly personal set of architectural preoccupations and showed no real engagement with the city of Dhaka, its citizens and their culture.

Vale was particularly critical of Kahn’s association of the project with an “architectural ruin.” Referring less to the architectural work than to Kahn’s personal statements, he wrote: At the base of his urge to design thousand-year-old walls that evoke “the memory of a giant” was a near obsession with the interconnectedness of architectural beginnings and architectural ruin … the thought that Kahn-the-father may prefer his buildings “freed from use” is surely a disturbing extension of poetic licence.47 In Vale’s view the term “ruin” helped encapsulate the shortcomings of Kahn’s approach. Not only did it evoke what was in his view the architect’s overtly wilful formalism, but moreover it was indicative of his apparent disregard for the particularities of the building’s contemporary function and use.

Vale’s discussion of the capitol complex represented the most doubt-laden reading of this project; it was perhaps only surpassed in this respect by Manfredo Tafuri’s earlier and more resolutely negative assessment of Kahn’s late idiom. For Tafuri, Kahn’s institutions of the late 1950s and 1960s, underscored by the mythical conception of cultural origins and associated social customs, gave form to invented cultural institutions and idealised settings that had never been in place or that, throughout the course of history, had been systematically dismantled and destroyed. (Figure 2.15) Tafuri suggested that Kahn’s particularly American traditionalism was ultimately more favourably received by “developing” nations – that is, at sites denied a contemporary dimension within the imperialist mindset: Kahn’s architecture proved highly exportable. Pushed aside in the United States, he found that his celebrative approach was highly pertinent to the developing countries ... Kahn likewise was to see his own mythic imperial symbols realized outside the United States, as consolation prizes magnanimously handed out by American civilization to countries over

------46 Ibid., 251–255. 47 Vale, Architecture, Power and National Identity, 242–243. Reference is, for example, made to Kahn’s 1964 letter to Harriet Pattison, where he notes: “The quiet ruin now freed from use welcomes wild growth to play joyously around it and is like a father who delights in the little one tugging at his clothes.” Louis Kahn, letter to Harriet Pattison, 15 September 1964, cited in Alexandra Tyng, Beginning: Louis I. Kahn’s Philosophy of Architecture (New York: John Wiley, 1984), 119.

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Figure 2.15. Page 405 in Modern Architecture. National Assembly Building and Kimbell Art Museum. [Tafuri and Dal Co, Modern Architecture, 405]

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which it has designs for expansion. Such coincidences inevitably give us grounds for reflection.

While the monuments to culture in the universities were being put to the torch in the years of student revolt and the war in Viet Nam, architecture went its own way. After having dismantled the fundaments of a tradition, the mythic castle of Kahn was predicated on a lesson without future. As with the great fathers of American culture, behind the appearance of an unwonted sureness of form stands a message open to anyone who wishes to use it. His values and forms are at the mercy of any and every possible exploitation ... Once again a new “master” has been accorded sainthood. His disquieting search for the “center” has thus become the pretext for untimely resurrections.48 Tafuri had warned that Kahn’s mythical institutional projections readily served as symbols of authoritative power and political and nationalist determinism.

Although Tafuri’s indictment of Kahn was arrived at via distinct interpretive traditions, it was broadly shared by Vale (particularly regarding Kahn’s institutions from the late 1950s and 1960s) and was reflected in Vale’s detailed criticism of the capitol complex. Despite his emphatic misgivings about the project, however, Vale resisted a final verdict: This is a building complex that cannot properly be judged for a long time … Over time, the manifold shortcomings and misconnections may dissipate. Some semblance of democracy may come to the chamber; religious harmony may make a mosque more truly a prayer hall; a city may grow up to and among the island edifices; humans may occupy the empty porches of climatic overcompensations. And the acropolis of Bangladesh may truly become a place of Assembly.49 Such hesitation about making a conclusive assessment was, in part, a result of the successful integration of the project within the urban life of the city. Seen in relation to Dhaka’s rapid urban expansion, the capitol complex and its surrounding landscape represented an open field within a densely built and populated urban fabric. When not barricaded during periods of political unrest, the complex’s southern plaza, lake and adjacent parkland had come to serve as a popular gathering ground; a green place of respite within the typically congested city.

Vale’s criticism of the project, as well as his ambivalent concluding remarks, were in tune with the 1973 assessment of the capitol complex by the Swedish scholar Sten Nilsson, an early reader of the colonial history of South Asia.50 Writing in the immediate aftermath of the Pakistani civil war, Nilsson’s assessment of the capitol had anticipated several of Vale’s criticisms: the disjuncture between the capitol and the city, the “extreme” formalism of ------48 Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, Modern Architecture (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979), 407. 49 Vale, Architecture, Power and National Identity, 270–271. 50 Sten Ake Nilsson, The New Capitals of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies Monograph Series, 12 (Lund: Studentiltteratur, 1973), 139–182.

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Kahn’s architectural approach and his precipitant role in the manifestation of nationalist state power via an architectural medium.

Nilsson’s interpretation drew on Scully’s monograph and explicitly reiterated several aspects of Scully’s thesis: for example, he emphasised the significance of Kahn’s “Roman experience” to his creative method and the formative influence of Piranesi on the architect’s formal repertoire. Nilsson’s criticism of the capitol complex was framed against Scully’s narrative. He questioned the relevance of Roman antiquity – its form as well as its program – to the Pakistani second capitol and dismissed Kahn’s reference to ancient Roman baths – institutions for “wellbeing”– as a model for his proposed civic precinct as an absurd analogy: “The program seems pathetic in its East Pakistan setting, in which all physical effort must be concentrated on finding one’s daily bread, and where thousands of people succumb without anybody ever inquiring after their well being.”51 Nilsson further commented that the environmentalist platform pursued in Luanda and later in Dhaka served for Kahn as a forum for formal exploration and as the situation in which the architect’s love of Roman ruins and Piranesi-inspired formal explorations had flourished.

Commenting at a time when the building was not fully completed, Nilsson blurred the depiction of the unfinished and the ruin: “Although the Second Capital has not been completed yet, it looks partially destroyed and abandoned. In this state it is characteristic of its author and of the tough conditions which operate for all housing in this part of the world.”52 (Figure 2.16) It was ultimately Kahn’s mastery of material and formal manipulation, as well as the curiously vacant quality of the building, which Nilsson conceded might be the project’s lasting contribution to the city. Here I return to Nilsson’s evocative concluding comment, with which the preface to this thesis began. In this statement the author’s critical voice was intermingled with his appreciation for the project’s formal affect: Perhaps the new government will feel at home in [Kahn’s] heroic buildings; perhaps it will move back into the old city to show that the colonial era has come to an end at last. Deserted, Louis Kahn’s Dacca would be as magnificent as Fatehpur Sikri. In fact it seems to have been created to be admired in ruins.53 In both Nilsson’s 1973 account and Vale’s assessment of the project over two decades later the project evaded a final categorisation.

------51 Ibid., 203. 52 Ibid., 203–204. 53 Ibid., 212.

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Figure 2.16. Page 207 in The New Capitals. Capitol Complex, West Hostels. [Nilsson, The New Capitals, 207]

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Postcolonial Perspective

A more radical voice at the symposium was that of architectural historian Zeynep Çelik. She argued that both the architecture of the capitol complex and the assumptions that shaped the critical reception of this work should be framed in relation to nineteenth-century colonial discourse on the orient. This discourse and its embedded stereotypes, she posited, underpinned both the twentieth-century early avant-garde and the postwar interest in and attitude towards the “non-Western.” Informed by postcolonial studies, Çelik pursued a cross-disciplinary approach to historiography. Her then imminent publications, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth Century World’s Fairs (1992) and the essay “Le Corbusier, Orientalism, Colonialism” (1992) exemplified her critical method.54 They exposed the collusion between architectural practice and particular modes of power and knowledge, with the latter offering a seminal postcolonial critique of Le Corbusier’s propositions for Algiers. Her work represented an early and highly influential strain of postcolonial theory that extended to consideration of twentieth-century cross-cultural practices.55

Çelik’s presentation did not speak directly to the Dhaka commission. Polemically titled “First World Architects in the Third World,” it focused on the disciplinary themes and embedded cultural biases that accompanied the dichotomy laid out in the presentation title, and ultimately dismissed the polarisation.56 Çelik argued that the twentieth-century “regionalist” discourse, with its emphasis on climate as an authoritative cultural determinant and the appropriation of non-Western cultures and their built vernacular as authentic, spiritual, timeless and untainted by technology and hence an appropriate reference point for a revisionary modernism, was both founded on and a revival of nineteenth-century “orientalist” stereotypes. From this critical perspective, the trope of the ruin and the associated aesthetic of the sublime as analogies for the “non-Western” were grounded in nineteenth-century colonial depictions of the orient as stagnant and in decline. The thematic required scrutiny from a postcolonial perspective.

------54 Zeynep Çelik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth Century World’s Fairs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Zeynep Çelik, “Le Corbusier, Orientalism, Colonialism,” Assemblage 17 (April 1992): 58–77. 55 Çelik was among the early and highly influential generation of postcolonial scholars; her work was grounded in Edward Said’s seminal book Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978). After Displaying the Orient, she wrote two significant books in which the architecture and urbanism of French colonialists in Algiers, and the representations of this work, were scrutinised: Zeynep Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers Under French Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Empire, Architecture, and the City: French-Ottoman Encounters, 1830–1914 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008). 56 Zeynep Çelik, “Third World Architects,” Design Book Review, 19 (Winter 1991): 46–50.

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Bengali Modern: Ruin as Landscape

During the British rule we lost everything. This building has received our sense of cultural identity. The whole complex – the way it deals with the climate, the spirit of the region – has local connotation for me … I know that we do not have democracy, but you see, the building is there; the aim is there.57 Mazharul Islam, ca. 1989

Long before its functional occupation as a political “citadel,” the Assembly took on a haunting presence in the cultural and natural landscape of Dhaka. In the long period of construction, it became inscribed in the collective mind, paradoxically through or because of its “ruinous” image, as an emblem of things to come. Like an epic which is no longer of a particular time but of a cosmic time, and time and time again, it spoke of essential things, things around which life coheres and seeks meaning.58 Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, 2002

In his paper “Architectural History of the Region as a Background of Louis Kahn’s Project,” Meer Mobashsher Ali from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) offered a survey of typically monumental architectural works in the region, with the region defined as the broader Bengal. His discussion emphasised the heterogeneous (and multi-denominational) character of the historic fabric of Bangladesh. Referring to discrete historic “periods,” he cited architectural exemplars from ancient Bengal to the “post-liberation” era. Included were Buddhist archaeological landscapes, monumental Hindu temples, sultanate mosques and mausoleums, examples of Moghul architecture, and monuments from the colonial era. The Pakistani period was addressed via the early work of prominent Bangladeshi modernist architect Mazharul Islam as well as the tropical modernism of American and European architects active in the region. The National Assembly Building, Mobashsher Ali suggested, had emerged as an iconic emblem within post-independence Bangladesh, both within the architectural discourse and within the popular imagination.59 His narrative underlined the manner in which these discrete traditions were adjusted in each instance, albeit in subtle terms, in response to the particular “environment” of the Bengal setting. The emphasis was on a multicultural built heritage with a regional accent.

------57 Mazharul Islam, cited in “National Assembly Project Brief,” n.p. 58 Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, “Capital Complexity: Kahn’s Architecture in Dhaka,” in Sherebanglanagar: Louis I. Kahn and the Making of a Capital Complex, eds., Kazi Khaleed Ashraf and Saiful Haque (Dhaka: Loka Publications, 2002), 14. 59 For a similar survey of the architectural history in Bangladesh see, Shah Alam Zahiruddin, Abu H. Imamuddin and M. Mohiuddin Kahn, eds. Contemporary Architecture, Bangladesh (Dhaka: Institute of Architects Bangladesh, 1990).

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Mobashsher Ali’s discussion was representative of a broader post-independence professional and scholarly attempt in Bangladesh to define regional identity through the lens of architectural history and production. This work shows an effort to ground regional identity within the broader Bengal and, at the same time, to maintain the particularity of Bangladesh as an independent, inherently heterogeneous and liberal geopolitical entity. This narrative explicitly de-emphasised the history of the near past, including both British colonisation and unification with Pakistan. An emerging (later prolific) contributor to this discourse was Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, who also spoke at the MIT symposium. The relationship between the National Assembly Building and it geo-cultural setting, alluded to by Meer Mobashsher Ali, was also discussed by Ashraf, albeit through an alternative and more nuanced conceptual framework.

A former member faculty at BUET, Ashraf had received his master’s degree from MIT and was at that time engaged in doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania (with initial financial assistance from the AKP). By virtue of his affiliation with the architectural community in Dhaka, on the one hand, and his US-based academic training on the other, Ashraf brought a unique cultural voice to the symposium, combining a “local” authority with a detailed knowledge of the critical discourse on Kahn. He argued that the building’s particular significance to Bengali culture and identity had not yet received adequate scholarly attention, and further suggested that a focused consideration of this nexus would offer a new understanding of the work and its disciplinary significance.

Distinguishing his interpretive approach from that of Brownlee/De Long and Goldhagen, and circumnavigating damning criticisms of the project, Ashraf entwined a regionalist critical framework with a phenomenological emphasis, and thus developed a new contextual reading of the capitol complex. Kenneth Frampton’s essay “Towards a Critical Regionalism” and Joseph Rykwert’s discourse on the elemental hut, although not explicitly identified at the outset, were key theoretical reference points. Ashraf’s doctoral dissertation “The Hermit’s Hut: A Study in Asceticism and Architecture” (2002), advised by Joseph Rykwert and developed during the 1990s, formed the theoretical background to his reading of the capitol complex.60

------60 Joseph Rykwert, On Adam's House in Paradise: the Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972); Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, “The Hermit’s Hut: A study in Asceticism and Architecture” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2002); Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance,” in Anti Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Hal Foster, ed. (Port Townsend: Bay Press, 1983). In 1998 Ashraf was the co-curator of the exhibition An Architecture of Independence: The Making of Modern South Asia, which showcased the work of Charles Correa, ------

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In his paper “Mythic Themes and the Architecture of the Capitol Complex,” Ashraf broadly proposed that Kahn’s architectural approach in Dhaka represented a thoughtful response to the distinctive landscape of the Bengal delta (the delta consisting of Bangladesh and the majority of the ). Ashraf suggested that the “excruciatingly horizontal … topographical mesh of land, water and clay,” and the cultural rituals interlaced with this agricultural landscape, separated the delta from the geographical territory to its west (that is, India, Pakistan and the Middle East) and instead oriented the region towards the water- based, “rice-growing,” geo-cultural matrix of South-East Asia. The most pervasive building form in the delta, Ashraf argued, was the pavilion type: a typically centralised built “figure” situated in “nature,” with the rustic and permeable farmer’s hut as its earliest, most elemental manifestation. (Figure 2.17, 2.18) By extending his discussion beyond a historical association, Ashraf gave the Bengali hut a mythological significance. He argued that within the Bengali myths of cultural beginnings, as inflected by the nineteenth-century Bengal Renaissance, the origins of Bengali cultural rituals and their corresponding spatial support were located in nature. In this narrative, a progressive and humanist conception of Bengali culture was distinguished from both the history of colonisation and traditional tribalism. Instead it was imbued with local particularities via the medium of nature. The individual’s autonomous creative potential and the presence of a “transcendental sacrality” in a secular existence were emphasised as core tenets of the Bengal Renaissance, in particular in the work of one its key proponents, Abanindranath Tagore. Ashraf thus emphasised that the elemental hut, as enmeshed in the myth of cultural beginnings, was charged with a metaphysical or mystical significance and represented the fundamental accord between the individual and a “primordial” natural order. This dwelling type, he believed, accordingly served as the archetypal basis for honorific or sacred architectural forms in the region.

------Balkrishna Doshi, Mazharul Islam and Achyut Kanvinde. The associated catalogue essay had an introduction by Kenneth Frampton. Here, Ashraf made an explicit reference to Frampton, identifying the latter’s critical framework as appropriate for interpreting modernism in the subcontinent: “The Modern: Architecture of South Asia,” Kazi Khaleed Ashraf and James Belluardo, eds., An Architecture of Independence: The Making of Modern South Asia (New York: The Architectural League of New York, 1998), 23–29. The appropriation of South Asian modernism under the banner of “critical regionalism” was questioned by the subsequent generation of postcolonial scholars. See, for example, Vikramaditya Prakash, “Identity Production in Postcolonial Indian Architecture: Re-covering What We Never Had,” in eds. Nalbantoglu and Wong, Postcolonial Space(s) (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997) and A. G. Krishna Menon, “Interrogating Modern Indian Architecture,” Architecture + Design 17, no. 6 (2000): 24–28.

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Figure 2.17. Village Landscape, illustration. [Haque, Ahsan and Ashraf, Pundranagar to Sherebanlanagar, 9] Figure 2.18. Bamboo Housing in Ramna District, Dacca, 1969. [Nilsson, The New Capitals, 184]

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Read against this background, Kahn’s architectural strategies were depicted as a sensitive response to the deltaic landscape and as an approach rich in vernacular allusion. In Ashraf’s terms Kahn’s strategies included a “dig and mound” approach to siting; a topographical mediation of earth, water and vegetation; an assemblage of individuated permeable “dwellings” “open” to nature and “invaded” by nature; and the articulation of the Assembly building as a figure or a node set upon a vast horizontal landscape.

Further, Ashraf suggested that Kahn’s adoption of an “unambiguously honorific typology” in the Assembly Building – a centralised top-lit volume with surrounding ambulatory – connoted the transcendental sacrality that, in his interpretation, formed the core of Bengali identity. Notwithstanding the multiple historical and cultural traditions that coalesced in Kahn’s singular architectural approach, Ashraf ultimately claimed that Kahn’s unique brand of humanist architecture found, in Dhaka, a serendipitous alignment with the local conception of culture and identity.

Ashraf’s somewhat polemical discussion of the capitol complex at the symposium formed the outline for his subsequent and more developed published writings on the project, first in the Japanese publication Global Architecture (1994) and subsequently the catalogue essays for two significant architectural exhibitions held in Dhaka. The first of these – From Pundranagar to Sherebanglanegar: Architecture in Bangladesh, curated by Ashraf (with Saiful Haque and Raziul Ahsan, 1997) – was produced in affiliation with Chetana, the “Society for Architectural Research and Education in Bangladesh.” Co-curator Haque, also a graduate from the MIT masters program, was also present at the MIT symposium.61

Established in 1981, Chetana (meaning consciousness or awakening) was a research study group with the prominent Bangladeshi, Yale-trained architect Mazharul Islam at its helm. Its main objective, the group stated, was to record the architectural heritage of the Bengal and work towards a “rationale” for a contemporary and regional mode of architectural practice in Bangladesh. This ambition was made explicit in the organisation’s “manifesto,” a ------61 See Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, “The National Capital Complex: Louis I. Kahn’s Architecture in Dhaka,” in Yukio Futagawa, ed., Global Architecture: Louis I. Kahn National Capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 1962–83, 72 (1994): n.p. Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, “Wind, Water and Clay: The Architecture of Bangladesh,” in eds. Saiful Haque, Raziul Ahsan and Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, Pundranagar to Sherebanglanagar: Architecture in Bangladesh (Dhaka: Chetana Sthapatya Unnoyon Society, 1997); Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, “Capital Complexity: Kahn’s Architecture in Dhaka,” in Sherebanglanagar: Louis I. Kahn and the Making of a Capital Complex, Kazi Khaleed Ashraf and Saiful Haque, eds. (Dhaka: Loka Publications, 2002), 13–24. Affiliated publications include Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, “Reincarnation and Independence,” 23–29; Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, “Of Land, Water and Man in Bengal,” in Contemporary Architecture and City Form: The South Asian Paradigm, Farooq Ameen, ed. (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 1997); Mazharul Islam, Kazi Khaleed Ashraf and Saiful Haque, “Background Introducing Bangladesh – A Case for Regionalism,” in Regionalism in Architecture, Robert Powell, ed. (Singapore: Concept Media, 1985).

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document in which contemporary architectural production was emphasised as a vital field through which “cultural identity” could be confirmed. “The time has arrived,” it stated, “for us, the architects of an independent nation, to devote efforts and energy to the creation of a cultural identity in our Architecture.”62 Perhaps the most evocative register of this intent was Chetana’s program for documentation of architecture in Bangladesh, culminating in the Pundranagar to Sherebanglanegar exhibition, which took place at the Bangladesh National Museum in Dhaka during December 1997.63 The exhibition claimed for a multi-ethnic yet distinctively Bangladeshi built tradition.

The catalogue frontispiece was suggestive in this regard. It consisted of four plan drawings representative of diverse “faiths” and/or periods: The Paharpur Buddhist Monastery, Naogaon, dated to the first century; the Nine Domed Mosque in Bagerhat from the fifteenth century; the Katangar Hindu Temple in Dinajpur from the eighteenth century; and the twentieth-century secular National Assembly Building in Dhaka. Spanning two thousand years, from ancient monastic traditions to the present, this graphic timeline alluded to common architectural order: centralised monumental forms, elemental geometric configurations, concentric spatial layering and a masonry material order.64 In this narrative Kahn’s scheme for the parliamentary complex was claimed as Bangladeshi. (Figure 2.19, 2.20, 2.21, 2.22)

Ashraf penned the introduction to the catalogue. Titled “Wind, Water and Clay: The Architecture of Bangladesh,” the essay emphasised the manner in which such discrete architectural traditions and types were in each instance subtly adapted in response to the geo-cultural setting of the Bengal Delta. It emphasised the Bengali hut as a common thread and “pervasive architectural presence.” Ashraf’s discussion of the local manifestation of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century, pre-Moghul Islamic architecture – the Sultani period (the Sultani mosque in particular) – exemplified his broader thesis and was persuasively developed. He argued that the Bengali hut had a marked influence on the local manifestation of the Sultani mosque.65 In his reading, the freestanding nature of the hut informed the expression of the mosque as an isolated monument. He explained that this formal resolution was a typological deviation from the traditional courtyard configuration

------62 “Manifesto of Chetana” (unpublished), n.p. 63 Haque, Ahsan and Khaleed, Pudranagar to Sherebanglanagar. 64 An aligned relationship between the capitol complex and the Paharpur Monastery had been earlier argued for in Chetana’s Manifesto: “Manifesto of Chetana,” (unpublished, 1981), n.p. 65 This argument was developed with reference to Perween Hasan’s research on the sultanate mosques; see Perween Hasan, “Sultanate Mosques and Continuity in Bengal Architecture,” Muqarnas 6 (1990): 58–74.

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Figure 2.19. Top left, Frontispiece, Pundranagar to Sherebanlanagar. [Haque, Ahsan and Ashraf, Pundranagar to Sherebanlanagar, n.p.] Figure 2.20. Top right, Paharpur Monastery and Temple, Naogaon, 770- 810 AD. [Haque, Ahsan and Ashraf, Pundranagar to Sherebanlanagar, 153] Figure 2.21. Bottom left, Nine Domed Mosque, Bagerhat, 15th century AD. [Haque, Ahsan and Ashraf, Pundranagar to Sherebanlanagar, 181] Figure 2.22. Bottom right, Kantanagar Temple, Dinajpur, 1752 AD. [Haque, Ahsan and Ashraf, Pundranagar to Sherebanlanagar, 160]

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that was typically characteristic of this building type. (Figure 2.23, 2.24) More specific “local” transformations were described with reference to monolithic use of local materials; for example, the employment of terracotta and brick, the replacement of domes with the chala (hipped) roof forms, and the employment of the curved cornice derived from the bent roof of the hut. In addition, there was the analogous reading of the woven bamboo screen and the geometrical grid and patterns of the terracotta reliefs. For Ashraf this process of architectural synthesis framed the emergence of a Bengali folk architectural tradition. Ashraf’s emphasis on localised transformations similarly informed his reading of the manifestation of Moghul and British , concluding with Bengali/Bangladeshi modernism. His overview thus set the larger interpretive context in which his reading of the National Assembly Building was grounded.

Ashraf’s interpretation of the capitol complex, as advanced at the symposium and developed in subsequent essays, featured several key deviations from those offered by other scholars. For example, the layered articulation of the external facade and the large-scale, unglazed openings that perforated the outer screens of the National Assembly Building were interpreted as a mode of “landscaping” the building: When Kahn makes those gigantic perforations, when he makes those cavernous spaces of shadows, he is surreptitiously “landscaping” the buildings. This is not landscaping in the botanical but in a phenomenal sense: how nature – the sun, the wind, the air – invades a man-made artefact, erodes its envelope, makes it porous, and finally repossess it.66 Resisting the ubiquitous description of the strategy as an environmental shield, he argued, by contrast, that the perforated walls rendered the building permeable.

Also notable was his interpretation of the relationship between the centralised assembly chamber and the ambulatory. This architectural association had been previously celebrated as a compelling response to the new monumentality debate, or alternatively, critiqued for its traditional conservatisms. Ashraf suggested that it evoked the experience of circumambulation: The Assembly Building attains its specific character within the genre of centrality because of the ambulatory space, … Programmatically it is only a circulation ring, and compositionally it is a mediator between the inner form and various geometric figures in the outer ring, but psychologically it is much more. It is the primary orienting (often disorienting) envelope before entering the inner sanctum, recalling the experience of pradakshina (circumambulation), sacralising device as ancient as the Buddhist Stupa.67

------66 Ashraf, “Capital Complexity: Kahn’s Architecture in Dhaka,” 21. 67 Ashraf, “The National Capital Complex: Louis I. Kahn’s Architecture in Dhaka,” n.p.

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Figure 2.23. Choto Sona Mosque, Nawabganj, 1493-1519 AD. [Haque, Ahsan and Ashraf, Pundranagar to Sherebanlanagar, 157] Figure 2.24. Choto Sona Mosque, elevation. [Haque, Ahsan and Ashraf, Pundranagar to Sherebanlanagar, 45]

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In developing this argument Ashraf drew on Kahn’s architectural distinction of the mosque and the National Assembly Building. He suggested that in Kahn’s compositional approach the domains of the sacred and religious were deliberately juxtaposed. The dialectic of the religious and the sacred embodied in this strategy, he in turn suggested, had an “acute relevance in Bangladeshi social dynamics, as attested by the continuing tension between autochthonous spirituality and Islamic religiosity.”68 For Ashraf, Kahn’s architecture in Dhaka, whether by intention or serendipity, came close to approximating, architecturally, the philosophical and the social ideals of the liberation movement in East Pakistan.

Ashraf’s discussion of the capitol complex concluded with the consideration of the project as an urban entity. He suggested that it was ultimately in the capitol’s urban order that the geo-cultural character of the Bengal was most evocatively felt. In this interpretation, the composition of the capitol precinct was differentiated from the existing city of Dhaka as well as, in Ashraf’s terms, the figure-ground urbanism of North Indian cities. Using the term “figure-nature,” he alternatively framed the capitol design was as a “landscape” condition: The image of the city at Sher-e-Banglanegar may not coincide morphologically with the currently existing city nor with “the city of figure-ground” derived from the urbanism of north India. If there is a correspondence it is with the city of the “rice culture” matrix or what may be called “the city of figure-nature,” where the “traditional” city-country opposition is not abrasive … At the capital Complex, one can sense the silhouette of the phantasmal Bengali city.69 In this description, the capitol precinct – consisting of built nodes or “pavilions” set within a matrix of ponds, waterways and gardens – was promoted as model for a distinctly Bengali city.

The representation of the capitol setting as being aligned with the deltaic vernacular was, in some part, a response to the perceived shortcomings of the project – particularly the scepticism regarding this work’s cultural/political relevance. It was with Tafuri’s damning criticism in mind, for example, that Ashraf wrote: Whether Sherebanglanagar is a city, and whether this spectacular symbolic machine is out of tune in our fractious society are questions related to the efficacy of the center (the Assembly). The doubt about the center is perhaps redeemed by the quality of the overall plan, this fabric of buildings, lakes, and gardens, and their disposition in the landscape. It is this quasi-city that is more responsive to the features of the delta than realized or

------68 Ibid. 69 Ibid.

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discussed, and that offers public places that have now become dear to the people of Dhaka.70 Here the relationship between the capitol complex and its contemporary function was de- emphasised, and discontinuities between the building and the political reality of the city, by extension, were deemed irrelevant. The value of the capitol complex was in turn framed as, in essence, symbolic: Long before its functional occupation as a political “citadel,” the Assembly took on a haunting presence in the cultural and natural landscape of Dhaka. In the long period of construction, it became inscribed in the collective mind, paradoxically through or because of its “ruinous” image, as an emblem of things to come.71 Perceptions of the building as an incomplete work and a ruin coalesced here – it was depicted as an artefact awaiting future occupation or one that was no longer in use. It was inferred that the value of the project to the city was not as a house for democratic action or processes, but instead as a topographical setting that stirred within the collective imagination, essential cultural beginnings or the possibility for a vital future. “In the context of the nightmarish city that we all now live in,” Ashraf concluded, “the environment of Sherebanglanagar offers the image of an imaginary past – as if all Bengali cities were like this – and an imagined future.”72 (Figure 2.25)

Figure 2.25. Book jacket, Sherebanlanagar. [Haque and Ashraf, Sherebanlanagar]

------70 Ashraf, “Capital Complexity: Kahn’s Architecture in Dhaka,” 22–23. 71 Ibid., 14. 72 Ibid., 23.

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“Resisting a Conclusion”

It was with this open and somewhat optimistic critical impulse that Lawrence Vale, in his by-now classic book Architecture, Power and National Identity, provisionally closed his discussion of the National Assembly Building in Dhaka. This was a reflexive nod towards the building’s potential to draw forth multiple interpretations and meanings.

The range of critical positions and interpretations voiced at the MIT conference were suggestive in this regard. They included diverse, and at times juxtaposing, historiographical approaches from both individual scholars and their affiliated institutions. The autonomous, and for the most part Eurocentric, approach to architectural history was juxtaposed with cross-disciplinary modes of investigation. Discourse on nationalism and national identity, and the affiliated theme of the regional or the vernacular, formed the basis for the project’s acclaim as well as the scrutiny of it. And the postcolonial perspective offered a critical framework within which the cultural assumptions underpinning both the project and its reception were problematised. The symposium captured, in essence, a snapshot of critical culture during the 1980s and early 1990s as it was particularly shaped by the alignments and differences between east coast, American Ivy League universities. The project invited multiple modes of examination and was assigned diverse and at times contested and contradictory meanings. What emerged was the particularly elusive condition of this architectural work. This building, it appeared, slipped away from easy classification.

This chapter has traced the continuities and discontinuities across these interpretative strands. The thematic of the ruin has served as a productive lens through which to view these interpretations – not only does it reveal relationships between these seemingly disparate readings, but it also highlights ambiguities that prevent this work from occupying a neat ideological and historical position. Inscribed in this term was the “problem” that lay at the heart of this critical dialogue and exchange: namely the meaning and status of this work as a monument and its relationship to its immediate setting. Here several architectural tropes and relationships were consistently deemed pertinent: the relationship between this monument and the existing city, the primacy of the wall and the layered facade, and the function of the ambulatory.

An architectural reading of the project in relation to these categories forms part two of this dissertation.

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PART II – Capitol Complex: Architectural Reading

97

PRELUDE: “THE DEVELOPMENT BY LOUIS I. KAHN OF THE DESIGN FOR THE SECOND CAPITAL OF PAKISTAN AT DACCA”

The following design sequence was compiled to follow the process of design from its initial stages to its full development … Out of the many sketches made by Lou Kahn in developing the idea for the Second Capital of Pakistan, the most significant ones in terms of contributing to the design sequence were chosen and arranged in chronological order. The series of small sketches including the very first sketch made on the project, are from Lou Kahn’s sketchbook in which he makes notations of ideas. Others are much larger, made during discussions with the architects in his office or for the purpose of explaining an idea to be transcribed into a measured drawing.1 Editor’s Note (1964)

One of the most significant and suggestive records of the architectural priorities invested in the capitol complex by Kahn is his 1964 account, written when the project was still ongoing.2 Published in the student periodical of the North Carolina State College School of Design, the manuscript – signed March 1964 – was a revised and extended version of Kahn’s discussion of the capitol project during a lecture at Yale in October 1963.3 Recalling his first visit to Dhaka, in January of that year, Kahn dated the genesis of the design to the architectural insights reached only days after he first arrived in the city. The governing principles developed then, he suggested, remained consistent in subsequent configurations of the proposal. Kahn’s text was accompanied by a range of visual documents, including his sketches, measured site plans and photographs of site models at sequential stages of the design. Published in the fall, several months after the introductory text had been prepared, the document conveys the chronological development of the project over an approximately eighteen-month period, concluding with the site drawing of August 1964. This drawing shows that the first phase of the commission, namely the National Assembly Building and associated residences, had reached an advanced level of resolution by this time and closely resembled their final form.

------1 Editor’s preface to “The Development by Louis I. Kahn of the Design for the Second Capital of Pakistan at Dacca,” Student Publication of the School of Design, North Carolina State College, Raleigh 14 (May 1964): n.p. 2 Kahn, quoted in “The Development of Dacca,” n.p. 3 Lecture at Yale School of Architecture, October 30, 1963. First and final drafts of Kahn’s statements for the North Carolina student publication are in “North Carolina,” Box 56, Kahn Collection.

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As an early record of the design process by the architect, this now well-known document has become a dominant reference point in the critical reflections on the project.4 Interlacing the genesis of the design with his initial observations about the “way of life” in Pakistan, Kahn’s descriptions – and in particular his introductory narrative – have been read as a measure of his response to the local environment. The document has therefore supported diverse and at times contradictory interpretations, both laudatory and dismissive, of the relationship between this architecture and its cultural setting.

Over the next three chapters, I use this document as a springboard to a detailed discussion of the capitol complex. My primary historiographical interest in this study, however, does not lie in either celebrating or dismissing Kahn’s response or his interpretation of Dhaka as a cultural setting. Instead, I aim to trace the manner in which architectural themes and tropes, common to Kahn’s late idiom, were employed in the Dhaka commission and to demonstrate the manner in which these strategies have been uniquely adjusted or transformed in the process. Using the metaphor of the “ruin” as the conceptual framework for my analysis, I suggest that the relationship between architectural form and associated patterns of use are deliberately blurred in this project, and at times more radically separated or counterpoised. The text and illustrations included in the North Carolina student publication are suggestive in this regard.

------4 Kahn’s statement was later published in Perspecta: Louis Kahn, “Remarks: Louis I. Kahn,” Perspecta 9/10 (1965): 303–335 and subsequently as excerpts or in full in: “Louis I. Kahn – Oeuvres 1963–1969,” L’architecture d’aujourd’hui 40, 142, special issue (February–March 1969): 1; in “Louis I. Kahn 1901–1974,” Architecture, Movement, Continue, 34 (July 1974): 111–14; translated in Christian Norberg-Schulz, Kahn, 96– 108; in Alexandra Tyng, Beginnings: Louis I. Kahn’s Philosophy of Architecture (New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1984), 74, 115–119, 166–68; in Richard Saul Wurman, What Will Be Has Always Been: The Words of Louis I. Kahn (New York: Access Press, 1986),12–13; in Twombly, Louis Kahn, 162–168. The most quoted excerpt from this text concerns Kahn’s account of his epiphanic conception of the project, where “Observing the way of religion in the living of the Pakistani” prompted him to think that a “mosque woven into the space fabric of the assembly” would express the transcendental nature of the assembly. David De Long suggests that Kahn’s account of the trip to his studio group at the University of Pennsylvania in March 1963 closely matched Kahn’s discussion of the capitol commission during his 1963 talk at Yale. He thus elevates the source as a poignant register of Kahn’s initial reflections on the project. See footnote 16 in David Brownlee and David De Long, Louis I Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 92.

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CHAPTER 3 THE PROBLEM OF THE CITY: CITY WITHIN A CITY

When I was asked to design the Second Capital, legislative, of Pakistan in Dacca … I kept thinking how these buildings may be grouped and what would cause them to take their place on the land.1 Louis Kahn (1964)

Preamble

“A thousand acres of flat land subject to flood.” So Kahn described the designated site for the capitol commission in the opening passage to the introductory text in the North Carolina student publication. As the only explicit reference to the project’s physical context, the depiction appeared somewhat terse and elusive. Indeed the sparse level of detail about the existing city was a striking aspect of this document, and contrasts with Kahn’s animated account of the creative catalyst that his first visit to the city provided. When viewed in relation to the project’s sequential development, however, the two measures of the site underlined in Kahn’s concise categorisation – the extensive scale of the allocated site relative to the scale of the existing city, and the topographical nexus between land and water – emerge as fundamentally significant to the relationship between the capitol complex as realised and the city of Dhaka. This chapter considers this relationship as imagined by Kahn and as ultimately manifested in the design. (Figure 3.1)

Chapter Summary

In this chapter the term “ruin”, as an analogy, provides the conceptual framework for the critical analysis of the capitol complex at Dhaka, with a particular focus on the relationship between the capitol and the city.

As outlined in Part I of this dissertation, the relationship between the capitol complex and the city has been subject to divergent interpretations. The proposal has, for example, been framed as an extension of Kahn’s critical thesis on the decentralised city, especially his

------1 Louis Kahn, “The Development by Louis I. Kahn of the Design for the Second Capital of Pakistan at Dacca,” in Student Publication of the School of Design, North Carolina State College, Raleigh 14, no. 3 (May 1964): n.p.

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Figure 3.1. Capitol Complex [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.]

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hypothetical urban propositions for the city of Philadelphia. Others have criticised the work as a neo-colonialist architectural strategy that deliberately segregates the locus of political administration from the existing city. For yet others, the project represents a regional response whereby the local context has been interpreted in terms of highly selective regional references – the Moghul-built heritage on the one hand, and the Bengali alluvial landscape condition on the other. These readings, although theoretically discrete, have consistently framed the project as an idealised order, independent of its immediate setting. In contrast, other scholars have argued that the building was conceived as a democratic and participatory monument in continuum with the existing city.2

This chapter proposes another interpretation. I argue that, set in contrast to – and arguably in confrontation with – its immediate environment, the capitol complex precinct projects an image of an alternative urban order. This suggests that the presence of the city of Dhaka and its populace are not denied by this project, but nor does the monument serve as an active civic precinct in continuum with the existing city. In this reading, I argue that the meaning of this monument is less indebted to a civic purpose than to a desire to aesthetically stir the collective imagination. The chapter shows that the relationship between the architectural form and evidence of everyday civic use is blurred in regards to this building. This occurs in two ways – through a carefully choreographed relationship between the monument and the city, and through a sequence of both deliberate and unexpected amendments to the order and logic of the proposed site plan. I speculate that the successful integration of the building, in part, stems from this ambiguous condition.

The chapter begins with the designation of Dhaka as Pakistan’s “Second Capital.” The political circumstances underpinning Pakistan’s two-pronged capital structure has been well traced in other studies, with various writers interpreting the significance of the political context to the capitol commission in different ways. For example, some scholars have suggested that Dhaka’s subordinate role to the newly established city of Islamabad secured Kahn a relatively unencumbered level of creative autonomy.3 Other writers, referring to the dominant authority of the Western province, have framed the second capitol project as an

------2 These views were considered in Chapter Two. 3 For example, Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Louis Kahn’s Situated Modernism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001) and Peter Reed, “Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, Capital of Bangladesh” in David Brownlee and David De Long, Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1991).

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essentially colonialist enterprise.4 In retracing this historical narrative, I place an emphasis on the competing nationalist ideologies with which the project was charged. Discrete conceptions of regional built tradition were not only significant to Kahn’s perception of the architectural context in which he worked, they were also cited by the architect in support of his urban speculations. I suggest that the politics of local identity provided Kahn with the leverage to extend, and in some respects transform, his critical thesis on the city.

Dhaka’s historical development is my next consideration. Beginning as a riverside settlement, I explain how the city’s northbound expansion was prompted by successive and clearly demarcated centres for political governances; first by the Moghuls and then by the British. The site for the Second Capital represents a third administrative node within the city. The politics of segregation implicit to this urban order has already been underlined and critiqued by other scholars.5 In reflecting on Dhaka’s evolution, I am particularly interested in the contemporary order of the city. Within present-day Dhaka, conserved monuments and gardens associated with Moghul and British rule punctuate and give respite in an otherwise densely knit and populated urban matrix. Defined as an expansive urban void, the capitol complex extends this urban experience.

The relationship between the National Assembly Building and the existing city forms the third component of the chapter and is the primary focus of the study. My reading of the project is developed with reference to key design stages. I suggest that two related architectural strategies are pivotal in this regard. The first is the calibration of the building with respect to its distant prospect. Using expansive void elements such as lakes, open parks and picturesque gardens, the distance between the building and the onlooker was carefully choreographed. The second is the expression of the building as an apparently vacant structure, which I argue was significant to achieving this desired visual affect.

------

------4 As discussed in Chapter Two this reading is, for example, advanced by Manfredo Tafuri and Lawrence Vale: Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, Modern Architecture (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979), 407; Lawrence Vale, Architecture, Power and National Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 236–271. 5 For example, Sten Ake Nilsson, The New Capitals of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies Monograph Series, 12 (Lund: Studentiltteratur, 1973). Nilsson’s interpretation was cited in and formed the basis of Kenneth Yeang’s representation of the second capitol site in his 1986 “1986 Technical Review Summary,” see Aga Khan Award for Architecture, “Project Brief,” (1989) www.akdn.org/architecture/project.asp?id=75 (accessed March 5, 2013).

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Two Capitals

In June 1959, less than one year after Pakistan’s “weak” civilian rule was stalled by a military coup led by Field Marshall Ayub Khan, it was decided to establish a Second Capital for Pakistan in Dhaka, East Pakistan. This decision was taken to complement the relocation of the country’s “first capital” (at that time centralised in West Pakistan) from the colonial port city of Karachi, to a new planned city to be called Islamabad.6 With Pakistan’s two discrete provinces geographically separated by a thousand miles of Indian land and further delineated by socio-cultural distinctions, the introduction of a Second Capital was framed by the military administration as a measure toward representative equivalence and national unity. Signalling a return to participatory democracy, albeit in significantly compromised terms, the 1962 Constitution of Pakistan gave mandate to a 165-member national assembly and further confirmed the two-pronged structure of the nation’s capital. In this arrangement, Islamabad was designated as the “executive” capital and Dhaka as its “legislative” counterpart. The delegates to the National Assembly, it was proposed, would convene in each city on an alternating basis.

The relocation of the first capital from Karachi, the country’s largest city, to West Pakistan’s relatively undeveloped interior was promoted by the administration through relatively generic nationalist rhetoric. As a newly designed capital city, it was proposed that Islamabad would provide a “pure” political environment, untainted by commercial corruption (considered endemic to Karachi) and the history of colonisation. Thus it would powerfully symbolise Pakistan’s emergent independent national status. The adjacency of Islamabad to Rawalpindi, the base for the military headquarters, presented an explicit and arguably more earnest representation of Ayub’s political ambitions; that is, an assertive program of nation building governed by a civil-military coalition. This categorical projection of centralised power in West Pakistan was, however, complicated by the need to govern two unconnected and increasingly polarised territories.

------6 An important publication on the city of Dhaka and a recurring citation in contemporary studies on the city is Sharif Uddin Ahmed, ed., Dhaka: Past, Present, Future (Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 1991). In an essay in this volume Shirin Akhtar traces the background to the city’s nomination as the Second Capital. Shirin Akhtar, “On the Selection of Dhaka as the Capital of Eastern Bengal and Assam 1905– 1911,” in Dhaka: Past, Present, Future. Karachi served as Pakistan’s first capital following the independence and partition of British India (1947–58), then in Rawalpindi (1958–62), and finally in Islamabad. In 1959 the capital was transferred from Karachi to the Punjab garrison town of Rawalpindi and from there to the newly constructed Islamabad a decade later. See: Sten Nilsson, The New Capitals of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, 139–182.

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Throughout the 1950s (and notwithstanding East Pakistan’s initially strong support for national unification as an Islamic state) ethnic distinctions between Pakistan’s two precincts, coupled with perception of political and economic discrimination, had provoked a demand for regional autonomy within the county’s eastern province.7 East Pakistan’s opposition to the central government had initially gained political expression through the “Language Movement”, a popular resistance front posed in reaction to the government’s imposition of Urdu as the national language (1947).8 In protest, the East Bengali intellectuals and student activists had sought equal national status for Bengali, the native tongue to the relatively ethnically homogenous East Pakistanis who comprised over fifty percent of the country’s population. At first confined to a small segment of the urban middle class, the Language Movement mobilised wider sections of the population following the shooting of four student protestors in 1952 and extended to include members of the rural community as well as the economically underprivileged. The Bengali language ultimately gained formal national status in 1956. However, the regionalist principles that had fuelled political resistance in the Bengal continued to charge an ongoing claim for political equity over the next decade. The East Pakistani demands for political and economic autonomy was, therefore, fundamentally interlaced with regionalist discourse on Bengali culture and origins.

With the assumption of power by the military regime in 1958 the conflict between the two sectors was further agitated. West Pakistan harboured an essentially colonial attitude towards the country’s eastern province during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and this further amplified its administrative and military dominance.9 East Pakistanis, for example, only represented five percent of officers within the army and less than a third of the country’s civil personnel. Higher ranked administrative posts, which required proficiency in Urdu and included those in charge of East Pakistan’s governance, were increasingly occupied by West Pakistani citizens. And, despite the East’s contribution to more than half of Pakistan’s foreign exchange earnings through the export of jute, the state budgetary distribution favoured the western sector of the country. As a result economic indicators in

------7 For the emergence of Pakistan as a nation-state see: Stephen Philip Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2004); and Yasmeen Niaz Mohuddin, Pakistan: A Global Studies Handbook (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2007). 8 For a political history of Bangladeshi independence and detailed account of post independence politics of representation, see: A.M.A. Muhith, Bangladesh: Emergence of a Nation (Dhaka: University Press, 1992 [first published 1978]). 9 For Ayub Khan’s personal views on East Pakistan see: Lawrence Ziring, The Ayub Khan Era: Politics in Pakistan, 1958–1969 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1971). For a discussion of Ayub’s neo-colonial attitude to East Pakistan and “Basic Democracies” see: Cohen, The Idea of Pakistan, 119.

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East Pakistan languished below their western counterparts. Read against such a tumultuous and fundamentally unstable domestic political setting, Ayub’s appointment of Dhaka as the Second Capital of Pakistan can be seen as a pre-emptive response to the intimation of political dissent by the country’s eastern province.

Thus informed by specific, and in some respects divergent, political motives, Pakistan’s two new capitals were each laden with a distinct set of formal and symbolic criteria. Framed as a new and primary seat of government, the architecture of Islamabad was to confidently assert a strong and powerful image of an emerging nation-state. The Greek architect Constantinos Doxiadis was hired to plan the city (1959–63) and a number of high-profile American and European designers, including Gio Ponti and Edward D. Stone, were entrusted with significant architectural commissions. Foreign consultants were not only a practical necessity that addressed the limitation in the number of locally trained architects, but also, significantly, affiliated the project with western progress and prestige. Expatriate authority, however, did not equate to a subordinate client group. The associated architectural propositions were vigorously tested against a core priority – to synthesise a universal and progressive modernist expression with Islamic formal traditions, thus rendering the two as synonymous.

In contrast, the new institutional facilities associated with the Second Capital were situated close to an existing, historically layered and heavily populated provincial centre. More immediately addressed to a localised audience, the new capitol at Dhaka was charged with a twofold, arguably conflicting, symbolic ambition. On the one hand, the precinct was to represent East Pakistan’s equitable participation within the national political administration and, on the other, to galvanise the neo-colonial benevolence, if not authority, of West Pakistani-dominated regime. In this project, colonial patronage was curiously interlaced with a struggle for regional independence and identity.

The project was initially offered to the Dhaka architect Mazharul Islam. With undergraduate training in engineering, Islam had continued his academic studies abroad, earning a design degree from the University of Oregon and a diploma in tropical architecture at the Architectural Association in London during the early to mid 1950s. Returning to the United States, he studied at Yale and gained his Masters in Architecture under Paul Rudolf

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(1960–61).10 Significant early works included the College of Arts and Crafts (1953–55, now the Fine Arts Institute). (Figure 3.2, 3.3) Concurrently established with the Balbul Academy of Fine Arts (for dancers, singers and musicians) and Bangla Academy (for Bengali language and literature), the college was symbolic of resurging interest in Bengali arts and folk culture. By the early 1960s Islam had established his reputation as an eminent local practitioner and was well regarded as a key proponent of regional modernism. It was on his insistent recommendation that invitations to design the Second Capital were first extended to critically acclaimed European architects; initially Le Corbusier and subsequently Alvar Aalto. Both architects were unable to accept the commission and the project was offered to Kahn.11 Mazharul Islam was an ardent regionalist, in both political and cultural modes of affiliation. For him, the capitol commission represented the opportunity to secure East Pakistan an exemplary architectural project, equal to, if not surpassing, those envisaged for Islamabad. With the architectural education in Dhaka in its infancy, he also saw the commission as an opportunity to energise the architectural culture in the city.12

Dhaka: Urban History

The appointed site for the second capitol was on open agricultural farmland, adjacent to the military airport on the northern industrial fringe of Dhaka and approximately two miles from the existing civic centre. (Figure 3.4) This northbound projection of the city, by way of a new and relatively autonomous governmental precinct, was in effect a continuation of Dhaka’s traditional pattern of extension. Beginning as an artisan trading settlement, the township’s substantive urbanisation – first by the Moghuls and subsequently by the British administration – had in each instance developed relative to a new and clearly demarcated centre for political governance. In this sequence the second capitol precinct presented a third and new administrative node to the city. (Figure 3.5) To understand the relationship of

------10 On Islam’s work See: Shamsul Wares, “Architecture in the 50s and 60s in Bangladesh,” Architecture and Planning, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (1982); Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, “Mazharul Islam, Kahn and Architecture in Bangladesh,” Mimar 31 (March 1989): 55–63; and Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, “Mazharul Islam, Reincarnation and Independence: The Modern Architecture of South Asia,” in An Architecture of Independence: The Making of Modern South Asia, Kazi Khaleed Ashraf and James Belluardo, eds. (New York: Architectural League of New York, 1998), 23–29. Interviews with Mazharul Islam have been pivotal to the account of the early history of the project. See for example: Wiseman, Beyond Time, 151–52. 11 Islam’s role as the “Dacca Capitol Architectural Planning advisor” was noted in an early letter to Kahn, see: Letter, M. Stewart (Department of State) to Louis I. Kahn, September 20, 1962, “PAK. Correspondence–Miscellaneous,” Box LIK 120, Kahn Collection. 12 Interview with author.

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Figure 3.2. Mazharul Islam, Fine Arts Institute, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 1953–55. [Ashraf and Belluardo, An Architecture of Independence, 59] Figure 3.3. Fine Arts Institute. [Ashraf and Belluardo, An Architecture of Independence, 59]

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Figure 3.4. Top left, Dacca City Map (colour added), 1962. [Islam and Khan, “High Class Residential Area in Dhaka City”, 3] Figure 3.5. Top right, Demarcation between Pre-Moghul and Moghul Dhaka. [Chowdhury and Faruqui, “Physical Growth of Dhaka City”, 47] Figure 3.6. Bottom left, The Moghul Capital. [Chowdhury and Faruqui, “Physical Growth of Dhaka City”, 51]

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the project to its immediate urban context, it is important to also understand the urban history of the city.

In its early development, in the period generically referred to as “Pre-Moghul” Dhaka (before 1608), the township had emerged on the northern banks of the Burganga River. It was roughly centred in the area presently known as Bangla Bazar, with its northern extent defined by the Dulai River.13 (Figure 3.6) Composed of craft-based, specialised localities and markets, early built works in this area are thought to have served a range of functions including living quarters, workstations and shops. A lack of available historical records has hindered a precise understanding of Dhaka’s early evolution. The originating Hindu titles that remain associated with these localities, however, provide an indication of the types of industries that were once practiced here. The tortuous laneways and tightly composed plot subdivision that formed the early structure of the township have persisted and remain characteristic of the precinct.14

In the early seventeenth century, under Moghul rule, Dhaka gained official status as a provincial capital (named Jahangirnagar) and was rapidly urbanised. Early administrative and commercial structures, located to the west and at a distance to the existing township, included the Fort (established over the existing Afghan Fort, now the Central Jail) and the Chawk market place (Badshahi Bazar or Royal Market) around which the Moghul city subsequently developed.15 Cultivated as a significant centre for commerce and the trade of

------13 See Abdul Karim “Origin and Development of Mughal Dhaka,” and A.M. Chowdhury, Shabnam Faruqui, “Physical Growth of Dhaka City,” in Sharif Uddin Ahmed, Dhaka: Past, Present, Future, 24–42; 43–63. Also see Ahmad Hasan, Dacca: A Record of Its Changing Fortunes, (Dacca: Dacca Museum, 1956). These documents form consistent reference points in more recent overviews of the city’s historical development, see for example, Zishan Choudhury, and Urban Transformation in Old Dhaka (Lambert, Saarbrucken, 2012) and Khurshid Zabin Hossain Taufique, “Interfacing of Urban Planning, Urban Economics and Ecology: a New Urban Paradigm for Sustainable Urban Development of Mega City, Dhaka, Bangladesh” (PhD diss., Bauhaus Universität Weimar, 1997), 25–53. This dissertation was not available for public borrowing. I am grateful to the author for providing me with a copy. For a general discussion of the presence of Islam in the Bengal prior to the Moghul period (usually referred to as Sultanate period [A.D. 1338 – 1576]) see Willem van Schendel, A History of Bangladesh, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 27–28. For a discussion of Sultanate architecture, mosques in particular, see Parween Hasan, “Sultanate Mosques and Continuity in Bengal Architecture,” Muqarnas 6 (1990): 58–74. 14 See for example: Abu H. Imamuddin, Shamim Ara Hassan and Wahidul Alam, “Shakhari Patti: A Unique Old City Settlement, Dhaka,” in Architectural and Urban Conservation in the Islamic World, Abu H. Imamuddin and Karen R. Longeteig, eds., (Geneva: The Aga Khan Trust for Culture: 1990), 121–132. 15 For a typological consideration of Dhaka’s Moghul structures, see: Part B in Ahmed, ed., Dhaka: Past, Present, Future. For an inventory of significant Islamic monuments in Dhaka including lucid descriptions of these built works, see Catherine B. Asher, “Dhaka: Inventory of Key Monuments,” in George Mitchell, ed., The Islamic Heritage of Bengal (Paris: Unesco, 1984), 54–63.

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textiles, Dhaka prospered. By the 1670s the city was one of the largest emporiums in the world, with a population estimated at nine hundred thousand and an urban area extending seven to ten miles along the river and up to two and half miles inland. The relocation of the Moghul capital to Murshidabad in 1717 initiated a decline in Dhaka’s population and urban extent. By the 1760s, as the British consolidated their control of the Bengal region, Dhaka’s remaining institutional status was abolished and the locus of political and military power transferred to Calcutta. Accounts of Dhaka during the early British period are stories of economic and urban deterioration, with the once-thriving centre for industry reduced to a market dependent on Britain. Further diminished by a sequence of famines and floods, the city was mostly deserted by the early nineteenth century and its urban fabric overtaken by the encroaching jungle.

Maintaining the Moghul urban framework in their early years of administration, the British settled their quarters within the existing built work and did not immediately extend the city.16 Initially based in the Chawk area, colonial residences, offices and courts were gradually moved eastwards, indicating a preference for riverside localities close to Bangla Bazar. By the 1840s the population of the city was once again on the rise and Dhaka’s urban deterioration had come to a halt. During this period administrative initiatives, combined with public pressure, activated a sequence of urban renewal programs, which, although sporadic, restored and modernised aspects of the existing Moghul city. New provisions for housing and public facilities within old Dhaka were combined with infrastructure schemes such as new road systems, piped water supply, streetlights and riverfront embankments.

The British intervention also included a number of reclamation and restoration projects, the most ambitious of which included the revitalisation of the Moghul edifice, Lalbagh Fort.17 (Figure 3.7) The construction of the fort was begun by Muhamad Azam between 1677 and 1679 and was further developed by his successor Shaista Khan from 1679 to 1688.18 The complex consists of the mosque, the Tomb of Bibi Pari, Diwan-I Khas, a tank, a walled enclosure and gates. These structures, along with the axial layout of the monuments, are generally regarded as adhering to the Imperial Moghul tradition however, the fort was never

------16 For nuanced reading of Dhaka’s development during the British period see: Sharif Uddin Ahmed, Dacca: A Study in Urban History and Development, (London: Curzon Press, 1986), see also Howard Spodek, “Review of Dacca: A Study in Urban History and Development, by Sharif Uddin Ahmed,” The Journal of Asian Studies 48, no. 2 (May 1989), 414–415. 17 Ahmed, Dacca: A Study in Urban History and Development, 132. 18 Catherine B. Asher, “Dhaka: Inventory of Key Monuments,” 108.

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fully completed and remained unfinished in appearance. (Figure 3.8, 3.9) Abandoned during the early decades of British governance, the fort had badly deteriorated and by the 1840s it was overgrown with vegetation. Populated with random huts, it was host to the city’s underprivileged. The Lalbagh Fort was restored in the early 1840s, with the intention of converting this Moghul monument into a public garden and a place for recreation; a “public ornament” to the city. Although the restorations have been typically described as a significant British achievement, scholars have nevertheless framed the practice in relation to colonial and restorative practices. The colonial community, inspired by metropolitan culture, ultimately created institutions to serve its own social and recreational ends.19

The most significant change to Dhaka’s urban structure by the British was the establishment of the railway line during the 1880s, and a new civic centre was subsequently developed close to this.20 Stationed northward from the Chawk and Bangla Bazar, the railway reoriented Dhaka away from the river and radically altered the prevailing urban logic of the city. (Figure 3.10) The provision of the rail service, combined with the naval position en route between Calcutta and Assam, reasserted and further galvanised Dhaka’s strategic significance as an administrative and commercial centre and the city gradually grew as a regional node for governmental departments; in particular medical and educational facilities. The appointment of Dhaka as the capital of East Bengal and Assam was instigated by the partition of the Bengal 1906–11. Although short lived, it in effect consolidated Dhaka’s steady re-emergence as an administrative centre over the latter decades of the nineteenth century.

In contrast with the more integrated approach that had characterised the early British settlement, the architecture of the new British capital was located in the relatively undeveloped district of Ramna, immediately to the north of the railway station. Originally the site of lavish Moghul gardens – since disintegrated – the area had been first cleared by the British administration in the 1820s. Developed as a green oval and racecourse, it served as a recreational reserve. Disused for over two decades, the racecourse was again revitalised in the early 1840s when colonial residences were established on its immediate periphery. The suburb’s substantive development, however, dates to the partition of 1906 when Dhaka regained its status as a provincial capital. The Ramna oval formed a delineating element in

------19 See, for example, Thomas Metcalf, An Imperial Vision, Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002). 20 Initially connecting Dhaka to Narayanganj and Mynensingh.

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Figure 3.7. Top left, Lalbagh Fort, Dhaka, 17th Century AD, plan. [Haque, Ahsan and Ashraf, Pundranagar to Sherebanlanagar, 73] Figure 3.8. Top right, Lalbagh Fort. [Author’s image] Figure 3.9. Bottom, Lalbagh Fort. [Haque, Ahsan and Ashraf, Pundranagar to Sherebanlanagar, 169]

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Figure 3.10. Map of Dacca (1924). [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/77/Dacca1924.jpg, accessed March 20 2013]

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the configuration of the precinct. A new civic district was placed to the green’s southern boundary and an extensive colonial garden suburb developed to its north. Notable civic monuments constructed during this period include Curzon Hall (foundation laid in 1904 prior to the partition; originally the town hall, later Dhaka College/University) and the Government House (later the high court). (Figure 3.11, 3.12)

The next phase of Dhaka’s urban development dates to the partition of British India in 1947 and the advent of Pakistani independence, at which time the city became the seat of the East Pakistan province. The massive influx of migrant population from India at this time resulted in the city’s unplanned northward expansion, with Ramna retaining its status as a civic central district.21 In 1957, under the Colombo Plan, English consultants Minoprio and Spencely and P. W. Macfarlane were commissioned to prepare a master plan for the future evolution of the city. Submitted in 1959, the study reasserted the significance of the Buriganga River as a major urban and economic focal point, albeit at a reduced density, and generally posited integrative principles. For example, it recommended converting the Dholai Khala (canal), which delineated the boundary between pre-Moghul and Moghul Dhaka, into a ring road (except for the eastern portion of the canal), and further integrating Ramna and old Dhaka by proposing to relocate the railway further west beyond the densely developed suburbs. In this proposal the area to the west of Ramna racecourse was recommended for a new governmental enclave. This proposed zoning was ultimately disregarded.

The selection of the site for the second capitol in the outskirts of Dhaka has been subject to criticism, most provocatively by Sten Nilsson who frames the decision as a neo-colonial strategy whereby the centre of political governance is deliberately segregated from the existing city.22 (Figure 3.13) In the remainder of this chapter I offer an alternative interpretation.

In the present day experience of the city, former settings for colonial governance serve as garden settings within an otherwise congested city fabric. The experience of “Colonial” monuments, whether in contemporary use or conserved as historic built fabric, is interlaced with their status as sites of leisure and tourism. I argue that this experience of the colonial city is extended by the capitol precinct.

------21 Sarfaraz Adnan and md. Mostafizur Rahman, Spatial Structure of Dhaka City from Sustainability Perspective: Analysis of Spatial Structure of Dhaka City from Sustainability Perspective (Saarbrucken: Lambert, 2010), 3–4. 22 See Sten Ake Nilsson, The New Capitals of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, Scandinavian Institute of Asian Studies Monograph Series, 12 (Lund: Studentiltteratur, 1973), 188.

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Figure 3.11. Curzon Hall, Dhaka, 1904 AD. [Haque, Ahsan and Ashraf, Pundranagar to Sherebanlanagar, 187] Figure 3.12. Governor’s House, Dhaka, 1905 AD. [Haque, Ahsan and Ashraf, Pundranagar to Sherebanlanagar, 187]

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Figure 3.13. Page 188 in The New Capitals, map. [Nilsson, The New Capitals, 188] Figure 3.14. Google Earth (colour added). [Accessed February 10, 2013]

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I suggest that in his conception of the master plan for the capitol, Kahn proposed an urban edifice that was not segregated from the existing city, nor in continuum with the existing condition. What he sought was to project a legible and spectacular image of an alternative city in juxtaposition to its immediate setting. With the capitol project the city was ultimately presented with an urban void: an extensive park setting within which an enigmatic monument was poised.

The Second Capitol

Kahn first travelled to Dhaka at the end of January 1963, at which time he was presented with a building program and inspected the site and the city.23 Oriented north-south, the land allocated for the second capitol was close to the industrial suburb of Tejgaon and mediated between the airport and Mirpur Road, the main city road extending northbound from the western edges of old Dhaka.24 Relatively flat and designated as “low land”, the site was predominantly used for farming. A brickmaking plant, agricultural school and related facilities were the only substantive buildings within the precinct.25 The undulating topography to the north of the site registered the structure of a former rural township. A narrow track, later developed as Manik Mian Avenue, formed the southern boundary to the site. (Figure 3.14)

The components of the brief scheduled for immediate development included the National Assembly Building, housing and offices for the assembly members, government ministers and secretaries during their periodic stays in Dhaka, and individual residences for the president, the speakers and the secretary of assembly, all to be accommodated on a two- hundred-and-thirty-five-acre zone initially acquired by the government and approved for

------23 Telegram, CapDap to Kahn, received August 27, 1962, “Second Capital–Pakistan Cablegrams To/From Kaffiludin Ahmad August 27, 1962 through Nov. 26, 1963,” Box LIK 117, Kahn Collection. Previously cited in Reed, “Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, Capital of Bangladesh,” 382. 24 Within the literature on the project, the location of the nominated capitol site is typically described as outside the limit of the existing city. However, in 1962, Dhaka’s northern suburbs of Gulshan and Mahakbali had already been developed. For a discussion of the city’s municipal boundary and extent of urban development in the early 1960s see F. Karim Khan and Nzrul Islam, “High Class residential Areas in Dacca City,” The Oriental Geographer 8, no.1 (January 1964), 1–40. They describe the northern residential suburbs to the east of the second capitol site as defined by “complete urban characteristics”. 25 At present the site is bounded by Manik Mian Avenue to the south, Begum Rokeya Avenue (Former Eastern Periphery Road) to the east; and Seyed Mahbub Morshed Ave (Former Argagaon Rd) traversing the site on the north.

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development.26 These programmatic elements were to be considered as part of a larger master plan, incorporating the contiguous parcel of land to the north. Initially estimated at approximately six hundred acres, the capitol precinct was subsequently extended at several stages and ultimately measured at approximately one thousand acres in full extent.27 Slated for future development were the Supreme Court, a democratic enclave, offices, schools, a library, a museum, a hospital and additional residences.

During his six-day stay in Dhaka, Kahn met with government officials and members of the Pakistani Public Works Department, the office charged with the administration of design and construction of the second capitol. Particularly significant among them was Kafiluddin Ahmed, the deputy chief engineer of the PWD and the local figure in charge of the project (1963–69).28 Kahn’s itinerary within the existing city is not precisely known, but he is understood to have visited significant urban sites including Lalbagh Fort and Garden, thereby extending his firsthand experience of Moghul built heritage.29 Only months earlier, during his first visit to India, Kahn had toured Moghul masterworks in Delhi and Agra. His friend and associate for the Indian Institute of Management, Balkrishna V. Doshi, is typically credited with introducing the architect to Indian architectural history, and the

------26 Reed locates the program for the building in: “Second Capital–Pakistan 62–63 Pakistan Public Works Department, (Ahmad, Farqui, Qureshim, Hasan, etc.),” Box LIK 117, Kahn Collection; “Requirements for Second Capital Dacca,” “Second Capital – Pakistan 62–63 Pakistan Public Works Department, (Ahmad, Ahmad, Farqui, Qureshim, Hasan, etc.),” Box LIK 117, Kahn Collection. See notes 6 and 9: Reed, “Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, Capital of Bangladesh,” 382. In my research at the Kahn Collection I was not able to source these documents at the nominated locations. My experience was similar to that expressed by Lawrence Vale, who notes that the only written architectural program for the assembly that he could locate at the Kahn Collection were undated and appeared to have been devised after Kahn’s work had commenced, see endnote 7 to the Chapter “The Acropolis of Bangladesh,” in Lawrence Vale, Architecture, Power and National Identity, 311. 27 Early drawings are indicative of two nominated site allocations: 250 acres for the first construction phase and 640 acres as the full available extent including land designated for future development. Kenneth Yeang suggests that after two years of negotiations 840 acres were allotted for the site (out of which 600 acres were government farmlands and 240 acres were privately owned), and another 90 acres were made available after two more years. After 1971, the site was further extended to near 1000 acres, see Yeang, “1986 Technical Review Summary,” 2. David Wisdom similarly notes that, “The initial commitment of land was 235 acres. Kahn pleaded for more site area and in conferences about various master plan studies he obtained an increase in area increments of a few hundred acres to the present 1,000 acres,” see, David Wisdom, “Kahn’s Building at Dacca,” in “Louis I. Kahn 1901/1974,” Rassegna 7, no. 21 (March 1985): n.p. 28 A detailed account of Kahn’s first visit to Dhaka is one recalled by August Komendant in August Komendant, 18 Years with Architect Louis I. Kahn, (Englewood, N.J.: Aloray, 1975), 77–83. See also Carter Wiseman, Louis I. Kahn Beyond Time and Style: A Life in Architecture (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2007), 152–53. 29 Goldhagen notes that during his first trip to Dhaka Kahn travelled to Karachi and Lahore see, Goldhagen, Situated Modernism, 180.

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Moghul tradition in particular.30 Historically privileged by the British classification of Indian styles as the high point in the evolution of Indian architectural trajectory, the Moghul architectural legacy was validated as a vital anchor point in the development of modern architecture in India.

The elevated status of Moghul architecture had been further amplified in Pakistan through the post-independence discourse on national identity. Not only did the Moghul tradition represent an ideal cultural foundation for a nation unified by Islam, but the period was also accorded additional significance as it represented a shared material heritage between Pakistan’s two precincts. Typically classified as the “golden era” in Dhaka’s urban evolution, the vitality of the city under the Moghul rule was considered emblematic of the successful integration of Islam within the Bengal, both in historic terms and, as the Pakistani administration were keen to emphasise, as an ongoing social reality. For Kahn’s client, in particular the West Pakistani representatives of his client group, the Moghul monuments of India and Pakistan were explicitly sanctioned as the historical ground upon which a “modern” Pakistani architecture should evolve.

Within East Pakistan, however, an additional alternative “local” built tradition was underlined and (arguably) favoured. Looking to the rural vernacular rather than the urban built fabric, the timber pavilion – a single-roomed, rectangular structure with bamboo wooden posts, woven screen walls and thatched roofs – was depicted as the most authentic response to the deltaic landscape (the delta consisting of Bangladesh and the majority of the West Bengal). A particular point of emphasis was the manner in which these dwellings were sited. This highlighted an approach colloquially described as a “dig-and-mound” strategy, whereby earthen mounds formed by the excavation of nearby land allowed for the elevation of individual pavilions above the flood plain. The resulting depressions in the landform typically served as fish ponds. During the dry months raised, narrow tracks provided circulation between these dwellings and with the monsoon period, or the onset of floods, rowboats allowed for transport among apparently floating pavilions. Considered the most pervasive built elements within East Pakistan’s agricultural landscape, these simple structures were further aligned with local farming practices and modes of inhabiting the land. Thus, interlaced with environmental as well as anthropological associations, the timber ------30 For example see, Stephen Bernard James, “Louis I. Kahn: Toward an Iconography of Memory” (PhD. diss. University of Virginia, 2010), 154. Also see, Kathleen James, “Louis Kahn’s Indian Institute of Management’s Courtyard: Form versus Function,” Journal of Architectural Education 49, no. 1 (September 1995): 38–49.

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pavilions of the rural Bengal were underlined as a highly localised built tradition and a material culture that distinguished the Bengal from Pakistan’s western precinct.31

Approximately twenty months after Kahn’s visit to Dhaka, Roy Vollmer arrived in the city to establish a field office. Gus Langford was soon to follow. Correspondence between Vollmer, Langford and the Philadelphia office provides a nuanced account of the perceived contextual particularities and the everyday processes that informed the project’s development and realisation. Vollmer’s personal reports, often infused with gentle humour, were particularly poignant. In one of his earliest communications, Vollmer commented on the local conventions for siting: “Use the age old method of building on high ground or making tanks to supply additional earth … The approach you are taking is excellent – the Bengali told me so ... * You might also consider a canal system, this was a Moghul principle.”32

Kahn’s early introduction to the architectural tradition in East Pakistan was underscored by a parallel, and in some respects competitive, conception of local built tradition and built heritage considered to be the best foundation for a future architectural culture in East Pakistan.

A Miniature City

Invited to design institutions for legislative and legal governance; for health, recreation, education, religion and culture; places for commercial activity as well as housing, Kahn’s brief for the capitol precinct presented the programmatic ingredients for a self-supportive urban enclave or a small city.

------31 This is for example highlighted by August Komendant in his account of the March 1963 visit to Dhaka. He notes: “The farmhouses were built on a pile of soil up to several feet higher than the surrounding area. The resulting pit of excavation was used as a fish pool. When the snow melted in the Himalayas, the rivers overflowed and put the lower terrain under water. The fish, when the water level lowered, escaped to the deeper waters and filled the pools. So the farmers had plenty of fish year-round. The connection with higher terrain and other farms during the high water period was possible only by boats.” See, Komendant, 18 Years with Architect Louis I. Kahn, 77–78. For a description of rural huts see, Attilio Petruccioli, “A note on Louis Kahn’s mosque at Banglanagar,” in Catherine B. Asher, “Dhaka: Inventory of Key Monuments,” in George Mitchell, ed., The Islamic Heritage of Bengal, (Paris: Unesco, 1984), 231–236. As discussed in Chapter Two, the emphasis on the rural vernacular takes on a particularly amplified, and more theoretical character in the post independence architectural discourse and the associated search for national identity via the lens of architecture and urbanism. 32 Report, Vollmer to Philadelphia Office, November 14, 1964 “PAKCAP–Correspondence to/from ROYGUS October 8, 1964, thru June 30, 1965,” BOX LIK 117, Kahn Collection.

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Up until this date, Kahn’s postwar critical reflections on the city, in particular the “city/civic centre”, had been most evocatively registered in a sequence of ambitious and progressively theoretical proposals conceived for his hometown of Philadelphia. These posited a radical critique of the decentralised city, particularly those schemes generated between 1959 and 1962 (1947–62, unbuilt).33 Beyond these explicitly urban propositions, the diverse requirements for the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California (1959–65) had presented the architect with the opportunity to reflect on the architectural relationship between discrete yet mutually supportive, formally individuated programmatic elements encompassing accommodation for individuals as well as for collective association. Conceived as a tripartite ensemble of laboratories, meeting houses and residences, the Salk Institute campus remained incomplete. An amendment to the architect’s contract, issued only seven months after his first trip to Dhaka, terminated his work on the “meeting” and “living” components of the associated master plan.34 The project for the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Ahmedabad similarly combined residential, educational and more generic public facilities and allowed for further exploration of the interrelationship of distinct programmatic elements within a campus setting. Surpassing the IIM in scale, programmatic diversity and symbolic significance, the invitation to design the second capitol precinct in Dhaka offered Kahn his most substantive opportunity to reflect on the urban order for a miniature city.

Indeed the dominant focus of Kahn’s animated narrative concerning the second capitol’s early development was the programmatic associations that informed the order of his proposed master plan. Beginning with the principal function of the capitol, namely the house for assembly and legislation, he posited an interdependent relationship between the National Assembly Building and a mosque. In a country unified by religious belief and association, he implied, the alignment would render the National Assembly Building’s elevated function explicit: On the night of the third day, I fell out of bed with the idea which is still the prevailing idea of the plan. This came simply from the realization that assembly is of a transcendent

------33 For Kahn’s critique of the decentralised city as developed in his hypothetical plans for the city of Philadelphia, see, Peter Reed, “Toward Form, Louis I. Kahn’s Urban Designs for Philadelphia, 1939–62” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1989). 34 Daniel S. Friedman “The Salk Institute for Biological Study,” in David Brownlee and David De Long, Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 336. Friedman offers a detailed account of the Salk Institute’s biography and characterises the project as incomplete. For the evolution of the site plan for the Indian Institute of Management see, James, “Louis I. Kahn: Toward an Iconography of Memory,” 136–217.

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nature. Men came to assemble to touch the spirit of commonness, and I thought that this must be expressible. Observing the way of religion in the living of the Pakistani, I thought that a mosque woven into the space fabric of the assembly would have such effect. I feared the presumption to assume this right, that is to know it to fit symbolically their way of life. But this assumption took possession as an anchor.35 Kahn’s conceptual starting point for the Second Capital, his “form” proposition for the National Assembly Building precinct, was thus initially defined as a productive alignment between two institutions of higher purpose – in Kahn’s terms, institutions for inspired assembly and action. The mosque’s architectural affect and legibility as an elevated cultural institution, Kahn implied, not only prepared the elected representatives for ethical service to their country but also assigned the National Assembly Building with a culturally sanctified, and therefore readily understood, symbolism. This association involved a radical departure from the client brief. Although both a mosque and a prayer hall were included within the National Assembly Building’s extensive list of requirements, the specification for the prayer facilities were of modest scale and but one component amongst a myriad of spatial requirements associated with the National Assembly Building. Nevertheless Kahn argues that monumentalising the mosque as an autonomous entity – and via an unambiguously orientalising logic – was vital to the symbolic authority of the assembly cluster.36

Kahn further suggested that two additional programmatic elements were essential to the functional order of the precinct. The first was the Supreme Court, the institution whereby legislative acts were interpreted and applied according to legal principles: “The supreme

------35 Kahn quoted in “The Development of Dacca,” np. The first account of the proposed relationship between the mosque and the National Assembly Building I have been able to source is in: Typed transcript, May 29, 1963, “A.I.D Speech – Liturgical Conference,” Box LIK 68, Kahn Collection. In this lecture, delivered to the Association of Interior Designers, Kahn’s description was more elaborate: “I had a recent experience in Pakistan. One day I was given a very complicated program of designing a capital complex on a thousand acre of land … On the third day, I should say the third night, I fell out of bed with an idea. I couldn’t wait, really, to see those in charge in Pakistan. It was something which was not in the program, which I wanted to add, an ingredient which I felt was indispensable. And it all came from the realization that assembly is a transcendent thing. Your selfishness, your own desires and needs, though they are very close and tug at you, are always given up for the better man. Realizing this I felt that it was absolutely necessary to have a religious building, a mosque very close by. I didn’t know exactly in what way we’d incorporate it, but I felt the need of a mosque. It was not in the program. And not only did I think there should be a mosque, but I thought it should be as big as Hagia Sofia. That’s a very big planned commission to build a complex of this nature.” Correction noted on the transcript has been incorporated in this citation. 36 Peter Reed highlights the discrepancy between the project brief and Kahn’s proposition, see note 8 in Reed, “Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, Capital of Bangladesh,” 382. The misalignment was similarly noted by Lawrence Vale and formed a core theme in his criticism, Vale, Architecture, Power and National Identity, 261– 264.

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court in my mind was the test of the acts of legislation”.37 The second additional element was the residential hostels, which Kahn interpreted as “studies”. He described these as follows: “The program required the design of a hotel for ministers, their secretaries, and the members of the assembly. But this requirement became in my mind a corollary to the assembly and I thought immediately that they should be transformed from a hotel to studies in their garden on a lake.”38 Kahn concluded that the essential elements to the assembly ensemble were formed by the National Assembly Building interwoven with a mosque, the Supreme Court and places for individual reflection and study, situated upon a lake within a garden setting. He termed this building group the “Citadel of Assembly”.

The relative adjacency between the National Assembly Building, the mosque and the Supreme Court was confirmed following consultation with the Chief Justice of the Court. Initially rejecting a close association between the Supreme Court and the National Assembly Building, the judge instead expressed a strong preference for a site near the provincial High Court in Ramna. In Kahn’s account, however, the logic and symbolic integrity of his architectural proposition ultimately prevailed. Recounting his dialogue with the Chief Justice, Kahn wrote: “Let me explain to you what I intend to compose.” And I made my first sketch on the paper of the assembly with the mosque on the lake. I added the hostels framing this lake. I told him how I felt about the transcendent meaning of assembly. After a moment’s thought he took the pencil out of my hand and placed a mark representing the supreme court in a position where I would have placed it myself, on the other side of the mosque, and he said: “The mosque is sufficient insulation from the men of the assembly.”39 Kahn’s emphasis on the exchange appears somewhat rhetorical. While acknowledging local misgivings about the location and political legitimacy of the second capitol, he asserted that the institutional order of his architectural proposition was charged with civilising potential.

With the programmatic ingredient for the Citadel of Assembly first established, Kahn suggested that the legislative ensemble would be complemented and balanced by a second group of buildings consisting of public and commercial institutions as well as housing: Then because of the intellectual entity of the related buildings of the assembly, its meaning caused me to realize that the acts of assembly led to the establishment of the institutions of man. That made me realize that the buildings of the program other than

------37 Kahn, quoted in “The Development of Dacca,” n.p. 38 Ibid., n.p. 39 Ibid., n.p.

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those related to the assembly belong to the Citadel of the Institutions which I placed on axis and facing the Citadel of the Assembly.40 Citing the bathing complexes of ancient and imperial Rome as the architectural model for this civic cluster, Kahn described the setting as “a place of baths and place of exercise and meeting … a building harboring a stadium as well as the rooms of meeting, bath, exercise and their gardens, and flanked by a school of science and a school of art. Also composed with these buildings is a block of satellite institutions and commercial services”.41 Kahn finally suggested that this institutional setting would act as an anchor for a new residential sector to the northern periphery of the capitol.

Within Kahn’s self-described accounts of the assembly complex’s early development, as first and most comprehensively published in the North Carolina student publication, the order of the second capitol was conceived as two distinct yet interrelated urban ensembles, mediated by a relatively expansive stretch of open space. Largely focused on the internal logic of the master plan, the proposition was depicted as a self-supportive miniature city. Indeed, the visual representation of the scheme in this publication was strictly limited to the capitol site, with the roads that determined the boundary of the site the only register of the capitol’s immediate context. The relationship between the capitol complex and the existing city of Dhaka is curiously under-described. However, a close reading of the subtle shifts that characterise the gradual evolution of this project allows an insight into the resultant relationship between the assembly complex and the city.

Capitol and the City

In his biographical record of the capitol project’s development, Peter Reed identified an early and previously unpublished architectural sketch, which, he speculated, dated from Kahn’s first visit to Dhaka.42 (Figure 3.15) Reed observed that Kahn anticipates the essential characteristics of his subsequent site plans in this early drawn response to the project, which was found alongside scribbled notes in the margins of a program document. The sketch reads as the precursor to the binuclear scheme that Kahn first submitted to the client, dated March 12, 1963. This latter drawing was included in the North Carolina student publication. Featured first in the document’s chronological structure, it was labelled as “preliminary”.

------40 Ibid., n.p. 41 Ibid., n.p. 42 Reed, “Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, Capital of Bangladesh,” 375.

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An undated model, identified by Ronner and Jhaveri as the “first version”, is anomalous in relation to this early, consistent drawn sequence.43 (Figure 3.16) In the modelled proposal, an undulating, irregularly formed, large expanse of open land presents as foreground to an architectural ensemble located in the upper northern half of the capitol precinct. Individuated buildings are grouped around an open court oriented to the cardinal directions and are bounded on all four sides by trapezium-shaped water basins or lakes. Raised linear elements radiate out diagonally from the courts’ open corners to serve as both retaining walls and avenues. To the south they anchor small-scale built works organised in a zigzag formation. From the western limit of the architectural cluster a canal extends south along the full length of the capitol precinct, terminating at the site’s southern boundary. Three elements mediate the canal and the military airport – a diagonally conjoined set of buildings, a mosque and a crescent-shaped building, that is possibly a stadium. The latter is aligned with the National Assembly Building on a common east-west central axis. Groves of trees indicated along the eastern boundary of the site buffer the precinct along Mirpur Road.

Located in an area not yet acquired by the government, and thus not sanctioned for development, the proposal appears deliberately speculative. Nevertheless, it provides a clear indication of Kahn’s ambition to extend the site boundary as far north as possible. With no known associated drawings, and the scheme revised shortly after, the proposition has usually been treated as inconsequent to the fundamental logic and evolution of the master plan. However, the compositional strategies employed here remained pivotal to Kahn’s later proposals. For example, the square, rotated square or diamond and radiating diagonal lines, are consistently formative. The interplay between the two modes of formal definition evident here – namely the organisation of the buildings around an open court, on the one hand, and their configuration as grounded, elemental volumes, on the other – also underlined Kahn’s subsequent propositions.

A particularly striking aspect of this early scheme was the capitol’s proposed landscape setting. Rendered as an intertwined sequence of irregular mounds and water basins, it alluded to the sculpted topography of the region’s rural settlements. Indeed the ground figurations portrayed in this early model closely resembled Kahn’s later drawn representations of the existing alluvial terrain to the north of the capitol site; the area later

------43 Heinz Ronner, Sharad Jhaveri, and Alessandro Vassella, Louis I. Kahn: Complete Works, 1935–74, (Boulder: Westview Press, 1975), 234.

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Figure 3.15. National Assembly Complex, site plan, ca. February 1963. [Brownlee and De Long, In the Realm, 375] Figure 3.16. National Assembly Complex, ca. 1963. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 234]

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described by the architect as an “old village with its mounds and depressions already established.” The architectural platform for the assembly precinct, treated as a sequence of tapering embankments and sunken lakes, appeared as an abstracted representation of this vernacular setting. In this early scheme Kahn appealed to regional traditions in support of his siting strategy. Although the proposal was radically revised, the sculpting of the land based on the interplay of land and water would remain fundamental to the subsequent design propositions and their respective projection of the relationship between the monument and the city.

Kahn returned to Dhaka in mid-March, accompanied by his assistant Carles Vallhonrat and architectural engineer August Komendant. In just over one month his team had prepared their first submission to the client, dated March 12, 1963. (Figure.3.17) The architect’s bipartite conception of the capitol underscored the essential order of the proposed site plan. Two distinct urban “centres” were shown aligned on the north-south axis and mediated by an open field. The Citadel of Assembly was located within the southern portion of the site, the approximately 200 acres of land approved for immediate development. To the north of the assembly group was the “Citadel of Institutions”, a civic and commercial precinct with housing at its edges. Treated as a separate entity to the binuclear capitol, the hospital was located in the north-western corner of the site fronting Mirpur Road. To the south of the assembly group, the parcel of land that mediated the capitol and the existing city was reserved as a “diplomatic enclave”.

In accord with Kahn’s account of the project’s initial conception, the most prominent programmatic components within the assembly group were the National Assembly Building, the mosque and the Supreme Court. These three architectural elements were aligned in sequence from south to north on a common central axis. Diamond shaped in plan, four perimeter battered walls, open at the corners, defined the National Assembly Building’s larger volume, with an individuated and flat-domed meeting chamber asymmetrically positioned within. The mosque, expressed as a cubic volume with four external minarets, abutted the National Assembly Building to the north and the pair was set within a triangular-shaped lake and surrounded (set upon) by water. An open court to the north of the mosque terminated the lake, with the Supreme Court, represented as a rectangular prism, situated across the court looking toward the mosque and the National Assembly Building beyond. The fourth element – considered by Kahn as vital to the programmatic and symbolic logic of the Citadel of Assembly – was the residential hostels,

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Figure 3.17. Capitol Complex, site plan, March 12, 1963. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 238]

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defined in this composition as two monolithic linear elements. They diagonally flanked the assembly group along the lake’s eastern and western boundaries and framed this body of water.

In addition to the institutional elements that Kahn considered essential to the order of the Citadel of Assembly, a number of other buildings scheduled by the client for immediate design and construction were incorporated within the precinct. These included the house for the speaker, delineated as an L-shaped volume bordering the Supreme Court to the north and east, and the house for the president, located to the north-west of the assembly group. Offices and accommodation for the military and administrative personnel, shown as low-rise blocks with inner courts, were located along the site’s eastern boundary adjacent to the military airport.

Situated across the park, the architect’s proposed tripartite civic cluster dedicated to science, arts and physical culture were articulated as a sequence of individuated cubic volumes with centralised enclosed and semi-enclosed courts. Typically conjoined at a point on alternating corners to the north and south they implied an undulating diagonal movement across. Amplified in scale relative to the neighbouring buildings, the centre for athletics and physical culture was placed on a common axis with the National Assembly Building, mosque and the Supreme Court and served as the focal point to the cluster. Located to the north of these major institutions, a low-rise market place and ancillary services formed a mediating architectural element between the Citadel of Institutions and the surrounding housing sector, and also served as an arrival point within the precinct.

Further to the institutional nodes and their immediate landscape setting, the proposed circulatory elements are represented as dominant and formative figures within the composition. Buffered from its immediate context by way of strategically located residential precincts and densely planted trees, the vehicular and pedestrian approach to the capitol were carefully choreographed. Two principal modes of circulation facilitated access and shaped the patterns of movement within the site. A sequence of entrance roads directed access from Mirpur Road and the new eastern boundary road (labelled as Inner Road) to each of the citadels and also determined the extent of vehicular traffic within the capitol. A network of internal courtyards and diagonally oriented avenues accommodated and shaped the pedestrian movement within.

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A resonance with Kahn’s urban design proposals for the city of Philadelphia was evident here, in particular his more theoretical proposals generated between 1956 and 1962. The conception of the Citadel of Institutions recalled the core principle of the Philadelphia urban proposals. These studies presented a formally defined city centre – garrisoned against the erosive impacts of the modern vehicular traffic and charged with a multifarious and culturally elevated sequence of public institutions – as fundamental to the civilising agency and social vitality of the contemporary city. A coloured version of the March site plan elaborated the immediate landscape and circulatory elements within the proposed scheme, and explicitly distinguished the vehicular and pedestrian zones within the site, coded as white and brown respectively. (Figure.3.18) Vehicular traffic was shown as limited to the four diagonally oriented avenues that terminated at the marketplace. The precinct’s inner courts, streets and gardens were, in turn, reserved as a pedestrian public setting. Extending the analogy between his conceptual proposition for Philadelphia’s centralised urban “forum” and the bathing complexes of ancient and imperial Rome, Kahn suggested that the had also been formative here.44

In its binuclear conception, Kahn’s composition of the capitol appeared more distinctive and the equivalence with the Philadelphia urban proposals is more tenuous in this regard. A functional and symbolic hierarchy was fundamental to Kahn’s conception of architectural and urban order, however, the implied distinction between the sacred and profane institutions via a binuclear civic organisation was anomalous in terms of his working method. In his introductory text to the North Carolina student publication, Kahn noted the particularity of his compositional approach, depicting the strategy as novel. Referring to his discussion with the Danish architect and urban planner Steen Eiler Rasmussen, and to Rasmussen’s critical response to the scheme, Kahn admitted to some uncertainty as to the essential merit of the proposal: I spoke to Mr. Steen Eiler Rasmussen about the deliberate separation of the two citadels and he has inspired me to look into this decision and sense whether the two can be brought together in a greater tie rather than the meaning of looking across at each other. I felt that their being separate was good, living on different planes of inspiration. But Mr Rasmussen knows the beginnings of towns in their essence so beautifully that I feel this plan needs a thorough review before I can feel confident about the beliefs which is in back of it.45

------44 Kahn, quoted in “The Development of Dacca,” n.p. 45 Kahn, quoted in “The Development of Dacca,” n.p.

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Figure 3.18. Capitol Complex, site plan, March 1963. [Ashraf, Khaleed and Haque, Sherebanglanagar: The Making of a Capital Complex, 48]

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In the passage that followed, Kahn grappled further with the dilemma – contending with the criticism that, as composed, the association between the two citadels overtly relied on formal or visual criteria. The capitol’s potential for social vitality and agency, Rasmussen’s critique had inferred, was compromised. The individuation of the citadels, Kahn however maintained, was pertinent: What I’m trying to do is to establish a belief out of a philosophy I can turn over to Pakistan so that whatever they do is always answerable to it. I feel as though this plan which was made weeks after I saw the program has strength but does it have all the ingredients? If only one is lacking it will disintegrate.46 Kahn ultimately implied that the visual perception of the capitol as an integrated urban entity was a key priority in the configuration of the site and its immediate setting. What he sought was a legible and absolute formal expression in productive tension with its immediate urban context – a distinctive and internally coherent idea of the city rather than one that conforms or appears in continuum with its existing condition.

An early sketch dated February 8, 1963, and featured in the North Carolina student publication, provides an evocative register of Kahn’s conception of the assembly group’s immediate setting. (Figure.3.19) To the south of the National Assembly Building a grand, two-level, monumental “promenade” traversed the site and reconfigured the body of water, which was cut as two individuated elements: the triangular head and crescent shaped base. The upper platform was dedicated to pedestrian movement and the road below to vehicular traffic. At its centre, considered lengthwise, the promenade abutted the National Assembly Building tangentially; that is on a single point at the building’s southern apex. The junction was in turn framed as a gateway, a charged entry point with the building otherwise distanced from the pedestrian concourse by way of enclosing perimeter walls and the mediating body of water. In the March site plan, the promenade reads as a major east-west thoroughfare between the suburbs of Tejgaon and Mohammadpur, effectively integrating the capitol within the existing transport network. Whether on approach to the National Assembly Building, or traversing the capitol site, the imagined pedestrian experience was unambiguously novel and ceremonial. With the crescent-shaped lake placed between the capitol and the city, the assembly group from the south was to be perceived from a distance. Thus composed, the promenade read as an extended platform, an accentuated horizontal landscape upon which the National Assembly Building was centrally poised.

------46 Ibid.

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Figure 3.19. Capitol Complex, perspective sketch. [Keller and Tansal, “The Development of Dacca”, plate 1]

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Kahn had typically explained the artificial lakes via a regionalist logic, variously referencing Moghul tradition or, as discussed above, the Bengali dig-and-mound strategy. In an early and introductory statement to the client, for example, the influence of Moghul gardens was particularly underlined: The two elements of nature most pervasive in the landscape of East Pakistan are water and vegetation. These almost assert their presence. The example of intelligent cooperation with these pervasive elements of water and vegetation in some best examples of Mughal Garden Architecture has been a great inspiration to me.47 In Kahn’s discussion of his design approach as represented in the North Carolina student publication, to cite an alternative example, the dig-and-mound strategy was privileged: “Because this is delta country, buildings are placed on mounds to protect them from flood. The ground for the mounds comes from the digging of lakes and ponds.”48 Moving beyond regionalist references, however, Kahn extended his explanation toward formal or compositional motives: “I employed the shape of the lake too as a discipline of location and boundary. The triangular lake was meant to encompass the hostels and the assembly and to act as a dimensional control.” When revising the North Carolina transcript Kahn made additional notes, which, although unpublished, further elaborate his thought: I try to make each building shape distinguish from its surroundings by the introduction of the lake as a firm boundary to which it is tied. Because this is delta country, buildings are placed on mounds to protect them from flood. The ground for the mounds comes from the digging of lakes and ponds. Therefore, the lake is nature (natural?) planning discipline, and its shape becomes part of all dimensions. I employed the shape of the lake as a discipline of location and boundary.49 Here a vernacular approach to siting and the privileged formal principles were more directly interlaced. The dig-and-mound strategy was reconfigured as a novel, “natural”, planning principle. The lake gave sharp definition to the “shape” of the building and like the expansive lawn that separated the two citadels, this body of water was employed as a device for calibrating the distance between the buildings and their audience.

The lake and the promenade served as the capitol’s public forecourt, facing the existing city. In contrast, the northern plaza and associated circulatory elements appeared to cater more particularly to the precinct’s principal occupants, namely the administrative and legal representatives, office bearers and personnel. Extending out diagonally from the promenade’s lower vehicular platform, two inner roads entered the assembly precinct, ------47 Typed document, undated, “Pak Correspondence Miscellaneous,” LIK 120, Kahn Collection. 48 Kahn, quoted in “The Development of Dacca,” n.p. 49 Revised Transcript, “North Carolina,” LIK 56, Kahn Collection.

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running in parallel to the residential hostels and culminating in a parking area situated to the rear of the Supreme Court. Pedestrian promenades also aligned with the hostels, guiding the delegates from the domestic environments to the centralised public court within. This arrangement generated a choreographed entry sequence from the residences through to the assembly chamber. The National Assembly Building was therefore rendered with two distinct prospects, paths of approach, circulation, and points of entry.

This articulation of the buildings with two “fronts” confirmed that Kahn’s urban proposal was not a bipartite composition, but instead was conceived as related to both the Citadel of Institutions and the existing city. The National Assembly Building was, in effect, situated between the two. Read in this light, the early master plan shows a deliberate effort to calibrate the capitol’s prospect both to and from two distinct vantage points: the Citadel of Institutions, on the one hand, and the surrounding city (to the south, east and west) on the other. This strategy allowed Kahn to separate the everyday civic activity from the monumental image of the National Assembly Building that was perceptible from the city.

As Kahn had anticipated the arrangement was scrutinised and the association between the two citadels and their respective relationships with the existing city was consistently tested and revised over a two-year period. In the remaining component of this chapter I comment on the key changes in the master plan with reference to a number of design proposals that were developed between mid 1963 and mid 1965. The discussion concludes with the final master plan of 1973, by which time the scheme was translated from the second capitol of Pakistan to the national capitol for the independent nation, the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.

Site Plan May 1963

The March 1963 site plan was revised within a two-month period. New drawings and photographs of the associated model, dated May 3, were sent to Dhaka accompanied by a letter of explanation, dated May 16.50 (Figure 3.20) This letter emphasised the design changes that had been introduced in response to the client’s priorities and feedback. For example, it highlighted the proposal’s broad alignment with the stipulated maximum site limit, with the distance between the Citadel of Assembly and the Citadel of Institutions reduced accordingly. The scale and appointment of the mosque was also revised, as the

------50 Letter, Kahn to Ahmad, May 16, 1963, “Pakistan Correspondence–Miscellaneous,” Box LIK 120, Kahn Collection.

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Figure 3.20. Capitol Complex, site plan, May 3, 1963. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 240]

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designation of a single denominational and deliberately monumental religious institution as the point of entry to the National Assembly Building had been perceived as controversial.51 In the new proposal the mosque was reconceived as a more generic “spiritual” institution and was described as the Prayer Hall. The structure was further reduced in scale and absorbed within the body of the National Assembly Building: The first design submitted on our last visit showed a mosque as a separate building adjoining the Assembly Building. In this new second scheme, the Prayer Hall of the program is made as part of the spaces of the Assembly block and woven into the architecture as one. In this way, its meaning is equally emphatic as a mosque and gives equal spiritual significance without inviting controversy.52 The most profound design change in the May site plan, however, was the reorientation of the constitutive elements of the Citadel of Assembly. This was curiously absent from the accompanying letter. The composition was, in effect, mirrored along the north-south axis. In this new arrangement the crescent-shaped lake (later named as Crescent Lake) was positioned to the north of the National Assembly Building, with the Supreme Court and the mosque relocated to the south. The diagonal lines of the residential hostels now fanned open toward the Citadel of Institutions, and the housing for high officials was sited further south towards the capitol’s lower boundary. This composition reversed the orientation of the National Assembly Building’s two discrete points of entry and associated prospects – to the north a ceremonial public boulevard, to the south a forecourt. The former was conceived with particular regard to its distant prospect, while the latter was defined as a “working” forecourt for governmental and judicial institutions. (Figure 3.21, 3.22)

This reorientation of the site plan appeared motivated, at least in part, by a desire to clarify the internal order of the design. The Citadel of Assembly and Citadel of Institutions now faced each other, unobstructed, across the open extent of the parkland. Less direct, however, was the proposed relationship between the National Assembly Building and the existing city. Here the southern platform was treated as a bounded court, with houses for ------51 For controversial reception of the mosque see August Komendant’s account, August Komendant, 18 Years with Architect Louis I. Kahn, (Englewood: Aloray, 1975), 78. 52 Letter, Kahn to Ahmad, May 16, 1963. A note concerning the title of the “Prayer Hall”: in documents prepared for the client, this building is typically, although not consistently, referred to as the Prayer Hall. However, in many other office documents the building retains the title of “mosque”. In Kahn’s discussions of the project the building similarly retains the title of mosque. This was particularly the case in the context of the architect’s lectures and interviews within the United States. Kahn’s late discussion of the capitol project during his 1966 lecture at Berkeley is exemplary in this regard, see Kahn, “Berkeley Lecture,” Perspecta 28 (1997): 29. The change in title, at least in the mind of the architect, appears largely rhetorical. In this dissertation, except in some direct quotations, this building is referred to as “mosque”.

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high officials mediating the assembly precinct and the city. The connection between the capitol and its immediate urban context to the south thus appeared neglected, if not deliberately severed. This disjuncture was, however, reconsidered in the next sequence of design iterations.

By late 1963 the design of the north and south plaza had acquired distinctive characteristics. The site plan dated December 1963 is illustrative in this regard. This drawing registered an important change to the location of the National Assembly Building. (Figure 3.23) Pulled away from Crescent Lake and the adjacent ceremonial thoroughfare, the northern entrance court to the building was afforded more generous grounds and was resolved as a ceremonial platform set within a formal “garden” setting. This environment was accordingly labelled as the “Garden Entrance Plaza”. The southern point of entry to the building was, by contrast, architecturally delimited. Fronting the mosque and framed by the “Central Government Secretariat”, “Central Library” and the Supreme Court building, this entrance court was labelled “Forecourt”.53 In this proposal two discrete entrance environments defined in terms of “garden” and “court”, were explicitly juxtaposed.

From Kahn’s earliest site diagrams, the doubling of the entries had allowed for the delineation of two patterns of use: one associated with the parliamentarians, legal officers, public servants and their personnel; and the other with the public and public ceremonies. However, a key question remained obscure in this dialectical proposition: that is, what constitutes the primary “public” approach to the building?

This ambiguity was partly indebted to the location of the existing city of Dhaka. Orientated towards the city, the south plaza intuitively read as the primary forecourt to the building. The northern podium and garden, in turn, looked toward the Citadel of Institutions, which, according to the logic of the site plan, served as the locus of public life within the precinct. Although in Kahn’s early drawings the latter frontage was more definitively presented as the “public” entrance to the National Assembly Building, this designation was in tension with the location of the existing city. (Figure 3.24, 3.25)

------53 Reed notes that a central Secretariat building and a meteorological observatory were late additions to the program introduced in the late summer of 1963. Reed, “Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, Capital of Bangladesh,” 377.

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Figure 3.21. Top left, Capitol Complex, site model, May 1963. [Kahn Collection] Figure 3.22. Top right, Capitol Complex, site model, May 1963. [Kahn Collection] Figure 3.23. Bottom, Capitol Complex, site plan, December 21, 1963. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 244]

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Kahn’s sketches and office drawings dating from 1964 indicate the ongoing explorations of both environments. The design of the ceremonial plaza to the north of the National Assembly Building, later named Presidential Square, was particularly resolved. This proposed an expansive platform clad in brick and inlaid with marble bands. The platform was delimited to the east and west by stepped marble seating, and connected to its immediate garden environment by way of a two-tiered cascade of marble steps. The substructure for the plaza consisted of regular rows of brick archways. This grand masonry undercroft is where the construction of the capitol complex began in late 1964. (Figure 3.26, 3.27)

The design of the southern forecourt was less developed at this time. Sketches and office drawings attest to the ongoing development of this precinct during the second half of 1964. (Figure 3.28, 3.29) In these studies the court-like character of the National Assembly Building’s immediate setting was gradually dissolved. Consistent in these explorations was the articulation of the southern podium as a two-level structure, which vertically delineated vehicular and pedestrian movements. In addition, the lower concourse provided a second entry to the building at ground level, via a covered path. The National Assembly Building was therefore assigned with distinct points of entry in both plan and section. What remained ambivalent, however, was the designation of the building’s “main entrance” and approach.

Notation to an undated office drawing suggests that the dilemma was addressed in early 1965. Here, under the heading “Notes about changes brought by LIK about PAC on 12 Apr. 65” it was inscribed: On the South Part of the NA [National Assembly] axis there will be the Supreme Court only. The G. Secretariat [Government Secretariat] will be located at both the southeast and southwest parts of the site … The main entrance at the capital will be at Road A [boulevard bordering the southern boundary of the site]. The Supreme Court Bldg. should be considered with its environment as an entrance bldg.54 By mid-1965 the designation of the south plaza as the principle entry forecourt to the building was made categorical. The descriptive text prepared for a “Progress Brochure” – written with the perspective of the client in mind – outlines a suggestive account of the imagined public approach to the building:

------54 Holding 650.MP.151, Kahn Collection.

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Figure 3.24. Top left, Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, public entrance court. [650.NA.170 (F20), Kahn Collection] Figure 3.25. Top right, Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, public entrance court, detail [650.NA.170 (F20), Kahn Collection] Figure 3.26. Middle left, Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, Presidential Square. [650.MP.13.18, Kahn Collection] Figure 3.27. Middle right, Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, Presidential Square. [650.PS.025(F68), Kahn Collection] Figure 3.28. Bottom left, Capitol Complex, plan, 2 April 1964. [650.MP.076, Kahn Collection] Figure 3.29. Bottom right, Capitol Complex, National Assembly Complex, site plan, April 28, 1964. [650.NA.029 (F2), Kahn Collection]

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The complete design is unfolding as construction work proceeds. The Presidential Square, which forms the ceremonial approach from the north to the National Assembly Building, is taking form on the site. The Entrance Square, which forms the southern approach to the National Assembly Building, has been developed as the main entrance to the whole Citadel of the Assembly. As the visitor approaches along the wide boulevard along the southern boundary of the site, he will pass under wide shade trees. He will still have a continuous view of the dominant Assembly Building. At the entrance he will recognise a landmark of the site, a large, oval pool with fountains surrounded by a broad, low portico. This will form a suitable memorial or dedicated monument. On each side he will see active fountains, garden paths and elaborate plantings of shrubs and flowers forming bowers, alcoves, and recesses with garden benches where he may rest and relax.55 This description was closely aligned with the site plan of January 1965. (Figure 3.30) The document goes on to describe the building components located within these grounds: the Supreme Court building to the west and the library and Secretariat buildings to the east; the Secretariat building to the north of the library; with two monumental ramps, leading up to a platform and onto the National Assembly Building: At the centre of the Entrance Square, the visitor will see two broad ramps providing a gradual approach to a broad entrance platform at the main level of the Assembly Chamber. This platform is designed to provide shelter for the entrance by car of officials and visitors on a limited basis. It will also provide a sheltered entrance for pedestrians using the covered walkways bordering the lakes around the Assembly Building.56 A pedestrian approach aligned with the north-south axis was proposed – this compositional approach was distinct from Kahn’s earlier propositions in which the primary approach and ascent to the southern podium had been at cross-axis to the National Assembly Building.57 (Figure 3.31, 3.32, 3.33) Here the southern landscape to the building was conceived as a grand and ceremonial pedestrian Entrance Square, situated between the National Assembly Building and the city.

By 1966 the design for the primary component of the project had been finalised and documents for construction were issued. The design of the southern precinct would, however, undergo further changes while the construction of the National Assembly ------55 Typed document, Philadelphia office to Roy Gus, sent July 9, 1965 “Second Capital of Pakistan in Dacca, Citadel of Assembly, Progress Booklet” LIK 122, Kahn Collection. 56 Ibid. 57 By January 1965, the internal circulatory order of the National Assembly Building, the entrance and mosque element and the outer circulatory ring to the National Assembly Building was also reconceived. These changes are subject to a more detailed discussion in the next two chapters. It is significant to note here that the movement of the public from the podium to the level of the Assembly Chamber’s public galleries was facilitated by these revisions. These galleries accommodated 400 seats as well as an additional 100 seats for women.

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Building was in progress. In late 1966 the podium was recomposed. Square-shaped in plan and approximately 200 metres wide, its scale was amplified. The undercroft to this structure was partly designated as accommodation for cars and mechanical services, and particular attention was paid to the circulatory connection between the lower concourse and the podium above. The passage of movement from the hostel’s covered walkways to the upper podium was also closely studied and a number of connecting stairway elements were developed and tested. (Figure 3.34) A subtle yet significant design revision, in late 1966, involved repositioning of the south plaza relative to the lake. The podium had previously projected into the water body, now it was aligned with the lake’s southern boundary. (Figure 3.35, 3.36) This resulted in a more pronounced separation between the podium and the mosque. The modest bridge, which in the previous proposals had mediated the two elements, was now elongated. Here, arched masonry walls bracketed the concrete passageway at ground level, while also serving as the structure for the bridge traversing the lake at the podium level above. In this arrangement the two paths of entry to the National Assembly Building were expressed and the threshold between the podium and the mosque/entrance chamber was amplified. By the late 1960s the National Assembly Building was unambiguously rendered as a monumental edifice. An architectural node set upon water, fronted by a grand podium and surrounded by an expansive landscape setting, it was arrived at by way of a ceremonial bridge hovering in the air and over water.

1971

Between March and April of 1971 Louis Kahn’s office in Dhaka was closed and the staff evacuated. In a detailed and emotive letter sent from India to the Philadelphia office, Richard Garfield, who was at that time based in the field office in Dhaka, detailed the events surrounding the outbreak of war in East Pakistan and his departure from the city. Recalling his last conversation with PWD additional chief engineer, Abdul Wazid, prior to deportation from Dhaka, he noted: “Mr Wazid and I had a long talk. We were hopeful that I’d be able to get the information to him. As I’ve said before, we’d no idea the job had been dropped. He may still not know.”58 With the advent of Pakistani civil war, Kahn’s contract for the second capitol was terminated.

However, Kahn’s return to Dhaka was not prolonged. Within months of the conclusion of the year-long, brutal civil conflict and the resulting emergence of Bangladesh as an ------58 Letter, Garfield to Wisdom, received by Philadelphia office April 18, 197, “PAC Correspondence to/from Dacca Office, 69 to 10/6/71,” LIK Box 121, Kahn Collection.

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Figure 3.30. Capitol Complex, plan, February, 1965. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 255]

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Figure 3.31. Top left, Capitol Complex, model. [650.13.18 k12 6p.134 (F2), Kahn Collection] Figure 3.32. Top right, Capitol Complex, model, 1966. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 254] Figure 3.33. Middle, Capitol Complex, site plan. [650.MP.102 (F3), Kahn Collection] Figure 3.34. Bottom, Capitol Complex, South Podium. [650.MP.076 (F2), Kahn Collection]

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Figure 3.35. Capitol Complex, model, 1966, detail. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 254] Figure 3.36. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, bridge at Southern entrance. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.]

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independent nation-state, Abdul Wazid – now the chief engineer for the Bangladesh PWD – resumed negotiations with Kahn’s office. In a letter dated July 19, 1972, addressed to Kahn’s associate Henry Wilcots, he wrote: I am anxiously waiting for your visit to Bangladesh soon, so that the incomplete work of the Capital can be completed early. The former Second Capital has been named as “Sher-e-Bangla Nagar,” the Capital of Bangladesh. Needless to say that the on-going projects particularly the National Assembly Building require the final touch of Prof. Louis I Kahn and yourself to make the dream of Prof. Kahn a reality. We intend to share the responsibility of giving it shape for which we can be proud of. That the imagination and thought of Prof. Louis Kahn is being appreciated by the world is nothing but accepting a truth. We expect we will able to help more in building Sher-e-Bangla Nagar and make this a model capital.59 Within a period of two years, the capitol of Dhaka had undergone a remarkable symbolic translation: from the Pakistani second capital to the capitol for the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. The architecture of the National Assembly Building, Wazid implied, was regarded as a powerful emblem for Bangladeshi independence.

The most significant change to the project introduced at this time was the extensive requirements for a new secretariat. The 1973 site plan registers the development of this program in terms of a colossal and monolithic office building situated to the north, across the park from the Citadel of Assembly. (Figure 3.37, 3.38) The Citadel of Institutions was thus replaced with housing for the new governmental bureaucracy. The Secretariat was not realised. Nevertheless, the proposed siting for the Secretariat building consolidated the determination of the National Assembly Building’s southern precinct as a public plaza facing the city of Dhaka.

The Capitol Complex as Realised

With the Citadel of Institutions eliminated and the Bangladeshi Secretariat never built, the National Assembly Building and the associated hostels assumed a formal singularity unintended by the architect. By the time of the project’s completion in 1983, nearly a decade after Kahn’s death, Dhaka’s densely knit and populated city fabric had surrounded the capitol.60 The juxtaposition between the capitol reserve and its immediate urban

------59 Letter Wazid to Wilcots, July 19, 1972, “Dacca, Correspondence, Public Works Dept., 1972–73,” LIK Box 121, Kahn Collection. 60 Kahn died in March 1974. At that time the preliminary design for the Secretariat had been completed. The remaining work was overseen by David Wisdom and Associates, which comprised Kahn’s long-term ------

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environment was stark. The near 1000-acre site that Kahn had so persistently claimed as vital to the order of his proposed plan now served as a colossal urban void within the city. It presented as a monumental edifice with sculptural force set within an expansive green field. (Figure 3.39)

The view from the north, and at a distance, is of a compositionally integrated and hierarchically ordered architectural complex: the centralised, monumental National Assembly Building poised above a lake and flanked to the east and west by low-rising, supporting hostels. Through precise geometric control and the masterful layering and superimposition of fenestration patterns, the scale of the National Assembly Building and the residential hostels was mediated from this perspective. The overall affect is of a unified and aesthetically powerful pictorial composition consisting of sharply defined elemental forms and geometric figurations. (Figure 3.40)

Seen from the south, the National Assembly Building appears as a lone monument, set upon a vast, gently rising masonry podium. (Figure 3.41) The figure of the mosque/entrance block is most dominant, with the body of the National Assembly Building receding behind. Particularly striking, once the top of the podium is reached, is the distance that separates the podium and the National Assembly Building. The two architectural elements appear pulled apart, with air and water placed in between. (Figure 3.42)

As I have argued in this chapter, the early site proposals for this project demonstrate the architectural effort to balance an image of a temporally ambiguous monument with the expression of the building as a contemporary forum for civic action and interaction. This was in part achieved by the delineation of patterns of use – by the members of the

------associates David Wisdom, Henry Wilcots, and Reyhan T. Larimer. Peter Reed notes that in January of 1974 Kahn had signed new agreements for ongoing involvement with the development of the capitol and adjoining precinct. He cites the project completion date as July 1983. Kenneth Yeang cites this date as “substantial” completion. The air-conditioning system had at that time not yet been installed. He notes that in 1982 an Assembly session was held in the building for the first time. The first major event hosted at the capitol, after practical completion, was the 14th Islamic Minister’s Conference in December 1983. See Reed, “Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, Capital of Bangladesh”, 382; and Kenneth Yeang, “1986 Technical Review Summary,” in Aga Khan Award for Architecture, “Project Report,” (1989) www.akdn.org/architecture/project.asp?id=75 (accessed March 5, 2013), 48.

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Figure 3.37. Capitol Complex, site plan, 1973. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 265] Figure 3.38. Secretariat Complex, Secretariat Building, ca. 1973, model, unbuilt. [Kahn Collection]

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Figure 3.39. Top, Capitol Complex, South Plaza. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.] Figure 3.40. Bottom left, Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, viewed from the North. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.] Figure 3.41. Bottom right, Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, viewed from the South. [Vale, Architecture, Power and National Identity, 271]

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government and aligned staff, on the one hand, and the civilians on the other. These priorities were made manifest through the two-pronged entrance to the building.

In the project as realised this desired delineation remains in play. These distinct patterns of occupation are not accommodated by the order of the plan, however, but by the architectural section. When in use, the parliamentarians, high officials and their associated staff enter the building via the southern and ground level concourse. This entrance more readily allows for a “secure” point of entry and also facilitates direct access to and from the vehicular point of arrival. With the everyday passage of officials and associated personnel accommodated within the lower concourse, both the south and north platform bear no trace of the building’s day-to-day operation. Here the civic function of the building is not merely delineated from public and ceremonial events but in effect obscured from view. This sectional hierarchy, coupled with the building’s highly internalised configuration, gives the complex a curiously vacant expression – as if the capitol had been deserted.

When not closed to the public by security blockades, and despite the National Assembly Building’s – thus far regular – occupation by undemocratically elected officials, the capitol precinct, and the southern podium and gardens in particular, serves as a vibrant place of gathering within the city. The popular reception of this project, it appears, readily distinguishes this landscape from its contemporary political symbolism and function. The architectural cut that separates the southern podium from the National Assembly Building, I suggest, works less as an amplified entrance threshold, as it was perhaps intended, and more as an architectural void that distinguishes a vital public setting from a spectacular and aesthetic edifice. Rather than being a destination point, the National Assembly Building serves as enigmatic background to a vast recreational ground within the city. (Figure 3.43, 3.44)

In the next chapter I will consider the manner in which this ambiguity between architectural form and its civic use was made manifest through the architectural threshold conditions as developed in this project.

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Figure 3.42. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.] Figure 3.43. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.] Figure 3.44. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building. [Ashraf and Haque, Sherebanglanagar, 12]

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CHAPTER 4 THE PROBLEM OF THE WALL: HOLLOW WALL, HOLLOW COLUMN

Long ago they built with solid stones. Today we must build with “hollow stones”.1 Louis Kahn, 1957

A wall long ago was thick … It had to be strong enough also to hold things. Today, you can make this wall one thing, make that another … In the plan, develop a very free view as to how these walls relate to each other.2 Louis Kahn, 1961

Consider if you see a series of columns … Now think of it just in reverse and think that the columns are hollow.3 Louis Kahn, 1963

Preamble

Included in the North Carolina student publication were two drawings of wall forms. One was a perspectival rendering with appended sectional and elevational sketches, and the other an annotated sequence of diagrams.

The perspective drawing was an early description of the outer wall strategy for the residential hostels. (Figure 4.1) It was noted that the fenestration to the office blocks, located to the periphery of the assembly building, would be similarly defined. Undated, the drawing appears closely aligned with the May 1963 site plan for the capitol. (see Figure 3.20) The vantage point is from the eastern hostels looking towards the mosque as if drawn from the semi-enclosed porch that extended out, midway, along the otherwise linear three-storey block.4 The image is particularly striking for the elemental expression and minimal depth of the depicted arched screen walls: uniform in material, taut, impossibly thin.

------1 Louis I. Kahn, “Space Order and Architecture,” in Alessandra Latour, Louis I. Kahn: Writings, Lectures, Interviews (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 79–80. (First published in Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Journal 34, 10 [October 1957]: 375–377.) 2 Louis I. Kahn, “Law and Rule in Architecture,” (Lecture, Princeton University, November 29, 1961), typed transcript, LIK lectures 1969, Box LIK 53, Kahn Collection. 3 Louis I. Kahn, “Toward a Plan for Midtown Philadelphia,” in Latour, Louis I. Kahn, 45. (First published in Perspecta 2 [1953]: 45–7). 4 In the documentation of this project the terms “prayer hall” and “mosque” are used interchangeably. In Kahn’s writings and lectures, however, “mosque” is most typically privileged. In my discussion of the project in this chapter, I will use the term “mosque.”

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Figure 4.1. East Hostels, early perspective sketch, ca. 1963. [Keller and Tansal, “The Development of Dacca”, plate 16]

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The appended sectional diagram explained that the three-tiered, staggered arrangement of the hostel’s semi-enclosed outer porch would allow a sliver of deflected light, admitted from the top, to wash the inner skin of the external wall at each level, thereby reducing the contrast between the brightness of the wall surface and the opening. This strategy, Kahn noted, would greatly reduce glare within the interior. Although the staggered detail of this proposed “anti glare” fenestration system was superseded, the drawing was nevertheless selected as one of three, and the most dominant, perspectival representation of the scheme in the North Carolina student publication and has since become one of the most regularly published illustrations of the scheme. Thin membrane “glare” walls punctuated with bold unglazed openings had, and would, remain vital to the architectural expression of the capitol complex.

The integral relationship between wall forms and apertures for light in the National Assembly Building was further conceptualised in the second, more didactic drawing, titled “Improvisation on light elements.” (Figure 4.2) In this diagrammatic sequence encased and light-filled spatial units were emphasised as the dominant form-giving component of the architectural entity as a whole. The first of these four sketches shows a notional interior interspersed with irregular figures, loosely shaped as a cluster of circular and/or oval cylinders, with an interconnected byway of narrow passages. Perimeter walls, drawn as thin lines, formed the outer boundary to each figure. Hatched in parallel horizontal lines, habitable areas were graphically differentiated from the mediating encased volumes which, unhatched, appeared as voids. Confirming the distinction in his notations to the drawing, Kahn described these elements as “interior space” and “light” respectively, with the encasing diaphragm walls defined as “structure.” Subsequent sketches in this series (the latter two diagrams in particular) elaborated on the proposition. The third drawing, for example, represented the perimeter walls as broken lines. This implies that top light, admitted to the encased chambers and reflected against the surface of the inner wall, would illuminate the interior. In the concluding diagram, the boundary line between the architectural interior and the void was marked with small crosses, highlighting the inner surface of the wall as a dynamic source of modulated light. A note to the third sketch encapsulated the strategy – Kahn wrote, “Structure gives light makes space.”

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Figure 4.2. Light element diagrams. [Keller and Tansal, “The Development of Dacca”, plate 18]

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In Kahn’s introduction penned for the North Carolina student publication both of these illustrations were explicitly addressed. Beginning with the encased vessels of light, Kahn wrote: In the plan of the assembly I have introduced a light-giving element to the interior of the plan. Consider if you see a series of columns you can say the choice of columns is a choice in light. The columns as solids frame the spaces of light. Now think of it just in reverse and think that the columns are hollow and much bigger and their walls can themselves give light, then the voids are rooms, and the column is the maker of light and can take on complex shapes and be the supporter of spaces and give light to spaces.5 He continued, addressing the outer wall strategy to the residential hostels: The problem of an element in a composition appears again in the making of the anti-glare porches for the hostels. The element must recognize that the light be on the inside of the porch as well as outside. If you have light (not necessarily sunlight), on the interior, the contrast between the darkness of the solids and the brightness of the openings is not great, and therefore, you do not feel the glare. The staggering of the porches as the building rises offers the chance to get the light into the porch, but a sliver of light is needed to give the presence of light to the interior. The sun is unwelcome.6 These drawn and written statements highlighted two distinct yet interrelated architectural tropes that were conceptualised by the architect during the late 1950s and early 1960s as pertinent to the design of the National Assembly Building and the associated residences. The first is the hollow or spatialised wall, where the external wall was conceived as two individual and separated layers. The second is the hollow column, or encased, light-filled architectural elements, variously configured as an uninhabited void or as an internal, room- like enclosure. In Dhaka, Kahn found the opportunity to explore these strategies at an unprecedented scale and intensity. In the course of this chapter I will explore their architectural meaning as resolved in this project.

------5 “The Development by Louis I. Kahn of the Design for the Second Capital of Pakistan at Dacca,” Student Publication of the School of Design, North Carolina State College, Raleigh 14 (May 1964): n.p. 6 Ibid.

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Chapter Argument

In this chapter the metaphor of the “ruin” provides the conceptual framework for an analysis of the National Assembly Building that focuses on threshold conditions; specifically those defined by Kahn in terms of “hollow” walls and “hollow” columns. I trace the evolution of these tropes in Kahn’s work and interpret their particular instantiation in the capitol commission.7

The discussion is developed with reference to a sequence of mostly unrealised architectural projects developed between 1959 and 1962.

I begin with Kahn’s proposal for the United States Consulate (Luanda, Angola, 1959–62, unbuilt). This project is a productive place to start for two reasons. It is the project in which layered threshold elements were first developed and, as I discussed in the first part of this dissertation, it is the project first depicted by Kahn – and subsequently and more assertively by Scully – in terms of the analogous relationship with a ruin. In addition, this project has been framed as the fundamental precursor to the Dhaka commission.8

Kahn’s account of his architectural approach to the Consulate commission shows two distinct architectural objectives. Firstly, and most persistently, the layered fenestration was described as a device for moderating the bright sun and the extreme heat of the African context. Secondly, by evoking the metaphor of a “ruin”, Kahn imbued the strategy with aesthetic and formal intent.9 Although these statements are disparate and in some respects

------7 For a discussion of the “wall” in Kahn’s work see: E. Vivoni-Farage, “A Measure of Silence: Louis I. Kahn and the Transformation of the Wall” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1985). For an alternative interpretation of wall forms in Kahn’s work see Peter Kohane, “The Framing of Space: Louis Kahn and the Trenton Bath House,” in Fabulation: Myth, Nature, Heritage: Proceedings of the 29th Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand Conference, eds. Stuart King, Anuradha Chatterjee and Stephen Loo (Launceston: Society of Architectural Historians of Australia & New Zealand, 2012), 531–540. 8 See for example, Peter Reed “Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, Capital of Bangladesh” in Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture, eds. David B. Brownlee and David G. De Long. (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 374–383; Sarah [Williams] Ksiazek, "Architectural Culture in the Fifties: Louis Kahn and the National Assembly Complex in Dhaka." Journal Of The Society of Architectural Historians 52, no. 4 (December 1993): 416-35. 9 Kahn’s discrete descriptions underscored divergent interpretations of the layered wall proposition. With reference to the “ruin” analogy, for example, and as I have discussed in Chapter 1, Scully privileged a formal/representative emphasis; see Scully, Louis I Kahn. This emphasis has been a dominant theme in Kahn scholarship. The appearance of layered walls in Kahn’s work, Scully has in addition suggested, points to the influence of Robert Venturi on Kahn. See Vincent Scully, “Everybody Needs Everything,” in In Mother’s House: The Evolution of Vanna Venturi’s House in Chestnut Hill, Frederick Schwartz, ed. (New York: Rizzoli, 1992), 39. This observation was extended by David Brownlee in David Brownlee and David De Long, Out of the Ordinary: Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Associates, Architecture, Urbanism, ------

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informed by contrary priorities, a critical attitude to the modernist resolution of the external boundary condition is implicit in both. Kahn’s criticism was three-pronged. He challenged both the modernist glass facade and the protection of glazed openings by way of finely patterned shading grills/screens.10 The articulation of the external wall as a direct expression of the functional interior was also questioned.

Through a close reading of the proposal for the United States Consulate for Luanda, I will comment on Kahn’s alternative solution and on the complex architectural priorities that were synthesised in his approach. This discussion offers an introduction to the emergent category in Kahn’s architectural lexicon: the “hollow” walls.

I then consider the relationship between the Consulate project and earlier works such as the Tribune Review Publishing Company Building (Greensburg, Pa. 1958–62) and the Fleisher House (Elkins Park, Pa., 1959, unbuilt) and the later evolution of “hollowed” architectural elements in the context of design proposals for the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (La Jolla, Ca., 1959–65, unbuilt) and Mikveh Israel Synagogue (Philadelphia, Pa., 1961–72, unbuilt).

The aligned relationship between these architectural projects has been emphasised by Kahn scholars, who highlight the inherent consistencies between these works.11 My interest in reconsidering the interrelationship lies in their particular condition. I therefore describe the ways in which the tropes of “hollow walls” and “hollow columns” are adjusted, and in some respects transformed, as they are translated from one architectural context to another. In tracing this trajectory I isolate the conceptual treads that underpin the meaning of these tropes as realised in Dhaka.

------Design (Philadelphia, Pa.: Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2001), 14; and more assertively by Denise Scott Brown and Sam Rodell, see Denise Scott Brown, “A Worm’s Eye View of Recent Architectural History,” Architectural Record, (February 1984): 69–81; and Sam Rodell “The Influence of Robert Venturi on Louis Kahn,” (Masters diss., Washington State University, 2008). Other scholars have placed their primary emphasis on the contextual/environmentalist characteristics; see for example, Robert McCarter, Louis I. Kahn (London: Phaidon, 2005), 150–159. 10 Kahn’s criticism was most directly addressed to Edward Durrell Stone. Kahn would later lose the commission to design the President’s Estate in Islamabad to Stone (1966), an event that has been typically cited as further evidence of the architect’s divergent approach. Kathleen James-Chakraborty offers a more nuanced comparison of the two architects in which she underlines inherent similarities: Kathleen James- Chakraborty, “Architecture of the Cold War: Louis Kahn and Edward Durrell Stone in South Asia,” in Building America, eds. Anke Köth, Kai Krauskopf, Andreas Schwarting and Hans-George Lippert (Dresden: Thelem, 2008), 169–82. 11 See for example chapter 3, “Shaping an Architecture of Light and Shadow” in McCarter, Louis I. Kahn, 134–219.

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Observations and arguments in this chapter are developed through the detailed discussion of buildings, associated design documents, and seminal representations of the projects in architectural periodicals. Kahn’s descriptions of selected works are a significant point of reference in this discussion. As mentioned in the introduction to this thesis, in drawing on Kahn’s statements I do not imply an equivalent relationship between architectural works and their account by the architect. I do propose, however, that the shifts in emphasis in Kahn’s descriptions across a sequence of visual and discursive representations provide clues to moments of conceptual transition between these projects.

I argue that two key architectural priorities were particularly significant to the development of “hollow” walls and columns in the architecture of the National Assembly Building:

The first priority was to imply a radical separation between distinct yet adjoining architectural environments. Uninhabited architectural voids, I suggest, were employed as formal buffers/barriers between individuated units of space. More specifically, I argue that a core objective of blurring the relationship between the architectural form and associations of contemporary use underpinned this delineation.

The second was to incorporate natural elements, such as the sun, rain and the wind, as active and at times unpredictable actors in the shaping of the architectural environment and experience. This objective was achieved through three key architectural strategies. Firstly, encased, uninhabited void spaces, open to natural elements, were employed as a device by which planar elements were compositionally “cut” and delineated. Secondly, natural elements were admitted into the folds of interior space through these voids. And thirdly, anticipated weathering and material decay were welcomed as a mode of architectural finish.

This chapter demonstrates that the metaphor of the “ruin” was evoked in two ways in the development and realisation of the architectural tropes “hollow walls” and “hollow columns” in the Dhaka project. On the one hand, the “ruin” is evoked through the delineation and radical separation of building parts; on the other, through the appropriation of nature as an active force in the shaping of architecture and architectural experience.

------

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Hollow Walls: US Consulate in Luanda, Angola

Double Layers

The “double layered” facade was most explicitly explored by Kahn in his design for the US Consulate in Luanda. In this proposal, a series of external wall and roof elements were devised as secondary skins to the habitable buildings within. The brief requested accommodation for two programmatic elements: a chancellery and a residence for the ambassador. Kahn interpreted this brief as two buildings. The residence was located to the north of the designated site, and the chancellery to the south, with a shared entrance plaza placed in between. (Figure 4.3)

A common compositional order informed both proposals. Structured as a tartan grid, they were both (broadly) symmetrical in plan, relative to both axes. Both were conceived as individuated pavilions, mediated by courts and connected by a central entrance core. Two storeys high, the primary functions were accommodated at the upper levels and arrived at via ceremonial stairways, with ground floors typically dedicated to services. In both projects the roof was articulated as two discrete and explicitly separated layers with a breezeway in between. (Figure 4.4)

Despite such common ground, the functional and symbolic distinction between the two buildings was also architecturally emphasised. Although both were symmetrically ordered relative to the shared entry axis, each had a specific relationship to the central plaza. Set back from the pedestrian thoroughfare, and situated within a walled garden, the ambassador’s residence was afforded privacy. In contrast, the chancellery fronted the public plaza. Raised on a modest podium and bordered on three sides by shallow pools of water, it was civic in character and ceremonial as a public setting. The two buildings were further differentiated through their volumetric articulation, with the chancellery more singular in its massing.

A more nuanced – and arguably more substantive – architectural distinction was achieved through the bespoke articulation of the buildings’ east and west boundary conditions. (Figure 4.5, 4.6) In the scheme for the ambassador’s residence the upper-level covered verandas formed thick, shaded thresholds to the east and west. In the chancellery, the east and west boundaries were similarly thickened and in shadow. However, here the desired depth was achieved by configuring the external wall as two discrete, separated layers with a shaded void between. The detail and resolution of the fenestration in this project was thus

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Figure 4.3. Louis Kahn, United States Consulate, Luanda, Angola, 1959–61, model. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 129] Figure 4.4. US Consulate Angola, site plan 1959–60. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 126]

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Figure 4.5. US Consulate, Angola, chancellery, elevation. [McCarter, Louis I. Kahn, 157] Figure 4.6. US Consulate, Angola, residence, elevation. [McCarter, Louis I. Kahn, 159] Figure 4.7. US Consulate, Angola, axonometric. [McCarter, Louis I. Kahn, 156]

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charged with a representative function; it amounted to a device that distinguished civil functions from their domestic counterparts.

In Kahn’s most developed design for the chancellery (1960–61), the outer facade was resolved as thin, freestanding, precast concrete modular screens, which fronted bays that were typically a room wide. Several feet separated these two external skins. (Figure 4.7) Anthropomorphic in composition, each panel contained two larger openings, an arched head and a rectangular base, connected via a narrow, vertical opening along the spine.

This arrangement reflected the two-storey organisation of the inner volume. The ground- level rectangular porticos framed the entry to undercroft laneways. At the upper level, the largely blank portion of wall screened full-height, operable, glazed windows. This shielded the glass to head height, reducing the direct view to a narrow vertical slot. A larger, arched opening was, in turn, placed overhead. The light received from this upper aperture, diffused in part by the ceiling plane, illuminated the room at large. Through this double-layered system the window frame was, in effect, detached from its glazing, with each layer afforded functional and material autonomy.

When discussing the US Consulate in Luanda, Kahn typically described his design approach in terms of regionalist logic. His early, often-quoted discussion of the project in his 1960 Voice of America lecture (later published as “Form and Design”), is representative: I am doing a building in Africa, which is very close to the equator. The glare is killing, everybody looks black against the sunlight. Light is a needed thing, but still an enemy. The relentless sun above, the siesta comes over you like thunder. I saw many huts that the natives made. There were no architects there. I came back with multiple impressions of how clever was the man who solved the problems of the sun, rain and wind.12 Alluding to vernacular practices, Kahn suggested that the passive regulation of sunlight was a key architectural priority in this project. He further implied that the search for a tectonic solution to environmental “problems” offered the potential for architectural discovery and innovation: I came to the realization that every window should have a free wall to face. This wall receiving the light from the sky would have a bold opening to the sky [and an opening for the view]. The glare is modified by the lighted wall and the view is not shut off. In this

------12 Louis I. Kahn, “Form and Design,” in Robert Twombly, Louis Kahn: Essential Texts (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2003), 70. (First published in Architectural Design 31, no. 4 [April 1961]: 145–154).

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way the contrast made by separated patterns of glare which skylight grills close to the window make is avoided.13 He referred, in principle, to the upper-level, screened rooms of the chancellery. He proposed that this fenestration embodied a novel architectural approach to the regulation of the regional bright sun and the associated problem of glare.

In this design two distinct architectural strategies worked to calibrate the daylight within the interior. The first involved the hierarchical composition of the openings with respect to the scale of the room and the individual inhabitant. By combining low, vertical slot windows with a larger, expansive overhead archway, the interior was well lit, yet the glare at eye level was minimised. The second strategy, and the aspect more particularly emphasised in Kahn’s statement, involved the resolution of the external wall as two discrete and separated layers. Kahn believed that the character of light held within the shaded void space, softened in colour and intensity, would mediate the bright exterior light and the darkness of the inner room and hence reduce the contrast between the two light conditions. The view, he suggested, was maintained while the glare was diminished. In this layered composition, Kahn explained, the inner surface of the concrete screen panels, subtly animated by the shifting illumination within the void-space, would prove a dynamic, visually engaging and yet soothing prospect for the interior. Kahn proposed that the problem of glare was moderated by a captured zone of coloured light.

The layered treatment of the roof system was, Kahn went on to suggest, similarly informed by an environmental logic, albeit more prosaically. He explained that the separation of the “rain” roof from the “sun” roof allowed for a flow of air between the individuated roof elements: “Another realization came from the effectiveness of the use of breeze for insulation by the making of a loose sun roof independently supported and separated from the rain roof by a head room of about six feet.”14

Kahn ultimately claimed that the regulation of the environment through the reconception of architectural elements such as the “window,” the “wall,” and the “roof” would resolve in an architecture representative of its setting: “The design of the window and wall and the sun

------13 Ibid. A more refined version of this description was cited by Jan Rowan in Progressive Architecture. The bracketed text included in the above quotation is from the Progressive Architecture citation, see Jan C. Rowan, “Wanting to Be: The Philadelphia School,” Progressive Architecture 42, no. 4 (April 1961): 130–169. 14 Ibid.

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and rain roofs would tell man on the street the way of life in Angola.”15 Posed as an alternative both to the modernist curtain wall and to finely patterned sun-shading grills, the environmental control embodied in this project was, Kahn argued, more effective in moderating glare, more indigenous in its architectural expression and profound in its “primitive” strength.

In a 1961 interview with the editor of Perspecta, Kahn redescribed his conceptual approach to the consulate commission and reiterated the regionalist principles at work. On this occasion he extended his explanation beyond environmental considerations to encompass explicitly formal/aesthetic priorities. He uses the metaphor of the “ruin” to describe a deliberately ambiguous relationship between the architectural encasement and the inner shelter: So therefore I thought of the beauty of ruins … the absence of frames … of things which nothing lives behind … and so I thought of wrapping ruins around buildings; you might say encasing a building in a ruin so that you look through the wall which had its apertures by accident.16 This implied that a principal intention underpinning the development of the layered facade was to blur the relationship between the architectural form and the suggestion of use.

Kahn’s description suggests that, reduced to the elemental language of wall plane and unglazed perforated apertures, the outer fenestration projected an image of a building apparently vacant or uninhabited. In this logic, and with the experience of the onlooker in mind, the deep zone of shade that mediated the two boundary wall elements effectively concealed the volume within. Evidence of occupation was obscured. (Figure 4.8) Viewed at a distance, the perforated concrete screen panels – devoid of conventional fenestration detail and patterns of use – presented a striking, two-storey anthropomorphic figuration composed from luminous concrete walls and dark shadows. With its regulating pattern to the east and west elevations, these figural motifs both organised and aesthetically stimulated the viewer’s attention.

Such explicit emphasis on the pictorial affect of the outer screen wall was, however, immediately qualified. The relationship between the facade composition and the

------15 Ibid. 16 Louis I. Kahn, “Discussion in Kahn’s Office,” in Twombly, Essential Texts, 98. (First published Perspecta 7 [1961]: 9–28)

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corresponding interior, Kahn took care to note, was not one of absolute separation but one of logical alignment: But in this case you’d want to formalize these openings and I felt this would be an answer to the glare problem. I wanted to incorporate this into the architecture instead of a device placed next to a window to correct the window desires … I don’t want to say window desires … window desires is not the way to put it. I should say: desire for light but still an active fighting of glare.17 The emphasis inferred that the reconfiguration of the external wall as two distinct layers, with two distinct profiles, did not simply differentiate between the internal requirements and those posed by the external setting. Nor were these respective demands separately addressed. Kahn indicated that the layered fenestration system and the mediating void/light as an integrated architectural component concurrently gave shape to discrete and at times contradictory experiential, formal and aesthetic objectives. This reciprocal function was exemplified by the resolution of the layered wall in the design of the consulate building, whereby each screen panel was composed with explicit regard to the scale and proportion of the inner room and the experience of the internal occupant as well as that of the onlooker.

Early Precedents

Kahn consistently depicted the proposal for the US Consulate as a novel response to contextual parameters. However, the resolution of the external wall as a “hollow” element was, in effect, a development and integration of architectural strategies that had already been explored in a sequence of earlier works – in particular the Tribune Review Publishing Company Building and the Fleisher House. For example, the tectonic order of the Tribune Review project – consisting of expressed masonry structural piers, precast roof beams and non-load bearing membrane walls – informed the chancellery building. (Figure 4.9, 4.10) The T-shaped or “keyhole” window design, first realised in this project, was a fundamental precursor to the consulate’s screen modules. Particularly suggestive in this regard were Kahn’s early elevational studies, which registered his interest in a figurative, particularly anthropomorphic, composition of external fenestration. (Figure 4.11)

Kahn further explored the keyhole window in a sequence of 1959 projects, with the development of the strategy in the Fleisher House particularly aligned with the consulate

------17 Kahn, “Discussion in Kahn’s Office,” 99.

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Figure 4.8. Top, US Consulate, Angola, model. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 127] Figure 4.9. Middle left, Louis Kahn, Tribune Review Building, Greensburg, PA, 1958-61. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 115] Figure 4.10. Middle right, Tribune Review Building, 1958-61. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 115] Figure 4.11. Bottom, Tribune Review Building, sketches, 1958. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 112]

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commission.18 (Figure 4.12) In this scheme, the keyhole window type was employed as an integral, and for the most part modular, element within the building’s constitutive primary units of spatial enclosure. In each unit, masonry bearing perimeter walls with centralised vertical openings were combined with arched caps of precast concrete. In this iteration the bipartite composition of the window arrangement was materially amplified. The design is an early exploration of precast concrete fenestration components whereby openings derived from a masonry structural order were reconfigured as geometric cut-outs within thin membrane walls. This material quality was further, and more vigorously, tested in the design of the building’s proposed double-height entrance facade panel. Consisting of an upper round arch, a thin slot window and lower portico, the tripartite composition was the direct precedent for the modular screen panels developed for the consulate commission. (Figure 4.13)

An especially striking aspect of this house design was the integration of walled garden courts within the building’s compositional matrix. (Figure 4.14, 4.15) Registered here was Kahn’s interest in unglazed boundary walls as encasing elements to individuated “rooms” of light, air and greenery. In this respect, the design is an important precursor to the walled forecourts of the governor’s residence in Luanda. (Figure 4.16, 4.17)

The design for the residence has received little attention either in the early representations of the US Consulate or in the critical reception of the project thereafter; the design for the chancellery building has been systematically privileged. This omission is partly a result of Kahn’s own emphasis on the consulate building as the locus of his architectural discovery. Moreover, the house design did not readily conform to the environmental performance concerns that dominated the reception of the project. The freestanding screen panels in the scheme for the residence (particularly those employed on the building’s southern boundary) did not serve to moderate glare within an aligned inner room. Instead, defining the outer limit to the open circulation forecourt, they flanked the path of entry to the building within. Announcing the building at a distance, the panels’ purpose was explicitly aesthetic.

Within scholarship on the capitol commission the chancellery building is typically framed as the precursor to the Dhaka commission. In contrast, I propose that the resolution of the

------18 The window treatment in the Esherick House (Chestnut Hill, Pa, 1959–61) is exemplary in this regard.

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Figure 4.12. Top, Louis Kahn, Fleisher House, Elkins Park, PA, 1959, model. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 151] Figure 4.13. Middle, Fleisher House, model. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 151] Figure 4.14. Bottom left, Fleisher House, plan. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 150] Figure 4.15. Bottom right, Fleisher House, section. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 151]

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Figure 4.16. Fleisher House, section. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 151] Figure 4.17. US Consulate, Angola, residence, sketches. [McCarter, Louis I. Kahn, 159]

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screen panels in the context of the residence building more closely anticipates Kahn’s approach to the design of the National Assembly Building at Dhaka.

“Theory of Walls”: The Salk Institute for Biological Studies

Kahn’s proposal for the US Consulate was published in the April 1961 issue of Progressive Architecture in Jan C. Rowan’s polemical, and now well-known, article “Wanting to Be: The Philadelphia School.”19

Rowan’s appraisal of Kahn’s design method and selected architectural propositions, which also included the First Unitarian Church and School and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, was developed with extensive reference to Kahn’s narrative and drawn statements. Kahn’s portrayal of the consulate project, as cited in this article, remained close to his Voice of America lecture of the previous year. However, in this edition it was subtly reworked and extended to include the “ruin” analogy: “this wall, receiving the light of day, with its sort of ruin of openings.”20

Limiting his representation of the consulate commission to the chancellery building alone, Rowan depicted the layered fenestration strategy as a “novel system of glare control with an exciting design potential.” He asserted that the “design problem” posed by the unfamiliar tropical climate had precipitated a process of formal discovery. The project was thus framed as the significant precursor to the design for the Salk Institute; the project in which Rowan suggested “Kahn developed further the ‘theory of walls’ that began with the consulate building.”21

Kahn’s description of the Salk Institute, as cited in Rowan’s essay, does not specifically address his “theory of walls.” Kahn did, however, prepare a drawing for the publication that outlined the conceptual logic of double-layered walls through a sequence of annotated diagrams. (Figure 4.18) This drawing inscribed the fundamental ways in which the layered wall strategy – as reiterated in the early designs of the Salk Institute, particularly in the meeting house and study units – was developed.22

------19 Rowan, “Wanting to Be.” 20 Ibid., 140. 21 Ibid., 137. 22 Rowan notes that Kahn prepared the annotated drawings especially for the Progressive Architecture article. Ibid., 163.

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Figure 4.18. Page 161 in “The Philadelphia School”, wall diagrams. [Rowan, “The Philadelphia School”, 161]

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Wall Diagrams: Hollow Walls

In the first two diagrams, a solid wall mediating “inside” and “outside” was reconfigured as two discrete, thinner and separated layers. Invoking Kahn’s 1953 formulation (now a famous aphorism) – “In Gothic times, architects built in solid stones. Now we can build with hollow stones” – the wall element was, in this drawing, reconfigured as hollow.23

Kahn had initially formulated the reconception of solid and weight-bearing structures as hollow tectonic elements with particular reference to triangulated space-frames. These were explored in several projects during the early 1950s, most notably the proposal for the City Tower Project (Philadelphia, Pa., 1952–57, unbuilt) and the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, Conn., 1951–53). In 1953 Kahn described them as follows: The spaces defined by the members of structure are as important as the members. These spaces range in scale from the voids of an insulation panel, void for air, lighting and heat to circulate, to spaces big enough to walk through or live in. The desire to express voids positively in the design of structure is evidenced by the growing interest and work in the development of space frames.24 Here he emphasised that the three-dimensional system provided the possibility for an integrated approach to the articulation of structure and form/space, on the one hand, and structure and mechanical services on the other. (Figure 4.19, 4.20)

Kahn further developed the analogy in 1957, using the terms “served” and “servant” spaces. Traditionally solid architectural elements, when made hollow, he emphasised, could newly work as ancillary spaces: The nature of space is further characterized by the minor spaces that serve it. Storage- rooms, service-rooms and cubicles must not be partitioned areas of a single space structure, they must be given their own structure. The space order concept must extend beyond the harbouring of the mechanical services and include the ‘servant spaces’ adjoining the spaces served. This will give meaningful form to the hierarchy of the spaces. Long ago they built with solid stones. Today we must build with ‘hollow stones’.25 No longer limited to being only mechanical equipment, service elements were now defined as minor, typically smaller-scale units of functional space. Kahn’s earlier emphasis on ------23 Louis I. Kahn, “Toward a Plan for Midtown Philadelphia,” in Alessandra Latour, Louis I. Kahn: Writings, Lectures, Interviews (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 45. (First published in Perspecta 2 [1953]: 45–7) 24 Ibid. 25 Louis I. Kahn, “Space Order and Architecture,” in Latour, Louis I. Kahn, 79–80. (First published in Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Journal 34, 10 [October 1957]: 375–377).

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organic/technologically derived space frame systems was revised to privilege a historically informed, “room”-based architectural order with a hierarchical yet interdependent relationship between individuated units of space. This description accorded with the architectural principles that informed the Trenton Bath House at the Trenton Jewish Community Center (Ewing, N.J., 1954–59) and Kahn later confirmed that the trope of “served” and “servant” spaces had been crystallised in this project.26 (Figure 4.21)

When looked at in relation to these earlier propositions, Kahn’s “wall” diagram for the PA publication (1961) registers the development of his thinking on “hollow” architectural elements and their extended potential to work as servant spaces. In the third diagram, for example, Kahn noted that the newly hollowed or layered wall, when infused with “air,” would work to insulate the interior. The wall, it was implied, would assume a “serving” role by operating as a device for passive environmental control.27 In the next diagram the layered walls were again charged with a serving role, which in this case involved the moderation of glare. This reiterated the logic of the layered walls developed in Luanda, with the inner wall layer defined as glass and the outer wall as a solid panel with openings to the view, and with each layer, Kahn’s notes indicated, being of a different “character.” In the next sequence of sketches, however, the development of the strategy in the context of Kahn’s design for the Salk Institute was more specifically addressed.

Hollow Walls as Encasements

The final three diagrams in the PA drawing are bracketed together and labelled “Architectural solutions of spaces facing the problems of glare.” In these diagrams Kahn explored the architectural implication of the layered wall proposition when considered as the perimeter boundary to a unit of enclosure.

------26 Susan Solomon, Louis I Kahn’s Trenton Jewish Community Center (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), 45–46. 27 Kahn extended the depiction of the hollowed wall element as a passive device for environmental control in his lecture “Law and Rule in Architecture,” first delivered at Princeton University in 1961. In it, Kahn suggested: “A wall long ago was thick and it was expected to be one thing on the outside, something else inside … It had to be strong enough also to hold things. Today, you can make this wall one thing, make that another … In the summer the two walls create a venturi. In the plan, develop a very free view as to how these walls may relate to each other. In the winter, you can close this with a door and you have a space which can insulate you from the cold and the warmth.” Kahn, “Law and Rule in Architecture,” in Twombly, Essential Texts, 127.

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Figure 4.19. Page 25 in “Toward a Plan For Midtown Philadelphia”, proposed city hall building, model. [Kahn, “Toward a Plan for Midtown Philadelphia”, 25] Figure 4.20. Yale Art Gallery, isometric drawing. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 68] Figure 4.21. Trenton Jewish Community Centre, plans and section. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 83]

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The first two diagrams, a circle set within a square and a square set within a circle, provided generic descriptions of architectural modules associated with the three-storey dining and library blocks of the Salk Institute meeting house. Each diagram identified structural columns as the tangential point of connection between concentric geometric figures, with the space between the two layers defined as “outside.” These diagrams show a nuanced evolution of the layered wall strategy when compared to the screen modules of the chancellery building. The individuated “character” of the inner and outer wall layers was in this design, for example, further amplified through geometric juxtaposition. A different emphasis also characterised the definition of the interstitial spaces. In this configuration, the previously shaded void spaces that mediated the wall layers were treated as open to the elements. The freestanding fenestration modules, which had been earlier resolved as planar precast panels, were reconfigured as segments to prismatic and cylindrical encasements. In Kahn’s concluding sketch, which is loosely representative of the design of the Institute’s study units, the logic of the glare modification again appeared lost. Instead, the sketch underlined the inherent formal potential – that is, a geometrically complex concentric sequence of layered spaces with alternating units of enclosure and void.

The “wall” drawing registered a significant development in Kahn’s conception of hollowed architectural elements and their potential role as servant spaces. No longer host to mechanical services or servant functions, hollowed walls, when treated as an open void, would moderate the temperature and quality of light within the interior. His emphasis was not on an instrumental negation of environmental parameters. Instead, the hollowed wall was invested with an ambition to simultaneously moderate and emphasise natural elements as active agents in the shaping of the architecture and the architectural experience.

With reference to the chancellery building, Kahn had explained that the character of light within the void space would reduce the contrast between bright exterior light and the dark interior and therefore diminish glare. He further emphasised that the inner surface of the concrete screen panels, animated by the fluctuating light conditions within the void, would provide a soothing yet dynamic surface for the eye to rest on. The design for the Salk Institute’s meeting house demonstrates the evolution of Kahn’s thinking with regard to the architectural resolution of the void spaces. Here, the space mediating the layered fenestration was treated as an open void; a threshold more directly exposed to the natural elements. Light, rain, wind and fog were, in this design, admitted within the folds of the building and set in play with the inner surface of the concrete encasement. The interior

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environment was therefore at once sealed and yet fundamentally determined by the dynamic material atmosphere of the boundary condition. The interior and the immediate environment were therefore, in this proposition, configured in a reciprocal architectural relationship.

Window Room and Roofless Room

In 1965 an edited transcript of Kahn’s 1963 Yale lecture was published in Perspecta 9/10, under the title “Remarks.”28 Kahn’s early account of the Dhaka commission in this lecture (initially published in the 1964 North Carolina student publication) was reprinted here as the first and most elaborately described project in a series. This speech also included succinct yet lucid descriptions of a number of other projects that were active in his office at the time. This sequence of projects included the Fine Arts Center (Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1959–73), the Mikveh Israel Synagogue (Philadelphia, Pa., 1961–72, unbuilt), the Indian Institute of Management (Ahmedabad, India, 1962–74), the Adele Levy Memorial Playground (New York City, NY, 1961–66), and the Salk Institute of Biological Studies (La Jolla, Ca., 1959– 65). The illustrations mostly date from 1963; however, the late publication of the transcript also allowed for the inclusion of several later documents. The development of the Indian Institute of Management and the capitol complex were, for example, traced with reference to drawings and models completed in 1964.

This published record – now seminal and frequently cited – provided a vivid account of the major works developed by Kahn in the relatively short period spanning 1961–64. This cluster of works, particularly as represented in this article, shows the emergence of layered or encased “light elements” as a persistent trope. This account also highlighted the resonance between the strategy employed in the community building for the Mikveh Israel Synagogue commission and the resolution of the light elements in Dhaka.

In this publication, the Mikveh Israel Synagogue was represented by a model photograph and corresponding site plan dated October 1963. (Figure 4.22, 4.23) The commission had, at this time, been conceived as three distinct architectural elements: a community facility, a chapel and a synagogue. Kahn’s concise discussion of it placed a particular emphasis on encased light elements and underlined the two distinct resolutions of the strategy. He referred to these as “window room” and “roofless room” respectively. ------28 Louis I. Kahn, “Remarks,” Perspecta 9/10 (1965): 303–335.

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Figure 4.22. Mikveh Israel Synagogue model. [Kahn, “Remarks”, 320] Figure 4.23. Mikveh Israel Synagogue plan. [Kahn, “Remarks”, 320]

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“Window room” described the cylindrical units of enclosure, which were integrated within and punctuated the layered perimeter boundary of the chapel and the synagogue buildings. Describing the strategy with reference to the synagogue he wrote: The spaces are enclosed by window rooms 20 feet in diameter connected by walled passages. These window room elements have glazed openings on one exterior side and larger unglazed arched openings facing the interior ... The light from the exterior captured in the interior room of the window is seen from the synagogue chamber as free from glare.29 The cylindrical units of enclosure, Kahn implied, were an extension of the layered wall strategy – both elements moderated glare and admitted diffused light to the interior. Despite his emphasis on such broad conceptual consistencies, there were also subtle shifts of emphasis at play. For example, the elemental juxtaposition of glass and concrete, which had been fundamental to the earlier works, was revised in this design. Proposed in its place was the continuous and materially uniform architectural encasement, which separated glazed and unglazed openings. The arrangement of these apertures relative to the building’s interior was reversed, with glazed openings set within the cylinder’s outer layer and the large unglazed apertures facing inwards. (Figure 4.24) The most significant conceptual shift in the translation of layered walls to cylindrical encasements was, however, the reconception of hollow threshold elements as habitable units of enclosure. Apertures of light previously treated as architectural voids were reconceived as habitable “rooms of light”; that is, individuated spaces integral to the hierarchical order of the plan and associated patterns of human action and interaction.

The conceptual distinction was emphasised by Kahn in the design for the community centre. In this scheme the external walls were treated as thin and pliable diaphragms that, by forming an inward omega figuration in plan, introduced cylindrical light wells within the interior. Kahn referred to these elements as “roofless rooms.” “In the community building,” he emphasised, “light is given to the interior by exterior roofless rooms.”30

------29 Kahn, “Remarks,” 320. 30 Ibid.

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Figure 4.24. Mikveh Israel Synagogue, perspective, 1963. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 193]

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The introduction of cylindrical voids in the plan of the community building was a late design addition dating to late 1963.31 This revision was concurrent with Kahn’s active engagement in the development of the capitol complex in Dhaka. Kahn highlighted the conjunction, noting that the “roofless room was born out of the same idea which incidentally gave rise to the plans at Dacca.”32 Encased spaces open to the natural elements had by late 1963 become fundamental to the composition of the National Assembly Building.

Hollow Walls/Hollow Columns in Dhaka

The visual documents – including sketches, measured drawings and model photographs – used to represent the capitol project in Perspecta were, for the most part, an edited, concise version of those published earlier in the North Carolina student publication. However, the sequence in which these documents were arranged was revised. This facilitated a more direct alignment between text and image. Additional plans and sections of the capitol complex dating to July 1964 were also included. Among the republished illustrations was Kahn’s annotated drawing of “light elements” and the “glare wall” study of the hostels – the illustration with which this chapter began and to which I now return. In the rest of this chapter, I consider the particular resolution of spatialised architectural elements in the architecture of the National Assembly Building.

In the Perspecta edition the light element drawing was extended to include an additional pair of interrelated sectional diagrams.33 (Figure 4.25) The first drawing in this set showed a number of columns standing in a row, equidistant from each other. Tapered, capped with a capital and rendered as solid, their status as “traditional” architectural elements was underlined. The space between these columns was, in contrast, left unhatched. When seen in relation to the graphic logic of the larger drawing, this suggests “light.” The relationship ------31 For a chronology of Mikveh Israel Synagogue’s design development see Susan Solomon, Louis I. Kahn’s Jewish Architecture: Mikveh Israel and the Midcentury American Synagogue, (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2009). 32 Kahn, “Remarks,” 320. 33 This drawing is not included in Louis I. Kahn, Personal Drawings: The Completely Illustrated Catalogue of the Drawings in the Louis I. Kahn Collection, University of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (New York: Garland, 1987). I could not locate this drawing at the Kahn Collection or at the Museum of Modern Art (New York). I have hence not been able to ascertain the status of the original drawing. Subsequently the illustration was published in its extended version, as seen in Perspecta. See, for example, Heinz Ronner, Sharad Jhaveri and Alessandro Vasella, Louis I. Kahn: Complete Works, 1935–74, (Boulder, Colo: Westview Press, 1977), 239; Michael Merrill, Louis Kahn on the Thoughtful Making of Spaces: The Dominican Motherhouse and a Modern Culture of Space (Baden: Lars Muller: 2010), 171.

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between solid and light elements was reversed in the subsequent, complementary diagram – here solids are re-conceived as light-filled architectural encasements. These vertical voids, the drawing suggested, would both delimit space and provide light to internal units of enclosure.

This extended version of the “light element” drawing provided a more direct and explicitly synchronised visual counterpart to Kahn’s narrative. I now return to this description, which was also cited at the beginning of this chapter: In the assembly I have introduced a light giving element to the interior of the plan. If you see a series of columns you can say that choice of column is choice of light. The columns as solids frame the spaces of light. Now think of it just in reverse and think that columns are hollow and much bigger and that their walls can themselves give light, then the voids are rooms, and the column is the maker of light and can take on complex shapes and be the supporter of spaces and give light to spaces.34 Two priorities articulated in this statement would prove essential to the resolution of spatialised architectural components in the capitol complex. Firstly, and by way of an analogy with a classical temple, Kahn privileged a compositional order based on a rhythmic play of light and shadow. In a classical work, he suggested, the definition of the columns and the intercolumniation gave form to the character of the space held between the solid elements. He referred to this mediating space as a field of “light.” The classical order was depicted here (to cite Kahn’s later formulation of this thought) as “a rhythmic composition of light and no light, light no light, light no light.”35 He proposed that top-lit, encased voids, when employed as constitutive elements within the design, would represent, in a new manner, the rhythmic composition of light and shadow.

Secondly, by highlighting the status of a classical column as a generic architectural component, Kahn privileged an elemental approach to architectural composition. He suggested that a novel solution for generic tectonic elements was achieved through the conceptual revitalisation of solid columns as hollow architectural encasements. Clarifying ------34 Kahn, quoted in “The Development of Dacca,” n.p. Vincent Scully has noted the similarity between Kahn’s notion of hollow column and masonry piers employed by Frank Lloyd Wright; see Vincent Scully, “Wright, International Style, and Kahn,” Arts 36 (March 1962): 67–71. The relationship “hollow column” and “served and servant spaces” was discussed by Alexandra Tyng, Beginnings: Louis I. Kahn’s Philosophy of Architecture, (New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1984): 31–43. See also Enrique Vivoni-Farage, “A Measure of Silence,” 49–62; and Peter Kohane “The Framing of Space: Louis Kahn and the Trenton Bath House,” in Fabulation: Myth, Nature, Heritage: Proceedings of the 29th Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand Conference, eds. Stuart King, Anuradha Chatterjee and Stephen Loo (Launceston: Society of Architectural Historians of Australia & New Zealand, 2012), 531–540. 35 See, for example Kahn, “Berkeley Lecture 1966: Informal Thoughts on Architecture and Personal Expression,” Perspecta 28 (1997): 1–33.

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Figure 4.25. Left, light element diagrams. [Keller and Tansal, “The Development of Dacca”, plate 18]. Right, light element diagrams [Kahn, “Remarks”, 310]

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the thought, he continued: “What I am working on is to develop the element to such an extent that it becomes a poetic entity which has its beauty outside its place in the composition as well as when it is part of it. In this way it becomes analogous to the solid column I mentioned above.”36 Kahn therefore argued that encased vessels of light, as developed in the design of the capitol complex, served as generative tectonic components in the composition of the National Assembly Building.

The graphic inversion of solid columns to light-giving elements was repeated in a number of Kahn’s early drawn studies of the National Assembly Building. (Figure 4.26, 4.27) These documents typically date to late 1963, the period during which the building’s essential compositional order was determined. A composite sketch included in the North Carolina student publication, captioned “Explanation of column and light element and other studies” was representative in this regard. (Figure 4.28) This drawing was published with, and formed the concluding image to, a set of three allied studies. In this sequence the emergence of light elements as significant components in the organisation of the National Assembly Building was explicitly emphasised. (Figure 4.29, 4.30, 4.31)

Plan and sectional studies of the assembly chamber were the primary subject of these illustrations. In a characteristic diagrammatic plan, redrawn several times with subtle variations, the assembly chamber was depicted as a circle with an outer ring. This concentric arrangement was, in turn, segmented by an eight-point asterisk figuration. Eight geometric, typically circular, encased “light” elements punctuated the chamber’s outer ring and presented a thickened and spatialised threshold to the circular body within. In the accompanying sectional diagrams the assembly chamber was drawn as a conical volume or, alternatively, as a cylindrical base with conical top, which culminated in an oculus or monitor for light. (Figure 4.32) A particularly striking feature of these sectional drawings was the vertical striations of light and shade, by which the chamber’s perimeter envelope was rendered as faceted.

When considered in relation to sequential development of the design, the integration of light elements within the chamber’s outer threshold marked a significant shift in the compositional order of the assembly chamber. Initially circular in plan, by the fall of 1963 the chamber had been recomposed as a circle inscribed within an octagon. The transition

------36 Kahn, quoted in “The Development of Dacca,” n.p.

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Figure 4.26. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, undated, sketch. [The Louis I. Kahn Archive, 131] Figure 4.27. National Assembly Building, November 1963, sketch. [The Louis I. Kahn Archive, 145]

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Figure 4.28. Top, Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, early sketches. [Keller and Tansal, “The Development of Dacca”, plate 22] Figure 4.29. Bottom left, Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, early sketches. [Keller and Tansal, “The Development of Dacca”, plate 19] Figure 4.30. Bottom centre, Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, early sketches. [Keller and Tansal, “The Development of Dacca”, plate 20] Figure 4.31. Bottom right, Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, early sketches. [Keller and Tansal, “The Development of Dacca”, plate 21]

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between the two figures was modulated by a geometrically complex and alternating pattern of individuated units of interior space and encased, light-filled voids. The hollow elements were, in this scheme, employed as architectural components through which the envelope of the assembly chamber was vertically striated. This proposition was evocatively conveyed in a three-dimensional rendering of the assembly chamber; also included in the North Carolina student publication, it was captioned: “Spirit of light giving elements.” (Figure 4.33) In this rendering, the outer envelope to the assembly chamber appeared segmented and interlaced by a colonnade of coloured light. The centrality of the chamber was thus counterpoised by the pronounced and apparently erosive force of radiating diagonals.

A comparison of two plan studies, both dated October 1963, clearly registers the evolution of the design during the autumn months of that year. (Figure 4.34, 4.35) One drawing is closely aligned to Kahn’s preliminary proposition; the other shows a more developed version of the plan. Their juxtaposition demonstrates that the encased voids of light emerged as a constitutive component of the assembly chamber in tandem with an important change in the overall composition. In the process, an essentially diamond-shaped (rotated square) plan, with a prayer hall at its southern apex, was newly resolved as an eight-sided figure, consisting of eight individuated architectural units. Those in the four cardinal directions were distinguished through their form and program. The pyramidal mosque/entrance was balanced with a circulation block/entrance to the north and two new, curvilinear elements were introduced to the east and west. (These were developed as common dining and lounge facilities respectively.) Four identical perimeter office blocks, now reduced in scale and simplified in form, traversed diagonally between these individuated building elements. The proposed full-height atrium mediating the chamber and the exterior ring remained unchanged. The circulatory elements were also consistent: four vertical nodes interconnected with corridor rings along the perimeter sector. Rendered as a figure-ground schematic, the definition of the architecture as alternating rhythm of interior space (horizontal and stacked) and full-height voids was emphasised in this later study.

This octagonal proposition was tested in numerous sketches and scaled studies dating to late 1963. The plan diagram was a recurrent drawing type – it was used to explore the geometric and formal relationship between the inner chamber, diamond-shaped light wells and

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Figure 4.32. Light element drawings, detail. [Keller and Tansal, “The Development of Dacca”, plate 21] Figure 4.33. Light element drawings. [Keller and Tansal, “The Development of Dacca”, plate 17]

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Figure 4.34. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, sketch. [The Louis I. Kahn Archive, 103] Figure 4.35. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, sketch. [The Louis I. Kahn Archive, 102]

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adjacent interiors. (Figure 4.36) These drawings suggest that internal circulation within the chamber’s thickened perimeter was difficult to resolve. In a relatively detailed version of this scheme, dated 26 November 1963, a solution was reached by way of a corridor ring. Mediating the inner and outer interiors, it dissected the light chambers in two. (Figure 4.37) This arrangement signalled the subsequent resolution of the light wells as triangular modules and the resultant composition of the chamber as a sixteen-sided figure with an outer circulatory ring. (Figure 4.38, 4.39, 4.40) The vertical extension of the light wells to form a crowning roof to the assembly building was significant and formative at this time. In this design a ring of eight prismatic light wells towered above the National Assembly Building. Perforated with large-arch and reverse-arch openings, they each admitted light and air to the well below, announced the monument at a distance, and circumscribed the chamber within. (Figure 4.41)

The shape and relative arrangement of unglazed wall apertures had preoccupied Kahn from the early stages of the design. The early perspectival rendering of the hostels (ca. Spring 1963), addressed in the preface to this chapter, is representative. (Figure 4.1) However, in the preliminary proposals such elaborate screen walls were smaller-scale building components. They were proportioned with respect to the scale of the individual occupant and the adjacent unit of the interior space. Larger-scale, public-building components were, by contrast, given a more restrained expression.37 In the later design for the towering light wells, however, the scale of the unglazed apertures was radically amplified. This introduced a further figurative element within the fenestration order of the National Assembly Building. (Figure 4.42) The proposal anticipated a major development in the design, where monumentalised unglazed apertures emerged as dominant and unifying compositional elements in the design of the capitol complex.

------37 This early composition was reminiscent of the design for the First Unitarian Church and School (Rochester, New York, first phase completed 1962). The similarity is highlighted by Goldhagen; see, Goldhagen, Situated Modernism, 183.

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Figure 4.36. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, sketch, 1964. [650.NA.306 (F24), Kahn Collection] Figure 4.37. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, plan, 1964. [650.NA.306 (F24), Kahn Collection]

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Figure 4.38. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, plan, 1963. [650.NA.313 (F24), Kahn Collection] Figure 4.39. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, plan detail, 1963. [650.NA.351 (F24), Kahn Collection] Figure 4.40. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, plan detail. [650.NA.351 (F24), Kahn Collection]

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Figure 4.41. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, section, November 26 1963. [650.NA.351 (F24), Kahn Collection] Figure 4.42. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, elevation, March 1964. [650.NA.141 (F20), Kahn Collection]

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The drawings and associated model of May 1964 consolidated the evolution of the design that had occurred during the spring months. (Figure 4.43, 4.44, 4.45) Thin diaphragm walls were employed as the principal form-giving vocabulary for the entire proposal. Through sharp folds – at acute, obtuse and right angles – wall planes gave shape to a complex geometric field. This emphasised both the continuity of the envelope and the individuation of component parts; each was, in turn, characterised by the adjacency of an interior space and vertical voids. In the National Assembly Building, this strategy created a sequence of layered perimeter boundary conditions, where glazed surfaces and unglazed framed openings were separated and set at a distance apart. Three types of unglazed openings, in turn, informed the fenestration pattern: large-scale geometric, most typically circular/semi- circular apertures; thin, full-height vertical reveals; and full-height vertical portals open to court spaces within. The monolithic concrete skin surrounding the National Assembly Building was, in this composition, rendered as both perforated and cut.

In this site plan the design of the hostel groups had further matured and approached their final arrangement. Although developed as three distinct clusters, each consisting of a particular housing density and type, the design of the hostels was informed by broadly similar principles. All dwelling types were grouped around circulation courts, garden and common rooms with shared facilities. They were of the same height, featured parapeted roof gardens and were unified by the common order of their fenestration. Perforated circular and semi-circular openings, combined with vertical, deep-set reveals, gave the hostel group a consistent visual expression.

This scheme was well received by both the Public Works Department in Dhaka and the ministers in Rawalpindi (West Pakistan), save for two important objections.38 The towering light wells were contested because of the perceived “chimney stacks” effect. The client suggested that the light wells, if connected together, would resemble a dome, thereby making the building more “Islamic” in appearance. The other criticism concerned the appropriation of the prayer hall as the entrance to the assembly.39 As the prayer hall was not intended for the general public, it was requested that it be raised one level above the public entrance to the building and accessed from within.

------38 Letter, Ahmed to Kahn, May 26, 1964, “Second Capital–Pakistan Pakistan Public Works Department Correspondence–1964,” Box LIK 117, Kahn Collection. Previously cited in Reed, “Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, Capital of Bangladesh,” 383. 39 Typed document, May 20, 1964, “Lou’s Notes,” Box LIK 122, Kahn Collection.

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By July the proposal had been revised. (Figure 4.46) The light towers were lowered, and integrated with a cylindrical cap to the assembly chamber, giving form to a geometrically complex centralised roof. The prayer hall was substantially redesigned – it was now proposed as a cubic volume with three-quarter engaged cylinders at each corner and was raised one level above the southern plaza to accommodate an entrance chamber below. With the plan of the assembly building further refined, the design of the Citadel of Assembly now approached its final layout. Considered as a whole, by July 1964, the design of the Citadel of Assembly appeared as an architectural essay in “hollow walls” and “hollow columns.” No longer employed as constitutive elements within the composition, these elements now formed the generative basis to the entire composition.

At this time Kahn noted, “Make the special problems of water, sun give building a special character.”40 If in Luanda the appropriation of environmental parameters as the architectural “problem” had precipitated a process of formal discovery, in Dhaka similar reasoning supported the consolidation and further monumentalisation of formal preoccupations.

Hollow Walls and Hollow Columns: Final Resolution

In the last section of this chapter I will comment on the manner in which the generic architectural tropes were specifically resolved at Dhaka, and I will speculate as to their particular architectural purpose and meaning as manifested here. How were these architectural elements transformed in this process?

Notes from May 1964 register Kahn’s early thoughts on the casting detail for in situ concrete walls: “Must use small lifts. Many horizontal joints. Do special detail at these joints. Develop detail to throw water away from the wall … Perhaps use marble inserts.”41 His instructions were formative – over the ensuing months, concrete diaphragm walls interlaced with a grid of white marble came to form the essential material order of the National Assembly Building.

------40 Ibid. 41 Ibid.

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Figure 4.43. Capital Complex, model, May 1964. [030.650.10 (k12.6p.111.n), Kahn Collection] Figure 4.44. Capital Complex, model, May 1964. [030.650.10 (k12.6p.130), Kahn Collection] Figure 4.45. Capital Complex, model, May 1964. [030.650.10 (k12.6p.143), Kahn Collection]

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Figure 4.46. Capital Complex, model, July 1964. [030.650.10 (k12.6p.149), Kahn Collection]

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Concrete, the material favoured by Kahn for the architecture of the National Assembly Building, was a polemical choice. Reinforced concrete construction was uncommon in Dhaka and posed two practical challenges. Firstly, the lack of skilled labour and industrial capability hindered a precisely controlled finish. Secondly, the characteristic high humidity meant that the exposed concrete surface was susceptible to mildew and moss. Concrete construction and resultant material quality, Kahn’s curt notes indicated, would need to be adjusted with respect to the local conditions.42

By mid 1965 construction documents were advanced. Reinforced concrete walls were to be formed using narrow timber boards, oriented vertically. (Figure 4.47) Fundamentality reliant on manual labour, estimates of daily “lifts” were modest and set at five-foot (1.5-metre) high sections. This precise measure was also proportioned relative to the building’s floor-to- floor height module. In the office buildings, for example, with a floor-to-floor height of ten feet, every alternate pour junction aligned with an inner floor. Horizontal pour lines were, in turn, detailed as a recessed joint to be finished with six-inch (fifteen-centimetre) bands of white marble. These were alternately detailed as flush with the concrete surface or cast as a drip joint and set proud of the wall. As the design advanced, marble was additionally employed as vertical, slightly wider bands, which together with the horizontal striations formed a delicate gridded stone inlay within the concrete wall. The composition was suggestive of a woven screen. (Figure 4.48)

In a lecture delivered at Berkeley in November 1966, approximately eight months after the pouring of concrete had commenced in Dhaka, Kahn described his solution: Now these stripes that you see there are the way I made the construction. I poured every five feet and rested, so that all the screw ties … would all be … where I placed the marble. So, you would have marble inserts every five feet, and that’s how it’s made. Because they technically are unable to make it – the concrete – as ‘Salk concrete,’ you see, so I made the ‘trauma’ part – the part that always is bad, when you start another pour – be a, well, be a sort of cruddy event, you see. But the bar that was there, to supplant, you see – it’s like thickening – it actually becomes a wash, maybe. Because it rains so much: so wall is not made so damp coming down … This way every five feet it’s drained. It’s a combination. It’s an ‘Order’; a realization of concrete; of construction, and [of] need.43

------42 For the process and detail of concrete construction, and adaptation construction details and techniques to the local condition, see Fred Langford, “Concrete in Dacca,” Mimar 6 (1982): 50–55. 43 Kahn, “Berkeley Lecture,” 29.

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Figure 4.47. Capitol Complex, construction site. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.] Figure 4.48. National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.]

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The proposed composite material order and detail, Kahn suggested, was informed by both rational and expressive priorities. Marble bands were, at a prosaic level, employed as a corrective measure: to cover an imperfect joint, or to drain the wall surface.44 The juxtaposition, Kahn further implied, was fundamental to the proposed material affect. In Dhaka Kahn did not aim for the refined, ethereal concrete finish he had so precisely achieved at Salk. In this context concrete was conceived as a textured and robust material, in the proximity of which the refined character of marble was heightened. Through adjacency with the more delicate and luminous precious stone, he inferred, the “crude” material condition acquired an elevated status. Variations and inconsistencies, roughness in finish, and the immanent prospect of the surface discolouration were not only tolerated, but actively embraced.

Concurrent with the material evolution of the design, the precise shape and location of the unglazed openings within the outer walls were refined. The relationship between the gridded screen walls and the cut-out openings were studied in a sequence of measured elevation drawings. (Figure 4.49) The large-scaled apertures were initially proportioned in precise relationship to the interior, with the inner rooms typically afforded a generous prospect. In subsequent design iterations, however, the relationship between the perforated openings and the inner volume appeared incidental. (Figure 4.50) This signalled a conceptual shift in the articulation of the layered fenestration. Earlier explorations (as in the consulate building in Luanda or the meeting house at Salk) had conceived the composition of the outer wall with respect to both the environmental quality of the inner room and the civil expression of the external form, subtly mediating the two. At Dhaka this reciprocal relationship was ultimately severed.

This disjuncture between the outer screen wall and the habitable volume within was, in part, a function of scale. With the monumentalisation of the layered wall strategy, the relationship of the inner rooms and the over-scaled openings was inevitably diminished, and the logic of the “glare wall” undermined. The ambiguous relationship between the architectural encasement and the inner shelter, invested in Kahn’s aphorism “wrapping ruins around buildings” was, in this project, not only architecturally sought, but also particularly amplified.

------44 The detail was similar to the wall detail developed earlier for the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, Conn., 1951–53).

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Figure 4.49. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, elevation, July 6 1964. [650.NA.095 (F20), Kahn Collection] Figure 4.50. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, elevation, March 1965. [650.NA.039 (F20), Kahn Collection]

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By mid 1965, the exterior facade compositions had been finalised. The marble grid and the perforated figurations were carefully integrated and the two geometric orders interlaced. The range and scale of the openings was further extended. Circular figures, characteristic of the earlier compositions, were now combined with large rectangular and variously shaped triangular cut-outs. Whereas the office blocks were regular in their fenestration pattern, the individuated character of the cardinal wings was further particularised through the shape and scale of the proposed openings. (Figure 4.51, 4.52, 4.53) This was an enigmatic edifice composed with a sculptural force. Solid and void, light and dark, vertical and horizontal figurations and accents were held in a dynamic yet finely balanced composition. (Figure 4.54) Devoid of familiar fenestration detail, and with the inner building veiled behind thick zones of shadow, the projected image was of a vacant edifice. (Figure 4.55)

At this time the interior elevations facing the ambulatory were also finalised. The seven- storey facade fronting each office block was designed as a regular module. (Figure 4.56) Sharply acute, pediment-shaped cut-outs and small portholes were bracketed with a large lunette and reverse lunette openings at the top and the base, the latter slightly cropped at the floor line to form a portico. The composition evoked both an abstracted geometric pattern and a playful anthropomorphic figuration: a mouth, and round eyes with a triangulated brow. The arrangement was conceived in relationship to adjacent corridors and with human scale in mind. These figural openings framed selective and carefully cropped views of the occupants in motion. The human figure was thus framed as integral to the desired pictorial affect. Distinct from the design of the outer facades, evidence of human occupation was, in this arrangement, instead deliberately aestheticised.

The individuation of the outer circulation ring to the sixteen-sided central volume, introduced in early 1965, was a significant change to the design of the National Assembly Building. (Figure 4.57, 4.58) Consisting of corridors and gently rising stairways, this perimeter zone served as both vertical and horizontal circulation within the central block and also connected the core to the four cardinal wings. To the inner side of this circulation zone was an alternating rhythm of light chambers, lobby or ancillary rooms, and to its outer perimeter was a sixteen-sided screen. This circulatory ring was, in effect, held within a “hollow wall.”

A particularly dramatic aspect of the design was the aligned sequence of light well, corridor, stair and screen wall. Large circular apertures in the outer screen were here braced by

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Figure 4.51. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, elevation, July 6 1964. [650.NA.095 (F20), Kahn Collection] Figure 4.52. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building [Author’s image] Figure 4.53. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building [Author’s image]

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Figure 4.54. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.] Figure 4.55. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building. [Brownlee and De Long, In the Realm, 236]

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Figure 4.56. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building. [Rykwert, Louis Kahn, 215]

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Figure 4.57. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, plan, July 1964. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete works, 248] Figure 4.58. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, plan, January 1965. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete works, 250]

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diagonal stairways, and further framed a walkway beyond. (Figure 4.59) The path of movement was thus explicitly included within the pictorial frame. Diffused light from the chamber filtered through the circulation zone at this juncture and added dramatic effect to the layered architectural setting. With natural light apparently emanating from the centre, the core of the building here read as an open void, with its functional status thus somewhat ambiguous. The civic function of building and its experience as an aesthetic object was separated or blurred.

Documents dating to 1966 (the year of the near-final version of the National Assembly Building) register a subtle yet significant adjustment to the relationship between the assembly chamber and the surrounding encased voids. The interlocking of these two figures, fundamental to the early conception of the project, was eliminated in this late revision. As a consequence, the vertical striations of light and shade, characteristic of the chamber’s outer volume, were lost. (Figure 4.60, 4.61) The assembly chamber was resolved into a more fundamentally centred figure, an orientation that was further reinforced by the late resolution of the roof as a centralised, top-lit, vaulted structure. In this final design, the only register of the interlocking between the light chambers and the assembly building were the sixteen thin vertical slot windows in the inner wall of the assembly’s crowning roof. (Figure 4.62) In the development of the mosque, however, a reciprocal relationship between “hollow columns” and the habitable interior was more fully explored and finally realised.

Cylindrical voids were included in the design of the mosque concurrent with its elevation above the public entry to the assembly. In this arrangement, the hollow towers admitted light to both the entry chamber and the floor below. The two inner cylinders further served to anchor the stairway between the entrance, the mosque and the assembly chamber. In the final design, the circulatory passage to the mosque was accommodated in an independent structure. (Figure 4.63, 4.64) In this composition, the mosque was resolved as a sixty-six- foot-wide (twenty-metre) cubic volume with four three-quarter engaged cylinders at each corner. These towers, each forty-eight feet (14.5 metres) in diameter, extended up above the ceiling of the mosque and dropped two levels below the mosque floor, grounding the building. (Figure 4.65) Four-foot timber panelling skirted the room, culminating in a mihrab marked by a tall vertical joinery element. Inclined planes at the upper four corners implied a forty-five degree rotation in the ceiling; and crowned the room. (Figure 4.66) The walls of the mosque extended out in both directions to cross-brace the cylindrical volumes.

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Figure 4.59. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.]

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Figure 4.60. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, plan, January 22 1965. [650.NA.048 (F20), Kahn Collection] Figure 4.61. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, plan, January 5 1966. [650.AC.003 (F38), Kahn Collection]

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Figure 4.62. Assembly Chamber. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.]

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Figure 4.63. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, mosque plan, June 20 1964. [030.IC.650.116, Kahn Collection] Figure 4.64. National Assembly Building, ca. 1966, plan, detail. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 190]

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At each corner circular figures were cut through these walls and those bracing the light chambers. The circular openings located at the base of the room were split and separated to float half above and half below the floor level. Through this layered compositional matrix the mosque and the cylindrical chambers appeared interlaced. With the cylindrical towers left uncapped, the four corners of the room were open to the elements. (Figure 4.67, 4.68) Describing the space during his 1966 lecture at Berkeley, Kahn provided a suggestive account of the proposed architectural environment: This is the construction of the mosque, and it’s made of, actually, light-giving elements, you see through here, which have openings in them. But they’re all so made [so] that you need no windows on the inside. It can pour – and it does pour – in Dacca, ’cause they have three hundred inches of rain a year. But it can pour, and you can see sheets of water go through here, but you can get no water inside. And that’d be the environment of the mosque.45 The “environment” of the mosque was conceived by Kahn as cubic volume suspended within a field of light, air and rain, with the building not only conceived as permeable but as one significantly shaped by natural elements.

In this respect the cylindrical towers of the mosque in Dhaka appeared in critical tension with those employed in the design of the Mikveh Israel Synagogue. In the synagogue, Kahn had conceived of the cylinders as habitable “window rooms”: rooms that were integral to the hierarchical order of the plan and the inscribed pattern of occupations and human association.46 In the design of the mosque in Dhaka these rooms were translated as voids. A heightened or transcendental experience appeared here, one that was less associated with human rituals and more singularly provoked by the spectacle of nature.

Weathering

In the spring of 1965 Kahn introduced yet another significant design change, this time to the eastern hostel group (the unit containing common dining and lounge facilities). Previously a single volume and rectilinear in order, these buildings were now resolved as three giant, formally enigmatic, masonry cylinders. The clients had preferred brick as the material choice for the hostels. Locally available and commonly used, brick was an economical alternative to concrete. Initially reserved for the forecourts and immediate landscape to the National Assembly Building, Kahn later accepted red brick as the primary

------45 Kahn, “Berkeley Lecture,” 28. 46 See, Kohane, “’Movement and Arrest’”.

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Figure 4.65. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, mosque. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.] Figure 4.66. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, mosque. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.]

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Figure 4.67. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, mosque. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.] Figure 4.68. Capitol Complex, National Assembly Building, mosque. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dahka, n.p.]

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material for all three hostel groups.47 (Figure 4.68) His initial impulse had been towards the traditional vocabulary of archways, as characterised by the undercroft structure to both the Presidential Square and the Southern Plaza. (Figure 4.69) In the context of the residential hostels, Kahn further explored a “composite” structural order, using a combination of brick and concrete. But it was with the design of the cylindrical dining and lounge facilities, that Kahn most vigorously tested the structural and formal limits of masonry construction. In the architectural conception and material realisation of these units, I suggest, several characteristics of threshold elements as developed in this project coalesce and appear somewhat amplified.

Designed as masonry encasements, these walls appear taut and thin – masonry counterparts to the concrete diaphragm walls of the National Assembly Building, and to the cylindrical towers of the mosque more particularly. (Figure 4.70) In the dining and lounge facilities they are perforated with sharply defined archways. These openings are not so much an expression of structure, as cut-outs which, when viewed from a distance, read as figures of dark shadow. In the two towers facing west towards the lake, the outer walls encase an open garden court. Within the corner cylindrical element, these boundary walls are doubled, with a narrow stair placed in between. The ascent of the stairway is registered in the base of the aligned arched opening. When seen from the northern formal garden, these cylindrical volumes appear elemental, vacant and overgrown – a shell for foliage and greenery. (Figure 4.71)

Emphasised here was not only an aesthetic of abstraction, but also an expressed materiality associated with weathering and decay. This was an architecture in which nature was assigned an active role in the shaping of architectural experience and in which the building appeared divorced from its immediate condition of use. The explicit distinction Kahn made between the aesthetic of abstraction associated with an incomplete building and that of a building in “ruin” was in this regard suggestive: Isn’t it true that sometimes a building being built is of more interest than one that is finished? A building that has become a ruin is again free of the bondage of use. But it is different from when it was being built because it now allows foliage to grow over it, as loving as a father permitting the child to pull at his carefully chosen clothes.48

------47 Telegram, Kahn to Addl. Chief (Ahmad), August 7, 1964, “PAC Cablegrams to/from ADDLCHIEF 1964,” Box LIK 117, Kahn Collection. Previously cited in Reed, “Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, Capital of Bangladesh,” 383. 48 Kahn, “Remarks,” Perspecta 9/10 (1965): 330–331.

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For the members of the public gathered on the northern plaza looking over the lake towards the undulating walls of the hostels, the only trace of human action in Kahn’s masonry cylinders was the upward or downward movement of people, to an uncertain destination.

This chapter has demonstrated that the metaphor of the “ruin” was evoked in two ways in the development and realisation of the architectural tropes “hollow walls” and “hollow columns” in the Dhaka project. On the one hand, the “ruin” is evoked through the delineation and radical separation of building parts; on the other, through the appropriation of nature as an active force in the shaping of architecture and architectural experience. It is the theme of circulation and movement in the architecture of the National Assembly Building that is the focus of the next chapter in this dissertation.

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CHAPTER 5 THE PROBLEM OF THE CIRCULATION: BETWEEN CENTRE AND PERIPHERY

What Kahn wanted was mystery, a sense of majestic and ambiguous scale, of function transcending into awe. It is totally, as it were, outside time – has escaped time as a ruin does – containing within it, as always, the sublime. We are reminded of Piranesi’s Carceri, the terrible stairs going up into space, seen through the enormous circles, vertiginous and awesome.1 Vincent Scully 1992

Preamble

The interior order of the National Assembly Building is described in two freehand cross- sections that are included as consecutive, double-page foldouts in the North Carolina student publication. (Figure 5.1, 5.2) Captioned “Section through assembly spaces,” these drawings outline the constitutive components of the project’s concentric composition: a top-lit monumental assembly chamber at the centre, smaller individuated building units at the periphery, and a variety of circulatory elements mediating the two.

In the first drawing a thickened outline accentuates the two rows of vertically stacked, arched openings, which were located within the outer threshold to the assembly chamber. These bold portals frame a pathway through an alternating sequence of room-like galleries and vertical light wells. Dating from mid 1964, this drawing represents an early attempt to resolve the relationship of the outer circulation spaces to the assembly chamber. This would later undergo substantial revision. Nevertheless, this proposition suggestively captured the architectural priorities that remained pertinent to the configuration of movement in the building. The drawing imagined a dramatic route through a rhythmic field of light and shadow; through enclosed space and open void; through a formally spectacular architectural landscape.

------1 Vincent Scully, “Louis I. Kahn and the Ruins of Rome,” in Neil Levine, ed., Modern Architecture and Other Essays by Vincent Scully (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 315. (First published in MoMA: The Members Quarterly of the Museum of Modern Art 12 [Summer 1992]: 1–13.)

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Figure 5.1. National Assembly Building section, ca. 1964. [Keller and Tansal, “The Development of Dacca”, plate 33] Figure 5.2. National Assembly Building section, ca. 1964. [Keller and Tansal, “The Development of Dacca”, plate 34]

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Chapter Argument

In this chapter the metaphor of the “ruin” provides the conceptual framework for the critical analysis of the capitol complex at Dhaka with a particular focus on the configuration of movement within the National Assembly Building.

As outlined in Part I of this dissertation, the concentric composition of the National Assembly Building and the relationship between its constituent parts – the central chamber, the individuated units at the periphery and the mediating circulation – have been subject to multiple, and at times contradictory, interpretations.2 These can be summarised in terms of four main readings. Scholars approaching the project from interdisciplinary perspectives have questioned the political efficacy and contemporary relevance of what they perceive to be an overtly centralised structure.3 In an alternative reading the circumscribed movement around the assembly chamber has been understood as a reference to the ancient Buddhist ritual of circumambulation and thus imbued with regionalist connotations.4 Still others – and again with particular reference to the resolution of the building’s circulation – have commented on Kahn’s formal dexterity. These writers suggested that Kahn’s longstanding formal preoccupation with Piranesian aesthetics was most evocatively made manifest in his design of pathways through this building.5 The more recent, and arguably most dominant, historiographical interrogations of the project counter-pose such formalist notions. They argue, in contrast, that the layered composition is fundamental to Kahn’s thesis for a participatory democratic monumentality.6 This chapter adds a new interpretative layer to this critical discourse and, in the process, connects these distinct and apparently disparate critical emphases.

The chapter begins with Kahn’s conceptualisation, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, of the “Form” proposition for a centralised building type; an institution for collective and ------2 These discrete readings of the project were subject to discussion in Chapter Two, where the associated scholarly field is cited in detail. In the citations below I therefore only include the most dominant scholarship within each interpretive strand. 3 See for example, Lawrence Vale, Architecture, Power and National Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 240–41. 4 See for example, See Kazi Khaleed Ashraf, “The National Capital Complex: Louis I. Kahn’s Architecture in Dhaka,” in Yukio Futagawa, ed., Global Architecture: Louis I. Kahn National Capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 1962–83, 72 (1994): n.p. 5 Within Kahn scholarship the association of the circulation spaces in the National Assembly Building with Piranesi’s Carceri series has been pervasive. As I have shown this reading was first and famously developed by Vincent Scully, see, for example, Vincent Scully, Louis I. Kahn (New York: George Braziller, 1962), 36. 6 See, for example, Sarah Williams Ksiazek, “Architectural Culture in the Fifties,” 34–35.

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elevated mode of assembly specifically. Underlined is the significance of the circulatory paths and interstitial spaces to the order and meaning of the proposition. This discussion provides the background to a close reading of the circulatory elements, as resolved in the architecture of the National Assembly Building.

The chapter is structured and developed with reference to three distinct pathways that connect the centre and the periphery. The first is the ambulatory space, the second is the more intimately scaled routes that facilitate internal circulation within the building complex, and the third is the route to and from the public galleries fronting the assembly chamber.

The chapter argues that the conception of the spatial support for movement in the National Assembly Building balanced, and deliberately juxtaposed, participatory civic engagement with the experience of the architecture as a formal spectacle. I then show how the potential for the circulatory and interstitial spaces to act as socially vital environments was gradually diminished throughout the project’s evolution. I argue that the building as realised provides a sequence of pathways for a leisurely, and at times disorienting, meander through formally varied and aesthetically charged architectural environments/landscapes.

------

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The Concentric Monument

The compositional order of the National Assembly Building was broadly outlined in an early plan dated July 1963. (Figure 5.3) A circular assembly chamber was set within a rotated square, with offices arranged along the outer perimeter boundary. The mosque and the entrance unit, both articulated as individuated units, marked the southern and northern apex of the square respectively. Common rooms, at this stage particularly rudimentary in formation, were located to the east and west of the assembly chamber. In this scheme a variety of circulatory elements were employed to both separate and connect the building’s centre and periphery.

Despite the early, diagrammatic character of this plan, the range and type of circulatory spaces remained consistent through the project’s subsequent development and as it was ultimately realised. A number of vertical and horizontal pathways were interlaced within the complex. Individuated, tall, prismatic encasements accommodated vertical “circulation” via both stairways and lifts. These were in turn connected to three horizontal perimeter passages: a “corridor” along the offices, an outer ring to the assembly chamber, and a full- height space between the inner chamber and the offices, which is described as the “main ambulatory.”

The concentric composition of the National Assembly Building, the appropriation of the building’s “centre” as a chamber for an elevated mode of collective gathering, and the incorporation of an “ambulatory” within the building’s layered circulatory system has prompted critics and historians to align the National Assembly Building with other works by Kahn that also combine a centralised chamber and ambulatory. Kahn’s earlier design for the First Unitarian Church and School (Rochester, NY, 1959–69) has been directly and indirectly referenced in such discussions.7 I addressed this correlation in the second chapter of this dissertation and now return to it.

------7 For an aligned relationship between the two projects see, for example, Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Louis Kahn’s Situated Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); and more tangentially David De Long, “Assembly … a Place of Transcendence: Designs for Meeting,” in David Brownlee and David De Long, Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1991), 78. Alan Colquhoun offers a contrary position. In a succinct yet astute comparison of the two projects Colquhoun suggests that: “In the final version of the Rochester building, the symmetry is distorted by circumstantial, ‘secular’ pressures. But in Dhaka Assembly and geometrical expression of unity is unremitting; nothing circumstantial disturbs the rigidly hieratic order. It is clear that for Kahn the Dhaka Assembly had taken on strong religious connotations. We no longer find the connection between democratic social practices and symbolic forms that were characteristic of his early civic designs.” Alan Colquhoun, Modern Architecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 253–254.

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Circulation and the Revitalisation of the Centre

Two key statements by Kahn have been significant to the critical reception of the First Unitarian Church and School project (as indicated in Chapter Two). The first was Kahn’s proposition for a non-denominational chapel formulated during the late 1950s, the second was the discussion of the Rochester project during his 1961 “Form and Design” address and the associated visual representation of this narrative.8 (Figure P1.1) In these verbal and drawn statements Kahn reconfigured a centralised building type as a dynamic, multi- hierarchical composition. Both discussions introduced paths of movement conceived in terms of a corridor and an ambulatory and framed these spaces as fundamental to the dynamic order of the proposed compositions.

Kahn’s description of a non-denominational “university chapel” was famously advanced during his 1959 CIAM address.9 Beginning with a deliberately polemical question – “So, what is a chapel really?” – he went on to describe the building type as a central space surrounded by a sequence of discrete and concentric environments: first an ambulatory, next an arcade, then a walled garden. He depicted a richly layered, spatially diverse architectural matrix where individual participants could freely determine their degree of engagement with the program supported at the centre. “The essential thing, you see,” Kahn concluded, “is that the chapel is a personal ritual, and that it is not a set ritual, and it is from this that you get the form.” Here he proposed a “Form” diagram for an elevated yet non- deterministic institutional setting.

Kahn reiterated the chapel narrative in the “Form and Design” statement of 1961, in this case integrating the statement with the description of his design for the First Unitarian Church and School. Beginning with the “Form” proposition for the church, he suggested: I made a square centre in which I placed a question mark. Let us say I meant it to be the sanctuary. This I encircled with an ambulatory for those who did not want to go into the sanctuary. Around the ambulatory I drew a corridor which belonged to an outer circle enclosing a space, the school.10 To clarify the conceptual logic of the proposition, the description of the “meaning” of the chapel was put forward: ------8 Most famously developed in Louis I. Kahn, “Talk at the Conclusion of Otterlo Congress,” Twombly, Essential Texts, 44. The 1959 address was first published in Oscar Newman, ed., New Frontiers in Architecture: CIAM ’59 in Otterlo, (New York: Universe Books, 1961); Louis I. Kahn, “Form and Design,” in Robert Twombly, Louis Kahn: Essential Texts (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 62–74. (Original text from Voice of America – Louis I. Kahn. Recorded November 19, 1960). Also see Chapter Two, note 15. 9 Kahn, “Talk at the Conclusion of Otterlo Congress,” 44. 10 Ibid., 66–67.

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This puts me in mind of the meaning of Chapel in a university … It may be expressed by a place which for the moment is left undescribed and has an ambulatory for the one who does not want to enter it. The ambulatory is surrounded by an arcade for the one who prefers not to go into the ambulatory. The arcade sits in the garden for the one who prefers not to enter the arcade. The garden has a wall and the student can be outside winking at it. The ritual is inspired and not set and is the basis of the form Chapel.11 The chapel “Form” proposition was thus extended to propose an ideal relationship between a church and a school.12

In his annotated sequence of “Form and Design” diagrams, prepared with reference to the Rochester project, Kahn gave architectural expression to this narrative. In the first “Design” translation of the “Form” diagram, a rectilinear church hall, delineated by four columns and three partition walls, was set at the centre of a twelve-sided polygon. (Figure 5.4) The interstitial space between the two figures was defined as the ambulatory. Overlaid by a regular pattern of interlocking triangles, this generously proportioned, mediating circulatory space appeared sheltered by a geometrically elaborate, undulating roof canopy. The ambulatory and the adjacent corridor were, in turn, connected via openings in the four cardinal directions. When combined, the two pathways determined the measure of distance between the church and the school and, at the same time, provided multiple points of connection and exchange between the two environments. An argument was thus advanced for a centralised composition characterised by both: centred, room-like enclosures arranged in a precisely conceived relationship and a spatial dynamism derived from the multi-axial interconnection between these discrete settings.

------11 Ibid., 67. 12 Kahn’s interest in symbolically charged geometry has been attributed to a variety of historical sources. Most dominant has been the centralised churches from the Italian Renaissance. Scholars have suggested that these works were familiar to Kahn through Rudolf Wittkower’s seminal study Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, a copy of which had been sent to Kahn in 1956 by Collin Rowe. For a discussion of the influence of Renaissance churches on conception of the First Unitarian Church and School see, Robin Williams, “An Architectural Myth: The Design Evolution of Louis Kahn’s First Unitarian Church,” (Master diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1990), 24. Williams also underlines the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright on Kahn – Wright’s projects for the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church (Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, designed in 1956), and the Christian Science Church (Bolinas, California, designed in 1957) in particular, see Ibid. As discussed in Chapter Two, an alternative interpretation has been offered by David De Long who suggests that Kahn was “drawn less to centralized churches of the fourth and fifth centuries than to their pagan prototypes.” See De Long, “Assembly,” 78. For reference to centralised Renaissance churches in the discussion of National Assembly Complex see Florindo Fusaro, Il Parlamento e nuova capitale a Dacca di Louis I. Kahn 1962–1974 (Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1985); Williams Ksiazek, “Architectural Culture in the Fifties,” 429; and Colquhoun, Modern Architecture, 253–54.

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Figure 5.3. National Assembly Building plan, July 15, 1963. [650.NA.157 (F20), Kahn Collection] Figure 5.4. Louis Kahn, First Unitarian Church and School, Rochester, NY, 1959–69, plan diagram, ca. January 1961, detail. [Rowan, “The Philadelphia School”, 134]

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As realised, the First Unitarian Church and School lacks the “ambulatory” space, which Kahn determined to be pertinent to the conceptual coherence of this work. Nonetheless, the project and its representations have remained important to the critical discourse about Kahn’s disciplinary significance. Critics broadly concur that Kahn’s contribution to the evolution of modernism during the postwar years was, in part, indebted to his radical critique of the positivist/rationalist conception of the term “circulation” and the reinvestment of this architectural category with symbolic, aesthetic, and social content.

Circulation as Support for Participatory Action

Recent scholarship on Kahn has underlined and interpreted the social implications of his approach to the configuration of movement. This emphasis has been, for the most part, motivated by the critical imperative to frame – and arguably defend – Kahn’s disciplinary status within the modernist canon. With tacit reference to the “Form” proposition for a non-denominational chapel, it has been suggested that Kahn’s proposed negotiated path between the periphery and the centre preserves the individual’s choice and agency within a collective setting. Critics have also pointed out that within Kahn’s late idiom interstitial spatial connectors were privileged as a vital setting for social discourse and interaction. In this interpretation, Kahn’s modernist translation of architectural tropes derived from disciplinary history – such as the cloister and ambulatory – has been framed as the basis by which centralised building types were reinvigorated as participatory, essentially democratic and ultimately modern institutional settings.13

With such broad emphasis on Kahn’s reinvigoration of modern architecture’s social agency during the postwar years, less attention has been paid to the nuanced shifts that occur as common tropes were adjusted relative to discrete projects and their settings. In the discussion that follows I trace the configuration of movement as realised in the architecture of the National Assembly Building.

------13 As discussed in Chapter Two this interpretation underpins both Goldhagen and De Long’s readings. Michael Merrill’s excellent chapter “Configuration, Movement, and Space, From ‘Circulation’ to an ‘Architecture of Connection’,” in Michael Merrill, Louis Kahn on the Thoughtful Making of Spaces: The Dominican Motherhouse and a Modern Culture of Space (Baden: Lars Muller, 2010), 123–145.

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Circulation as Spectacle

Ambulatory as Void

Read against the first “Design” proposition for the First Unitarian Church and School, Kahn’s early organisation of the National Assembly Building resembled the concentric order of the Rochester design: an assembly chamber at the centre was surrounded by consecutive outer zones; first an “ambulatory for the members,” second a “main ambulatory,” followed by the “corridor” to the perimeter office wings. The later, programmatically more complex design for Dhaka was differentiated from Rochester by the inclusion of two vertical circulation units in which lifts and stairways were combined. Located between the north and south entrance blocks and the assembly chamber, and tangentially connected to the perimeter office wings, these towers connected the building’s centre with its periphery. In this arrangement the main ambulatory was defined as a void space between individuated formal elements and a device by which the building parts were both delineated and set apart.

A north-south section through the National Assembly Building, dated November 1963, registers the relative arrangement of the concentric circulatory pathways. (Figure 5.5) This drawing emphasised the expression of the ambulatory as an expansive void space set between central chamber and the individuated blocks to the periphery of the building. It depicted a monumental court, infused with deflected light, which the discrete architectural components were arranged in relation to. Over a two-and-a-half-year period the form and expression of the building parts fronting the ambulatory, on the one hand, and the mode and rhythm of light afforded to this setting, on the other, were tested and developed. Both parameters were ultimately critical to the architectural affect of this interstitial space.

As realised, the ambulatory is eighty-five feet (twenty-six meters) tall, extending the full height of the building. It mediates between the sixteen-sided inner block and the eight individual building components that form the perimeter ring to the National Assembly Building. Vertical circulatory nodes are inserted within the body of the ambulatory in a manner that is consistent with Kahn’s early plan diagrams. These nodes are resolved as three units located to the north, east and west. Set at some distance from the assembly chamber, they allow a continuous passage around the inner volume at ground level. The ambulatory appears vast and monumental by the virtue of its scale, homogenous material palate and lack of familiar detail. The spatial experience offered by this circulatory passage is

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one of rhythmically expanding and contracting volumes and dynamic viewpoints informed by shifting geometric juxtapositions.

A number of late design changes introduced between 1965 and early 1966 had a significant effect on the form and expression of the ambulatory space. The most critical change was the layering of internal wall planes – specifically the perimeter walls of the central block and the inner walls of the office wings. In each instance the boundary walls were doubled and separated, with stairs, corridors, and ramps housed in-between. The internal elevations facing the ambulatory were variously resolved as blind or figurative screens. The composition of the internal elevation facing the ambulatory was described in the previous chapter, where I highlighted its appropriation as a device by which circulation within the building was aestheticised. I now return to this discussion.

From the perspective of the onlooker within the ambulatory, the pictorial purpose of the screens appears dialectical. On the one hand, they conceal the multifarious lines of circulation within the building. (Figure 5.6) On the other, and at the same time, they frame – and arguably dramatise – the episodes of movement within this setting: a gentle diagonal incline across a circular void, a terminating corridor suspended in air, a semicircular pathway afloat. (Figure 5.7, 5.8, 5.9)

The colour, pattern and rhythm of the daylight within this setting are fundamental to the spatial drama invoked by the ambulatory space. Light enters the ambulatory from multiple portals and multiple directions. Covered with a flat roof supported on concrete beams, the space is partly lit from above. Linear bands of glass blocks, set between and parallel to concrete roof beams, admit fields of striated light throughout the ambulatory. (Figure 5.10, 5.11) Morning and afternoon light slides in through the glazed junction between the roof beams and external walls and is diffused by the ceiling plane. (Figure 5.12) The light courts that punctuate the perimeter threshold to the assembly chamber are less immediately present, yet they are still a significant light source. Diffused silver light, emitted through the large, circular cut-outs, imbues the ambulatory space with a subtle rhythm of “light” and “no light”. The most striking, immediate light source is the semicircular court, which mediates between the ambulatory and the mosque. The monumental circular opening cut at this juncture floods the interior with bright light. This luminous motif announces the location of the mosque, further accentuating the southern threshold entry to the National Assembly Building. (Figure 5.13)

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Figure 5.5. National Assembly Building section, ca. 1963. [650.NA.397 (F25), Kahn Collection]

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Figure 5.6. Top, National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] Figure 5.7. Bottom left, National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] Figure 5.8. Bottom center, National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] Figure 5.9. Bottom right, National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.]

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Figure 5.10. Top left, National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] Figure 5.11. Top right, National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] Figure 5.12. Bottom, National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] Figure 5.13. National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.]

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The ambulatory is a highly interiorised space. It is enigmatically infused with light from multiple directions: from above and through the margins of the roof plane, from within via an interface with the assembly chamber, and from the perimeter via an interface with the mosque. The ever-shifting play of light and shadow, both patterned and diffused, amplifies the sculptural force of the space.

Considered as circulation, the ambulatory serves two distinct modes of connectivity. (Figure 5.14) Firstly, and relative to the internal order of the building, it represents one of only two floor levels at which the National Assembly Building’s nine blocks are all horizontally connected. The potential for this space to work as a common court or “street” between the building’s components parts is, however, diluted. The numerous pathways that connect the centre and the periphery in this building diminish the potential of the ambulatory to serve as a social condenser or as a forum for sustained contact between the building’s occupants.

A second reading of the ambulatory is as a connective route between the South Plaza and Presidential Square. In this interpretation the ambulatory principally works as a public passage that is subtly delineated from the everyday civic function of the building. The imagined experience here, I propose, was of a grand urban route between two monumental public courts. Moreover, I suggest that the architectural affect of this space relies in part on its sense of vacancy, with the visual presence of the building’s occupants being both episodic and elusive. The citizens of Dhaka, were they able to enter the ambulatory freely, would perhaps come to contact with their fellow citizens and represented parliamentarians and engage together in discourse. They may also nod toward the chamber in acknowledgement of the elevated function of assembly, or they may stroll through this remarkable space and experience the power of architecture as a spectacle; as an empty space open to new possibilities.

Kahn also considered the public thoroughfare through the National Assembly Building in relation to the circulatory sequence leading to and from the chamber’s public galleries. This passage will be considered in the last section of this chapter. Before discussing it I will turn to the more intimate pathways, which accommodate everyday movement within the building.

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Figure 5.14. National Assembly Building, ca. 1966, plan. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 190]

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Corridors as Labyrinth

In December 1983, only months after the project was completed, the National Assembly Building was the host venue for the 14th Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers.14 A pamphlet produced for the event provided a broad description of the building organisation.15 A general guideline for navigation through the building was provided under the somewhat incongruous heading Salient Features: Room Number is the best guide for locating one’s position or destination in this building. All room numbers are written in the format SW 422. The first two letters indicate the name of the Block, the first digit of the room number indicates the level, the second digits indicates the Zone or Sector and the third digit indicates the Room … The Assembly Chamber is Octagonal and there are 8 Sectors on the eight sides of the Octagon; and against 8 sectors there are 8 outer blocks. The 9 blocks including the central (Assembly Chamber) block interconnect only at levels 1 & 3. The outer blocks are interconnected at even levels while the central block (AC – Block) is connected with the Western and Eastern Blocks at odd levels. PE Block is however not connected with the outer blocks at levels 4 & 6.16 The instructions are suggestive. They explain the building’s complex organisation, but also convey an implicit anxiety about the way-finding difficulties posed by the venue. The concentric path of movement within this broadly symmetrical architectural composition, coupled with the complicated sequence of split levels that characterised the building section, rendered navigation through the building a challenging and potentially disorienting experience.

In Kahn’s conception of circulatory networks in the National Assembly Building, the vast scale of the ambulatory was consistently juxtaposed and set in balance with more intimately proportioned corridors, ramps and stairways that connected the centre and periphery of the building. The path of movement surrounding the assembly chamber was vigorously studied in the early evolution of the project – particularly in the drawings dating from 1963 and early 1964. Through many design iterations, the intersection of light courts, galleries,

------14 Noted in "Aga Khan Award for Architecture: Report of the 1986 Master Jury," Aga Khan Development Network, accessed March 5, 2013, http://www.akdn.org/akaa_award3_master.asp. 15 “The National Assembly Building, Dhaka – Venue of the 14th Islamic Conference of Foreign Ministers,”(Dhaka: Department of Architecture and Public Works, Government of the Republic of Bangladesh, undated), n.p. The event was held at the Aga Khan Trust for Culture Archives, Geneva, Switzerland. In the cited quote the capitalisation is as in the original text. I note an inconsistency in identification of “odd” and “even” floor levels is this document relative to the convention employed in Kahn’s office documents and letters. In this pamphlet the level of the ambulatory is noted as “Level 3,” whereas in the office files the ambulatory is typically referred to as an “even” level. In my discussion, I use the convention employed by Kahn’s office. 16 Ibid., n.p.

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committee rooms and additional functions such as a library were tested. As I discussed in the last chapter, the precise geometry and location of the vertical light courts was a particular design focus; and the potential for each light vessel to mediate multiple architectural environments was explored. (Figure 5.15, 5.16) Read in respect to Kahn’s account of an idealised chapel, these early drawings provide evidence of the effort to resolve a spatially layered, programmatically complex and laterally interconnected architectural setting.

However, as highlighted in the previous chapter, the design of this inner block underwent a radical change during early 1965. At this time the assembly chamber and surrounding circulation zone became more decisively individuated, with the boundary between the two sharply defined. By mid-1965 the assembly chamber was resolved as a “classically” centred and hermetically sealed core, with the outer ring (now described as the “circulatory”) configured as a complex, sculpturally charged, network of vertical and horizontal pathways. The interwoven and diverse programmatic adjacencies characteristic of the earlier studies was no longer apparent.

A second circulatory ring within the National Assembly Building consisted of the horizontally stacked “corridors” that formed the outer perimeter ring to the ambulatory. These linked the building’s individuated perimeter blocks, and also connected the perimeter to the centre via mediating vertical circulation cores. Adding complexity to this relatively direct and legible system, however, was the proposed sectional strategy for the expansion of the office wings. With the floor-to-floor height set twenty feet apart, it was proposed that subsequent expansion could occur through the insertion of additional floor levels at every ten feet. In his description of the project’s evolution David Wisdom explains: In the course of planning discussions, the committee requested arrangements for future expansion of the office wings of the Assembly Building. But Kahn could not accept the idea of any future alteration of his design after it had been built. He proposed to increase the floor-to-floor height from 10 feet to 20 feet and to provide foundations and some structural modification that would permit insertion of an additional floor at the 10 foot level in any wing at any time it should be found necessary.17 The strategy was put to effect earlier than expected – by the time the concrete had only reached twenty feet.18

------17 David Wisdom, “Kahn’s Building at Dacca,” in “Louis I. Kahn 1901/1974,” Rassegna 7, no. 21 (March 1985): n.p. 18 Ibid.

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Figure 5.15. National Assembly Building plan, ca. 1963. [650.NA.314 (F24), Kahn Collection] Figure 5.16. National Assembly Building plan, ca. 1964. [650.NA.111 (F20), Kahn Collection]

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The circulation implications were significant. With the perimeter corridors set at odd levels, and those connecting to the inner core typically at even levels, the addition of new floor levels in the office wings led to a double-barrelled, split-level organisation. In a letter to the Philadelphia office, dated November 1971, Don Barbaree (at that time Kahn’s representative in Dhaka) alluded to the logistical limitations of the system. Writing with regard to the “Space Allocation for National Assembly Office Wings,” he underlined the difficulties posed by the lack of lift and corridor access to the alternate levels within the office wings: After constructing the even numbered floor levels PWD is now questioning how these floors may be utilized … without the corridor access on the even numbered levels, there does not appear to be an acceptable solution to [allocation] problems … It would be of great benefit to us to know the background information concerning the basis on which the design of the office blocks was developed. At the moment neither myself nor Richard are able to discuss the matter with conviction.19 Withstanding such prosaic limitations, the impact of such a multilayered network was to disperse human movement within the building. The expression of the circulation as a negotiated passage open to personal choice was absent in this arrangement. In addition, the design did not give optimal support to nuanced modes of civic association and dialogue. The design and resolution of the architectural routes that serve the everyday occupants of the National Assembly Building appeared to be determined by formal priorities. One exception to this formalist bias was the configuration of the entry sequence to the mosque.

The pathways associated with the mosque are among the least studied aspects of the National Assembly Building. Yet they are a lucid manifestation of the architectural concepts laid out in Kahn’s description of the non-denominational chapel. The 1964 decision to elevate the mosque above the southern entrance chamber to the building was critical to the final resolution of this design. I now turn to the raised horizontal pathway between the mosque and the Garden Plaza to conclude this chapter.

Mosque, Gallery, Garden

The entrance threshold to the mosque is an independently articulated element situated between the body of the mosque and the ambulatory. It consists of a half cylinder with a doubled and separated outer wall. This mediating element determines a precise measure of distance between the mosque and the National Assembly Building, and the outer curve of

------19 Letter, Barbaree to Wilcots, November 5, 1970, “PAC Correspondence to/from Dacca Office, 69 to 10/6/71,” LIK Box 121.

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the cylinder provides a circumference relative to which the body of the mosque was realigned to be correctly oriented towards Mecca. (Figure 5.17)

Accommodated within this volume is the “court of ablutions,” the setting for the ritual of purification integral to Islamic prayer. With a floor-to-ceiling height of ten feet (three metres) and situated five feet (one and a half metres) below the level of the mosque, this interiorised “court” is spatially compressed and sombre. An encased chamber open to the sky is extruded above the “court of ablutions.” (Figure 5.18)

Curved paths framed by the doubled outer walls of the half cylinder connect the entrance/mosque unit to the ambulatory. At the level of the mosque this curving passage extends past the cylindrical encasement and projects within the body of the ambulatory. Expressed as an apparently floating platform, it forms a continuous, near-circular loop which arcs around, lightly intruding into the body of the central block before returning to the half cylinder. (Figure 5.19) U-shaped stairways are anchored to the inner face of the cylindrical block. These connect the looping platform, the “court of ablutions,” the ambulatory and the National Assembly Building’s lower ground floors. (Figure 5.20)

This expressive and richly layered circulatory node defines two discrete paths of entry to the mosque. The first is in accord with the ritual of Islamic prayer, as interpreted by Kahn. Participants approaching the mosque for prayer would begin in the “court of ablutions.” Following the ritual of purification they would move up half a level and pass through the triangular portal within a draping diaphragm wall to directly enter the mosque. Provided here, to employ Kahn’s terms, was an architectural support for “set” ritual – a pattern of human action and an associated path through space informed by collective and culturally shared customs. (Figure 5.21)

An alternative approach to the mosque is via the semicircular pathway framed within the cylinder’s outer perimeter walls. Light enters the space through clearstory apertures cut in the inner wall layer and is deflected off the parallel wall surface to evenly light the interior. The resultant space is luminous and ethereal. Participants moving along this semicircular passage would meet the entrance to the mosque tangentially at a midpoint. An architectural choice was presented here: the possibility of entering the mosque or continuing on along the passage to return to the main body of the National Assembly Building.

The entry sequence to the mosque presents interesting alignments and tensions with Kahn’s conceptualisation of a non-denominational chapel. The two terms of reference – “set ritual”

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Figure 5.17. National Assembly Building, mosque, ca. 1966, plan. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 253] Figure 5.18. National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] Figure 5.19. National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.]

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Figure 5.20. National Assembly Building, mosque, ca. 1966, plan. [Ronner and Jhaveri, Complete Works, 253] Figure 5.21. National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.]

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and “personal” or “inspired” ritual – which Kahn’s narrative account framed in opposition to each other, are simultaneously catered for. Thus two modes of approach to the mosque – the traditionally prescribed and the personally determined – coalesce. Of the myriad pathways that cater to everyday movement within the assembly building, the approach to the mosque is the most concentrated zone of public passage. This richly layered circulatory matrix provides the potential for meeting and exchange between the building’s participants, whether as a group or as lone participants.

The return passage from the mosque – across the curved platform, over the ambulatory – leads to the circulation ring that surrounds the central block. This level accommodates the individuated, stepped public galleries that overlook the assembly chamber. To the north of the central block, also on this level, is the portal leading the Garden Entrance stair. (Figure 5.22)

This elevated datum, twenty feet above the ambulatory, configured a continuous path of movement between the north and south of the building. This passage included three discrete, inherently public architectural episodes. The first is the mosque at the southern apex of the monumental edifice, a cubic chamber anchored at four corners by “hollow columns” infused with light and rain. The second is a public gallery at the heart of the building overlooking the drama of legislative debate. The third is the sculpturally charged, dramatic, double stair tower of the north block, which connects the core to the ceremonial forecourt, garden and roof. (Figure 5.23, 5.24) Indeed the roofscape of the National Assembly Building was perhaps the last episode in this sequence: a sculpted platform from which to view the spectacle of the surrounding city. (Figure 5.25, 5.26, 5.27)

Through the close reading of the three discrete pathways between the centre and periphery, this chapter has argued that Kahn’s architectural priority in the design of this circulation in the National Assembly Building was more fundamentally concerned with the exploration of architecture as an object of sculptural power than as a space of “public appearance”. In his approach to the design of the “public” circulatory spaces within the building more specifically, the experience of architecture was formally delineated from the civic function of the building; with occupants framed as actors within a theatrical setting.

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Figure 5.22. National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] Figure 5.23. National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.] Figure 5.24. National Assembly Building. [Meier, Louis Kahn Dhaka, n.p.]

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Figure 5.25. National Assembly Building plan, ca. 1964. [650.NA.727 (F27), Kahn Collection]

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Figure 5.26. National Assembly Building, roof. [Author’s image] Figure 5.27. Capitol Complex. [Author’s image]

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CONCLUSION

In September 2012, several months prior to the completion of this dissertation, a new exhibition on Kahn opened at the Netherlands Architecture Institute.1 Curated by Stanislaus von Moos and Jochen Eisenbrand, it was called Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture. The dust jacket to the exhibition catalogue features photographs of the National Assembly Building’s Garden Entrance by Raymond Meier – layered walls, with perforated circular apertures, crossed with diagonal pathways. In this exhibition the capitol complex, along with Kahn’s contemporaneous project for the Indian Institute of Management, are characterised as works in arrested development – as “ruins in reverse”: Compared with brick ruins from antiquity, many among Kahn’s buildings in India and Bangladesh have the pathos of construction sites arrested in time. They are “ruins in reverse. ”2 Kahn’s famous aphorism of “wrapping ruins around buildings” – reconceptualised as an interpretive framework by Vincent Scully and the subsequent generation of scholars – is still alive in Kahn scholarship. In this, the concluding statement to this dissertation, I reflect on and restate my interpretation of this significant project, and position it in relation to this most recent representation of the National Assembly Building as a “ruin”.

Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture is the first major retrospective exhibition since David Brownlee and David De Long’s important 1991 exhibition Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture, (discussed in Chapter 2). In their catalogue introduction, von Moos and Eisenbrand underline the significance of In the Realm noting, “Brownlee and De Long’s exhibition catalogue still forms the basis for any serious research related to Kahn.” Significant contribution notwithstanding, von Moos and Eisenbrand question the critical efficacy of the 1991 exhibition and indicate that the earlier retrospective ultimately failed to shift the pervasive tendency to frame Kahn’s approach as the precursor to postmodernism:

------1 The exhibition and associated catalogue were developed through collaboration between the Vitra Design Museum, the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Rotterdam. The exhibition opened at the Netherlands Architecture Institute (8 September 2012–6 January 2013) and is scheduled for a subsequent exhibition at Vitra Design Museum (9 March 2013–25 Aug 2013) before travelling to other European destinations. The catalogue includes a number of previously unpublished essays. In context of the research presented in this dissertation, time has not allowed for this material to be addressed and synthesised within the thesis argument. See, Kries, Mateo, Jochen Eisenbrand, and Stanislaus von Moos, eds., Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture, (Weil Am Rhein: Vitra Design Museum, 2013). 2 Ibid.,302.

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Though [Brownlee and De Long] took great care not to reduce Kahn to his role as a beacon of Post-modernism – the phenomenon was then at its height – they couldn’t prevent him being seen in this context for many years to come.3 In its broad interpretive stance, Kahn: The Power of Architecture is an extension of the recent – twenty-first century – critical effort to distance Kahn from postmodernism and its associated categories: “type,” “context,” “symbolism,” “iconography”. The curators contend that their historical distance allows for a re-examination of Kahn’s contemporary significance outside the codified terms “modern” and “postmodern”.

Vincent Scully’s pervasive impact on Kahn scholarship is implicit here. Kahn’s transitional status, emphasised by the historian more than half a century ago, remains provocative and continues to instigate both scholarly interest and anxiety. The critical effort to distinguish Kahn from the “postmodern” is, in essence, underpinned by the architect’s perceived liminal status.

Thematically organised, the 2012 NAI exhibition represents Kahn’s oeuvre through six categories, each of which combines a generic term with one specific to Kahn’s practice. In their conceptual focus and content, these themes loosely draw on the chronology of Kahn’s work and his evolving approach. The fourth theme “Eternal Present. Ruins and Archetypes” attends to the meaning and implication of architectural history to Kahn’s working method and his disciplinary contribution.4

Here Scully’s interpretative terms reappear – specifically those central to his early consideration of Kahn. The exhibition emphasises the significance of Kahn’s 1950–51 European sojourn; the alignment of Kahn’s notion of form with the terms “ruins” and “archetypes” and the influence of Piranesi. The association with Scully is, however, muted. Instead, these terms – particularly the “ruin” – are grounded via broad reference to the more recent scholarship by Neil Levine.

Levine’s reading of Kahn in relation to the “ruin” is addressed in Chapter Two of this thesis. With Scully as his departure point, Levine imaginatively reframes the “ruin” as an

------3 Ibid., 17. 4 The exhibition themes were determined in relation to two key considerations. The first is emergent scholarship on Kahn. This is presented via a number of new essays in the catalogue, which add specificity and depth to the otherwise deliberately broad thematic framework. The second aspect emphasises Kahn’s relevance to contemporary architectural priorities. For example, by interpreting Kahn in relation to the themes “Science” and “Grounding,” the exhibition highlights the relevance of his work to contemporary themes such as scientific modes of conception and production and ecological concerns. Ibid., 18.

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avatar for the incomplete (to use Levine’s term “unfinished”). That is, as an artefact in “arrested development” rather than one in decay.5

For the curators of the recent exhibition, Levine’s thesis provides a conceptual scaffold that allows them to address Kahn’s creative engagement with Roman antiquity without the connotations of historicism, pastiche and formalism. Levine’s scholarship thus sets the background against which the phrase “ruins in reverse” is forged. As interpreted by the exhibition, the capitol complex is represented as “structurally rational,” “elemental,” “austere” and “abstract”.6

This emphasis produces a subtle critical distance from Scully’s discussion of Kahn, especially his late considerations of the architect. Deliberately absent from the NAI exhibition is Scully’s reading of the capitol complex as an imaginative “misreading” of ancient sources, as a deliberate “deformation” and as an autonomous form “beyond function”.

In contrast, this dissertation engages directly with these ideas. It is precisely Scully’s late considerations, and his positioning of Kahn as a hinge between the mid-century modern and its subsequent critique, that triggered and gave foundation to the analysis pursued here. While not denying their agency, the interpretation presented in this thesis is not framed through the terms “modern” or “postmodern”. Rather, it searches for Kahn’s contribution to the tensions and revisions that such a dichotomy implies.

In this thesis a critical engagement with Scully’s discourse provides the opening for a detailed exploration of the particularities of Kahn’s practice in Dhaka. For Scully, Kahn’s work in India and Dhaka are especially significant to his critique of mid-century modernism. In these projects, the historian identifies a fulcrum in the trajectory of late-twentieth-century architecture, between the modern and its subsequent evolution. The metaphor of the “ruin”, as invoked in Scully’s late writings, alludes to a critical architectural practice: one where the core tenets of the modernist architectural trajectory were tested and reconfigured. Drawing on the term “ruin” Scully suggests that the realisation of architectural form that appeared “beyond function” was fundamental to Kahn’s achievements in Dhaka. This

------5 In their introduction the curators note Levine’s scholarship and invite the historian to contribute to the catalogue essay. See Neil Levine, “Kahn’s Edge: The Provocative Historicism of The Trenton Jewish Community Centre,” in Mateo, Eisenbrand and von Moos, Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture, 101–114. 6 Mateo, Eisenbrand and von Moos, Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture, 302.

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observation, which is described and contextualised in Part I of the dissertation, grounds the architectural analysis in Part II.

The thesis works within and between the complex historiographic narratives within and after Scully and links them to an analysis of the architectural tropes through which they are sustained.

Key Themes in Kahn’s Critical Revision of Modernism

What architectural themes and tropes common to Kahn’s late idiom were employed in the Dhaka commission, and how are these strategies uniquely particularised or transformed?

A response to this question is developed in Part II of this dissertation. This is done through a close reading of the project in relation to the three architectural categories that are considered significant to Kahn’s critical revision of modern architecture during the late 1950s and early 1960s: the relationship between architecture and the city, architectural thresholds and the relationship between the architectural centre and periphery as mediated through spaces of circulation.

Through a close reading of the capitol commission, developed across three chapters of Part II, this thesis argues that in the postcolonial, recently independent national context of Dhaka, Kahn deployed regionalist rhetoric in order to extend a number of his architectural preoccupations. These reiterated earlier (mostly unrealised) propositions, which were adjusted and, at times, transfigured at Dhaka. Using the metaphor of “ruin” as a framework for analysis, I show that in the particularisation of Kahn’s tropes in Dhaka, the relationship between form and evident use is rendered ambiguous.

In the relationship between the architecture and the city, this ambiguity was implied through the careful calibration of distant prospects whereby the civic function of the building was delineated from its expression as an image. In the articulation of the thresholds, ambiguities were created through the tropes of “hollow walls” and “hollow columns”. As realised in Dhaka, these mediating elements provided sharp distinction between the exterior form and the interior. Here, natural elements were in addition admitted as an active force in the shaping of the space and the spatial experience. In the resolution of the circulation the experience of architecture was formally distinguished from the civic function of the building – with civil occupants framed as actors within a theatrical setting.

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This desired tension, characteristic of Kahn’s postwar architectural thought and productions, is achieved here with more singularity than in any other project. A core argument of the thesis is that the value and meaning of civic monumentality in the capitol complex resides, in part, in its expression as a monument that is liberated from, or is in critical relationship with, its contemporary situation.

The idea of the “ruin in reverse” – as presented in Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture – approaches the “ruin” analogy through the lens of abstraction. This dissertation pursues an alternative emphasis. It uses the metaphor of “ruin” to allude to the expression of the monument as an apparently vacant edifice. As a work that seems abandoned; as a work that invites material weathering and decay; as work that is set in contrast to – and arguably in confrontation with – its surrounding environment, the capitol complex at Dhaka projects an image of an alternative urban order, one that stirs the collective imagination aesthetically.

Isolated from its immediate setting and vacant in expression, the project is invested with the affect of a historic monument – an architectural work that by the virtue of historical dislocation is displaced from its immediate setting and intended program.7 In the case of the capitol complex, however, this affect occurs not through the passing of time, but through the deployment of architectural means. Read through the metaphor of the “ruin”, it appears that a historic monument was instantaneously conceived at Dhaka. The dissertation argues that it is this very quality that accounts for the ease with which this building has been appropriated within multiple narratives both disciplinary and cultural.

Reading the Scholarship and Reading the Building

Part I of this thesis describes and juxtaposes multiple readings of the project (Chapter Two). It shows that the work has engendered a range of interpretations: as an exemplary manifestation of twentieth-century modernism; as the precursor to postmodernism; as democratic; as imperialist; as a modernist translation of Bengali vernacular and as an inspiration for Bangladeshi modernism. This dissertation works in the space between these interpretive strands.

The architectural reading of the project, presented in Part II of the thesis, does not deny juxtaposing views. Indeed, in places it links and contrasts their respective emphases. ------7 Françoise Choay, The Invention of the Historic Monument. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

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Ashraf’s interpretation of the capitol complex as “landscape,” Sten Nilsson’s promotion of the project as an aesthetic spectacle, Vale’s questioning of the project’s political efficacy as a civic institution – all are variously addressed and integrated. The thesis describes Kahn’s effort to balance discrete and contradictory priorities: a setting for democratic action and interaction; an apparently vacant building; a timeless abstraction and an artefact that welcomes decay; a civic monument and a spectacular folly.

In this dissertation Kahn’s architectural approach is studied through the lens of one project. This means that it is not limited by the historical convention of underlining consistencies in the architect’s oeuvre. Drawing on critical historiography, the dissertation charts a subtle shift in architectural emphasis as design strategies are translated from one cultural setting to another. The situational particularities of this project are, in turn, considered through careful readings of Kahn’s architectural tropes and their particular resolution in Dhaka. The result is a synthetic interpretation that draws together disciplinary history, historiographic analysis, architectural reading and political critique.

Contribution

The thesis contributes to Kahn scholarship in a number of ways. It presents an original and primary architectural analysis of key aspects of the capitol complex and provides a better understanding of the architectural development and evolution of the project throughout the design and building process. It also explores and accounts for anomalies within Kahn’s work as well as continuities. This provides a richer understanding of this significant project as both an architectural object and as a subject of architectural history.

This “contextual” investigation of one project also allows the broader architectural themes at work in Kahn’s oeuvre to be understood in new ways. In particular, it provides a more nuanced understanding of Kahn’s architectural effort to newly invest monumentality into architecture and of the key architectural tropes he employed toward this ambition. It contributes to the developing understanding of Kahn’s relationship to the close of the modern movement and what came after.

The discussion also contributes to the studies of modern architecture in non-Western settings. The project has not been studied from this perspective before, despite its significance as an important example of postcolonial modernism and the pivotal role it plays within the architectural canon. This dissertation directly engages with and contributes to the

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intersection of disciplinary history and cultural studies. As a context for architecture, Dhaka is inevitably shaped by the ideological processes and paradigms that accompany the East- West dialectic. The thesis argues that this led Kahn to extend his internal critique, revision and ongoing development of mid-twentieth-century modernism. The project thus offers unique insights as to the significance of Kahn’s practice in non-Western settings and what this contributes to the critique of modern architecture in the latter decades of the twentieth century.

Recent scholarship on Kahn has been characterised by critical efforts to frame his architecture within the modernist canon. However, there is also a new and developing historiographic interest in postmodernism in architecture more broadly, and a more balanced scrutiny of the relationship between the late modern architecture and the discipline’s subsequent evolution. This dissertation provides an opening for a more nuanced enquiry into Kahn’s precise relationship to this juncture. Such an investigation would add a new layer to the multifaceted narratives that this extraordinary architectural monument has generated so far.

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