MARGARET ESHERICK HOUSE HABS PA-6775 204 Sunrise Lane HABS PA-6775 Philadelphia Philadelphia County Pennsylvania PHOTOGRAPHS WRITTEN HISTORICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE DATA REDUCED COPIES OF MEASURED DRAWINGS FIELD RECORDS HISTORIC AMERICAN BUILDINGS SURVEY National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior 1849 C Street NW Washington, DC 20240-0001 HISTORIC AMERICAN BUILDINGS SURVEY MARGARET ESHERICK HOUSE HABS No. PA-6775 Location: 204 Sunrise Lane, Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania The Margaret Esherick House is located at latitude - 40.072327, longitude - 75.206324. The coordinate represents a point at the center of the building's roof. It was obtained using Google Earth imagery, dated April 11, 2010. The Margaret Esherick House location has no restriction on its release to the public. Present Owner: Dr. Robert and Lynn Gallagher Present Occupants: Lynn Gallagher Present Use: Residence Historian: James A. Jacobs, HABS Significance: Designed and constructed between 1959 and 1962, the Margaret Esherick House in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania is a masterwork of modern architecture and craftsmanship. Internationally renowned Philadelphia architect Louis I. Kahn designed the house at the exact moment his career began climbing to unprecedented heights of success and influence. His robust buildings emphasized structure, spatial organization, context, and the architectural separation of "servant" and "served," and were received by critics as powerful alternatives to the, by then, ubiquitous International Style glass box. The Esherick House is one of only a handful of built residential commissions by an architect known for his, sometimes massive, institutional projects. Its sophistication has clarity of design approaching his most important projects and, because of its modest scale, issues a clear and comprehensible demonstration of Kahn's complex ideas about the interplay of humanity and the built environment. The Esherick House might appropriately be called a modern suburban villa that has two distinct faces. The severity and closed quality of the street facade is entirely transformed and opened up on the garden front, which overlooks Pastorius Park. Expanses of glass blur the division between exterior and interior and this transparency is heightened in the warmer months by idiosyncratic wood shutters that open up sections of the exterior walls. These shutters are just one example of exquisitely detailed woodwork found throughout the house, rendered in apitong, a type of teak. The artistic quality of the woodwork becomes literal in the kitchen where important American sculptor Wharton Esherick, the uncle of client Margaret Esherick, crafted the cabinetry. Kahn designed a studio for MARGARET ESHERICK HOUSE HABS No. PA-6775 (Page 2) Wharton Esherick in 1955 and he likely provided the introduction for his niece, a mature single woman and business owner at a time when affluent women tended to be neither. A confident woman in her own right, with a famed sculptor for an uncle and a prolific and well-known West Coast architect for a brother, Kahn likely respected her artistic opinion or at least her ability to get a sound second opinion on matters of design. Together, they created a jewel-box of a building that is a testament to Kahn's abilities and Esherick's sensibilities, one that continues to demonstrate the transcendent quality of outstanding design, craftsmanship, and stewardship. PART I: HISTORICAL INFORMATION A. Physical History: 1. Date of construction: 1959-1962 2. Architect, artist, and landscape architect: Louis I. Kahn (1901-1974). Louis I. Kahn was born "Leiser-Itze Schmuilowsky" in Parnu, Estonia, which at the time was under Russian control. His father, Leib (later Leopold), was a Latvian Jew who had been trained as a stained glass artist who also spoke a number of languages, and his mother, Beila-Rebecka (later Bertha) was a trained harpist. The two had met and married in Riga while he was on leave from the Russian army, for which Leib had been drafted, and moved to Parnu, and later resided on Osel island. While living in Estonia, Kahn was seriously burned in an accident and he would bear the scars on his face for the rest of his life. Leib immigrated to Philadelphia in 1905 and Beila-Rebecka arrived with the rest of the family in 1906. They settled in the Northern Liberties neighborhood where the family, like many recent immigrants, made a living through a variety of temporary and odd jobs. The family eventually became naturalized citizens and took "Kahn" as a new surname. Louis Kahn's drawing talents were recognized while he was in elementary school, which set into motion a series of fortuitous educational opportunities. He was admitted first to the Public School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia, founded in 1880 to provide craft education for poor children. He subsequently attended the city's prestigious Central High 1 Kahn believed he was born on Osel island, and this is what appears in most histories; however, Carter Wiseman believes he was actually born on the Estonian mainland. Carter Wiseman, Louis I. Kahn Beyond Time and Style: A Life in Architecture (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 12-13. See also: Emily T. Cooperman, National Historic Landmark nomination for the "Alfred Newton Richards Medical Research Laboratories and David Goddard Laboratories Buildings," U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, 2009, 15-17. For a discussion of Kahn's career and the design of the Esherick House, see Section LB of this report, "Historical Context." 2 The Public School of Industrial Art was a distinct institution having no association with the Pennsylvania Museum School for Industrial Art (now part of the Philadelphia University of the Arts). See University of the Arts Libraries, "UArts Name Changes," accessed online, 22 Dec. 2010 (http://library.uarts.edu/archives/uartsnamechanges.html). For more information about the establishment of MARGARET ESHERICK HOUSE HABS No. PA-6775 (Page 3) School and earned a number of prizes for his drawings. After graduation, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts offered Kahn a four-year arts scholarship, but, instead, he chose to enter the School of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, at the time one of the country's flagship programs and closely modeled on Ecole des Beaux- Arts. Kahn studied under Paul Philippe Cret, one of the nation's preeminent Beaux-Arts architects and graduated in 1924. Kahn immediately entered the office of the Philadelphia city architect and worked on the Sesquicentennial Exposition (1926). He made his first European sojourn in 1928, returning in 1929 and taking a job in Cret's firm just months before the stock market crash. As with many architects, the economy of the 1930s resulted in Kahn's existence as an underemployed professional nomad, working at times in collaboration with George Howe and Oscar Stonorov, primarily with domestic design schemes for public programs and for periodic commissions. After World War II, Kahn took a position at Yale as a professor of architecture, teaching there between 1947 and 1955, after which he returned to Philadelphia to his alma mater. During his years at Yale, Kahn spent a year at the American Academy in Rome and, with his design for the Yale University Art Gallery (1951-53), began atwenty-year period of amazing productivity and ever-increasing national and international renown as an architect. He taught at Penn and ran a private practice at 1501 Walnut Street in Center City Philadelphia until his death in 1974. Wharton Esherick (1887-1970). Wharton Esherick is among America's most prominent twentieth-century artists. Best known for his sculptural interior fittings and furniture rendered in wood, Esherick's work existed at the intersection of art and craft. His pieces' distinctive forms make them some of the most recognizable, and their quality and depth grew out of both an appreciation of the raw material and enjoyment of the craft. In his 1970 obituary, the New York Times commented: "Mr. Esherick felt that he was at his best in bringing forth the image that was in the wood itself. But the effort had to be fun. Tf you take the fun away,' he was fond of saying, T don't want anything to do with it.'" While it has been observed that Esherick was born into a family "that had little record of artistic achievement," his own life's work, that of his nephew Joseph Esherick, Jr. (1914- 1998), an influential California architect, and the commission of the house at 204 Sunrise Lane by his niece Margaret suggest a passion for art and design held by later generations of Eshericks. Wharton Esherick was born into a well-off Philadelphia family whose wealth derived from a variety of business interests. His talents as an artist became evident with his the Public School of Industrial Art, see: John Trevor, The Public Schools of Philadelphia: Historical, Biographical, Statistical (Philadelphia, 1897), 201-13. 3 "Wharton Esherick, a Sculptor and Furniture Designer, Dies," New York Times 7 May 1970: 43. 4 For a discussion of Esherick's family, youth, and education, see: Mansfield Bascom, Wharton Esherick: The Journey of a Creative Mind(New York: Abrams, 2010), 9-19. Unless otherwise noted, all information about Esherick's education and early career is drawn from this source. MARGARET ESHERICK HOUSE HABS No. PA-6775 (Page 4) boyhood drawings, although his parents were at best ambivalent about them and his father attempted to steer him towards a more conventional education and career pathway. In the end, they relented and he was able to attend the Central Manual Training School instead of a preparatory high school. In 1906, Esherick entered the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art—founded in 1876 as an outgrowth of the Centennial Exposition and is now part of the University of the Arts—where he studied lithography, silk-screening, drawing, and illustration.