adler y devore houses l. kanh

5/13/2018 Adler y DeVore Houses L. Kanh

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1. Louis 1. Kahn, Adler House. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1954-1955.


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4. From Plaid Grid to Diachronic SpaceLouis I. Kahn, Adler & DeVore Houses, 1954-55In an essay on Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, MauriceBlanchot raises the question of narrative time and its disruption. Whilethere is a chronological time in narrative, Proust interweaves anotherform of time which Blanchot describes as another possibility of timebrought back not as a memory but as an actual event. Blanchot quotesfrom Proust: "The footsteps that stumble on the irregular cobblestones ofthe Guermantes Way are suddenly the same footsteps that stumbled overthe unevenfiagstones of the Piazza of San Marco." These footsteps are notjust a double, or an echo ofa past traverse. They evoke another sensation,one which does not take the form of a synchronic linear memory, butbecomes a diachronic, nonlinear, and simultaneous experience. Accordingto Blanchot, the Venice and Guermantes moments should not be consideredseparately, as a past and a present, but as a single presence that harborsa sense of absence. The incompatibility of these two moments creates asense of simultaneity, which Blanchot suggests is a sensation that suspendsand neutralizes even narrative time itself. The simultaneity, according toBlanchot, comprises the "then" of the past and the "here" of the present.These times resemble two instances of the "now," superposed in theconjunction of two simultaneous presents which alter time in a narrativesense. This diachronic time disrupts the traditional synchronic conditionof both a linear time of reading and the linear time ofthe story.

In literature, the time of the action of reading and the time of thenarrative are not the same. Yet unlike literature, architecture isthought to presume a single time: the experience of the building and theconceptualizing of the building are understood as one and the same.


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1 0 4 Adler & DeVore Houses

2. Adler and DeVoreHouses, elevations, 1954.A building unfolds in a linear manner as a personwalks in and around the space to come to under-stand the building. The time of "reading" is dif-ferent for a reader of literature than it is for areader of architecture. Time is only imaginedin the space of literature, but in architecture itis actually experienced in space, and becausethe time of experience in architecture is linear,architecture is associated with synchronic time.Blanchot suggests that the disruption elicited bya narrative's simultaneous moments representssuch a diachronic moment in actual space. Thequestion for architecture involves eliciting thatdisruptive moment or diachronic time: in otherwords, considering Blanchot's reading of Proustin architectural terms, can architecture, like lit-erature, propose affective moments in which theviewer is suddenly freed of the ultimate move-ment of time toward death, where one can expe-rience some other kind of time, a more pure statethat exists somewhere between the viewing sub-ject and the object itself?

The narrative of time that exists in a build-ing will always be constructed in real space,which is experienced as a narrative space-thatis, by walking in and around a building. One waythat architecture can suspend the time of thenarrative is by superposing on it another time.While this may seem an appropriate concept foran architecture of close reading, such an ideahas rarely been considered in the work of LouisKahn. In the Adler and DeVore Houses of 1954-55, unlike in many of his other projects, Kahnachieves what couldbe considered an architectur-al text in diachronic space. This is brought aboutby the superposition of classical and modernspace; that neither of these "times" dominatesresults in a dislocation of moments or, in otherterms, a disjunction that is experienced in space.In the Adler and DeVore Houses, Kahn presentsarchitecture both as a complex object and as thepotential for the subject to experience the objectas both a real space and an imaginary space. Bothconditions are present and can be read, each in


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Adler & DeVore Houses 105

3. Trenton Bathhouse, New Jersey, 1954-59.turn displacing the other. It is this unresolvedmoment in the Adler and DeVore Houses, whichare themselves suspended in real time betweenthe Trenton Bathhouse and the Richards MedicalCenter, that makes these two houses differentfrommuch ofKahn's other work. Itis in the con-text of the denial of axial symmetries and part-to-whole relationships evident inmuch ofKahn'slater work that these differences lie.

Thus the Adler and DeVore Houses canbe seen to articulate an alternate internal logic:first, as a conscious, didactic proposal againstthe free plan of modern architecture, andsecond, as a critique ofmodern architecture. Itis significant that the drawings for the Adler andDeVore Houses were published in Perspecta3 (1955)in a short article titled "TwoHouses,"which stressed the underlying geometric orderof both projects. Each was conceive? as a clus-ter of squares, according to Kahn, and each isrepresented with an emphasis on its columns,as if the houses were essentially an abstract

4. Trenton Bathhouse, axonometric view.pattern of square columns within square enclo-sures. Kahn suggests that the houses "grow outof the same order," but that their designs aredifferent. These statements by Kahn imply anorigin as a unity and a sameness, which beliesthe disjunctive conditions lodged in these twoprojects. Kahn actually produces two diagramsin each ofthese houses, one a classical, tripartite,nine-square diagram and the other a modernistasymmetrical diagram. The dual diagram coun-ters the idea of a singular origin, just as thesesuperposed organizations deny a beginning ina particular historical moment. The denial of asingle and identifiable point oforigin alsobeginsto critique the notion of the classical part-to-whole relationship in its denial of a single uni-fied whole. A series of potential points of originsuggests the undecidability of relationshipsbetween parts, which therefore no longer canbesubsumed within a clearly definable whole.

A variety of historical moments can be dis-cerned in Kahn's plans for these houses. The


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1 0 6 Adler & DeVore Housesil - 1

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5.Adler House, preliminary plan.European influence of the late 1940s and early1950sis evident; Le Corbusier's Maison Jaoul, forexample, is one such possible model, as a brick,wall-bearing structure whose barrel vault hasdispensed with the flat roof of modernism. Thehipped roofs of Kahn's Trenton Bathhouse, aswell as its emphatic materiality, are clearly ante-cedents to the Adler and DeVore Houses, giventhat initial sketches ofboth houses similarly havehipped roofs. The Trenton Bathhouse is the firstexample in America of a massive brick and con-crete structure denying the free plan and dynam-ic asymmetries of modernism with a classicizingnine-square plan. While only a small portion ofthe Trenton Bathhouse was built, its master planwas radical in deploying a plaid grid, a Beaux-Arts grid of servant and served spaces with anABABAB rhythm in its overall organization,rather than the homogenous space of the mod-ernist grid. Kahn uses the particular alignmentofthe columnwithin its masonry enclosure to dif-ferentiate the variegated bays that constitute theplaid grid. The structure is articulated with acer-tain redundancy because the large masonry units,

6.John Hejduk, Texas House 4,1954-63.despite their appearance, are not load-bearing;the actual steel structure is just visible betweenthe masonry and the roof. This is a self-referenc-ing notation ofthe disjunction between the sectionofthe roof and that of the plan; in other words, anarticulated system in section, which evolves outof an extrusion in plan. There is no sectional dis-placement. Ifin Le Corbusier the section is oftenthe site of the displacement ofthe subject, Kahn'sTrenton Bathhouse produces no such disturbancein section, which, it could be argued, fits withinthe pragmatic tradition and utilitarian organiza-tion of space in American architecture.

Materials are expressed in the Trenton proj-ect, which eschews the use of a surface veneer.The corner pier structures and wall are madeof concrete blocks. The wall plane of the cornerpier structures is made of the same material asthe corner, and contributes to the sense thatthe pavilions appear the same from the corneras from a frontal view, denying the picture orfrontal plane. The bathhouse pavilions are nei-ther Greek (conceptualized from a perspectivalview) nor Roman (conceptualized from a fron-


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7.DeVore House, plan. 8. John Hejduk, Wall House, 1968-74.

Adler & DeVore Houses

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DO tal plane); here the point of view of the subjectbecomes irrelevant. This disruption of specificpoints of view in the Trenton Bathhouse's nine-square plan foregrounds the destabilization thatbecomes manifest in the plans of the Adler andDeVore Houses.

The Adler House stands as a critique of thebi-nuclear houses of Walter Gropius and MarcelBreuer. In these bi-nuclear schemes, one entersin the middle space between two pavilions; onone side is the public space and on the other isthe private space. These modernist bi-nuclearhouses were essentially a misreading of classi-cal architecture, in that in a classical parti, thevoid between the two pavilions would neverhave been entered. Kahn, who understood this,maintains vestiges of a bi-nuclear notation inthe Adler House, which is a combination of aseries of pavilions along the lines of the TrentonBathhouse with a fracturing that does not occurin the work of Gropius or Breuer. A first sketchwith nine-square and axial symmetry clearly hasechoes ofthe Trenton Bathhouse. Later sketchesdemonstrate the fracturing of this organization,

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producing what seems to be the fragmentationof a former nine-square grid. Yet attempts to fitthe pavilion units back into a unified organizationsuch as a nine-square are frustrated and eludeany stable originary part-to-whole relationship.The Adler House maintains both of these ideas:the whole as the sum of its parts, and the impos-sibility ofthe whole; the whole is made impossibleby the different shearings and slippages resultingfrom the superposition of a modernist plan anda classical nine-square parti. That neither plan ismade dominant recalls the disruption generatedby the diachronic idea of time in Blanchot's read-ing of Proust.

The plan of the Adler House registers thissuperposition of the modernist and Beaux-Artsschemas, which implies a transformation not froma single original state but from several possibleoriginary conditions. This transformation leavestraces that can be read in the resulting plan. Themovement in the Adler House's square units pro-duces a shearing motion and introduces two con-cepts: the idea of a grain to the space and theidea of time in its process. Yet while the square


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108 Adler & DeVore Houses

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9.Adler House, plans.units of the plan themselves have no direction-ality, their varied motions away from possiblepoints of origin always occur along a horizontalaxis. The square columns and their groupings toform rectangles imply a grain and directionalityto the implied movement of the pavilion units.In the Adler House, the horizontal motion of theunits remains discontinuous, as if several disloca-tions from a seeming origin have occurred overtime, even though that origin in itself cannot befixed. The overall arrangement of square unitscomprising the Adler House resembles an orga-nization of pavilion units intermittently slidingoff the nine-square grid, yet their asymmetricalplacement confirms a modern spatial arrange-ment. The interior grid of the house reverts toa Beaux-Arts plaid grid, and thereby decentersthe nine-square grid parti. This is one of many ofthe embedded oppositions at work in the AdlerHouse. If the house at first seems to be haphaz-

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ard or an arbitrary organization of pavilions, this isnot the case. Through a purposeful manipulation,Kahn produces the dislocations that articulate atext of diachronic spaces in the architecture of theAdler House.

The DeVore House similarly resemblesthe record of a process that has been frozen at amoment in time; it alludes to a possible origin butfrustrates any direct reading of such origins. Thiscan be best understood in comparison to bothJ ohnHejduk's Wall Houses and his Texas Houses, withwhich the Adler and DeVore Houses are contem-poraries, though which came first is of little rel-evance in this context. Their similarities reflecta shared set of ideas also present in the earlydrawings for the Vanna Venturi House (chapter5). Like the Adler House, Hejduk's Texas Housesuse a classical nine-square parti as their basis.Alternatively, Hejduk's Wall Houses and Kahn'sDeVore House focus on the relationship of the


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Adler & DeVore Houses 1 0 9

10. DeVore House, partial plan.pavilion to the wall, which in and of itself is the-matized as a didactic element to which the pavil-ions respond. In the DeVore House, the placementof each of its pavilion units seems to respond tothe wall, and the shape of its columns furtherimplies a directionality in relation to the wall. Inboth Hejduk's Wall Houses and Kahn's DeVoreHouse, the wall performs as a divider, separat-ing public from private and bucolic from built; italso becomes a threshold marking the moment ofcrossing. The wall simultaneously differentiatesand makes intelligible; it separates but also links.Despite its obvious materiality, it embodies sev-eral seemingly contradictory abstract principles,establishing a narrative sequence for the subjectpassing through the house: while the subject isaware of a continual breach of that threshold, thisawareness focuses the spatio-temporal emphasison the moment of crossing. Thus, dividing dif-ferent times and spaces, the datum of the wall

assumes a metaphysical presence as the centralelement in the formulation of the perceptual andnavigational intelligibility of the design.

In drawing attention to this moment,Hejduk and Kahn set up a tension in the archi-tecture that questions the common understand-ing of the dialectical difference between insideand outside. Kahn's DeVore House also fuses twodifferent geometries and two different momentsin history, the classical and the modern. What canbe more evocative of the modern than a wall knif-ing through the heart of the house, which is nota modern house, but one that has classical echoesin its nine-square grid? If a wall is usually readas a divider between an interior and an exterior,once a person passes through the wall at DeVore,that conditioning has been problematized: hasone left the structure or entered it? How space isexperienced in an interval of time is part of howthe time of the object is usually revealed to the


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11.Richards Medical Center, 1957-65.subject. Because the subject is continually oper-ating around the wall and making reference to it,the only "inside" is that point in the interior ofthe wall itself. Everywhere else is outside of thewall, outside of its inside, but constantly awareof that moment of inside. A "time of inside" isthereby established in relation to the "time ofoutside." The actual "time of enclosure" thenbecomes infinitesimally small relative to the con-tinuum ofwhich it is a part. Thus, one of the maincharacteristics of both of these works is the col-lision of time narratives within the boundary ofthe wall itself.

The Adler and DeVore Houses can be con-sidered an inflection point in Kahn's work, forthey stand both outside of the traditional inter-pretations of his work and become the starting

point for future work. From these two houses it is ashort jump in scale to the Richards Medical Center,1957-65,which is a project made up of a sequence ofpavilions, extruded and positioned as if unwindingout of a tight spiral. Richards is also a pavilion proj-ect of servant and served elements extruded intothe third dimension. Ifthe pavilions of the Adler andDeVore Houses functioned as units marking tacticalshifts across the physical threshold of a wall or theimplied/conceptual threshold of a nine-square grid,then the pavilions of the Richards Medical Centerare made to serve a picturesque rather than didacticfunction. Kahn's sketches of the Richards MedicalCenter transform and extrude the pavilions to pro-duce a romantic skyline. Each of the three maintowers is a volume articulated by thin columns,with the servant spaces pulled off into smaller, sep-arate towers. The H-shaped columns reiterate thenine-square organization of each volume and forma plaid grid. Unlike the Adler and DeVore Houses,the structure frames the middle tier of each side,leaving a void at the corner: This voided conditionrecalls the Exeter Library and other Kahn proj-ects. At Richards, the two conditions contradicteach other: the alignment of the pavilions sets up afrontal organization in plan, yet the entry occurs atthe corner. The arrangement is both orthogonal anddiagonal, a combination of Greek and Roman spacethat becomes a Kahn trope. The countermandingpavilion alignments, operating systematically inthe Adler and DeVore Houses, become at Richardsmore graphic, and ultimately expressionistic. Thelegibility of the Richards servant and served spacesmarks another shift from the undecidability of thepavilions in the houses.

Kahn participates in the pre-1968 attempt torethink the originary premises of modernism thatcharacterize works belonging to this first paradigmshift. His work here represents a split between theunconscious theoretical propositions apparent inthe work of both Mies and Moretti, and the seem-


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ingly conscious theoretical reversals articulatedin that of Le Corbusier. The movement towardreal materials as well as the reintegration of clas-sical schemata, is an expression in each of thesehouses of a critique of abstraction. This critiqueinvolves a new interest in what resembles incom-pleteness and fragmentation ofform. With today'shindsight it is possible to suggest that the shifts,dislocations, and superpositions in the Adlerand DeVore Houses ultimately could be consid-ered a questioning of the classical part-to-wholerelationship.


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12. The organization of the Adler House suggests thatthe house has a conceptual origin in anine-square grid,five pavilion units and five square outdoor spaces.

13. The organization of the pavilions seem to originatein the nine-square grid. While the lowest row (openspace, pavilion unit, open space) can be conceptuallyreturned to such an origin, the center row (open space,pavilion, pavilion, open space) and the upper row(pavilion, halved open space, pavilion, open space)cannot.


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Adler & DeVore Houses 11 3

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14. The organization of the pavilions thus enablesmultiple readings. The Adler House's internal logicdepends on the simultaneity of two dissimilar systemsinvolving the open spaces (A) and the pavilionunits (B). The ideal ABA nine-square is adapted toaccommodate the Adler House plan by removing apavilion and shifting them. Although the plaid ABAplan derives directly from the Beaux-Arts tradition,this reading emphasizes the house's modernistasymmetry.

15.Equally, themodern BBA arrangement emphasizesan asymmetry of organization and can be adapted tothe Adler House by removing and shifting pavilions.The overall arrangement of the pavilion units presentsa superposition of Beaux-Arts and modern plans.Their combined product allows for a double readingof the house as an ABA arrangement and aBBAarrangement, in other words, as both Beaux-Arts andmodern organizations.


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16-17. There are two ways to locate the Adler Housewithin a classical nine-square-grid; yet each is an im-perfect fit, with all or a portion of a pavilion falling out-side of this idealized schema. When one interpretation

is chosen, one part of the scheme is outside of the nine-square diagram. When the outside part is the basis forthe basic diagram, the other part moves outside, thusthere is no stable single diagramfor the Adler House.


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18. In general, the piers provide points of alignmentfor one nine-square diagram, which responds to thesingle, double, and triple pier conditions.

19. However, an anomalous condition (highlighted inred) can bedefined by the single piers of the uppermostrow. While this space remains a void in the project,there is a conceptual overlapping of an implied unitbounded bypiers and open space.


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20. The column grid of the Adler House has a prob-lematic pier arrangement within the nine-square grid.There arefour different pier organizations which con-tribute to a striation of space in the Adler House: the

pier by itself, the pier doubled along the x-axis, thepier doubled on the y-axis, and the intersection of thetwo doubled axes, which creates an L-shaped cornerpier condition.


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22. This thirty-six square sub-grid accommodates bothnine-square and four-square organizations and there-by allows a double-reading of interior spaces that isalso possiblefor the overall organization of the pavil-ion units. This allows the doubled piers, for example,to remain within the definition of the overall sub-grid.

21. The dimensions of the window mullions and piersof each pavilion unit constitute a notational systemfor subdividing each pavilion. This minor grid iscomposed of thirty-six squares.


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11 8 Adler & DeVore Houses

23. Adler House, groundfioor, axonometric view.


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24. Adler House, roof level, axonometric view.


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a. b.

25 (a-b). The pavilion units of the DeVore Houseare organized in relation to a wall. Origins can beattributed to classical ABCBA (a) and modernistasymmetrical schemes (b).

26. Four actual units (B-E) and one implied unit (Ajstand on one side of the wall, while a single similarpavilion unit (F) is located on the other side of thewall. The leftmost two units (A and B) are aligned butseparated by a gap that functions as an implied wall.


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a.

27 (a-b). Unit (E) is separated by a space equivalent tohalf of the unit dimension (a) from the adjacent unitD, but is the only unit physically attached to the wall.Units B, C, and D are aligned in a parallel manneralong a wall that is breached by the C and Fblocks.The outermost units (A, E) are aligned with the wall.Units Band D shear from the mass created by unit C,establishing a grain perpendicular to the wall.

28. Units A and B are 'separated by a narrow slot ofspace, while unit D is separated from the wall by aspace (b) that is equivalent to half of space (a). Thedimension of a pavilion unit is double that of space(a). A logic of spacing emerges in which spaces ofdimension (a) interlock and frame the units in a plaidgrid.


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29 (a-b). Units A and B are separated by a space,yet it is a poched area (the fireplace) that maintainstheir physical separation (a). Rectangular columnsdefine the relationship between units B, C, and D andestablish a grain running in parallel to the wall (b).

30 (a-b). A single square column located centrallybetween units C and F indexes the presence of theexisting wall. One of the middle columns is unaligned,but in another reading it aligns with an outboardcolumn to produce a double column in unit C (a).Unit F is "rotated"so that its two open sides suggest amovement producing a third shearing condition.


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31_A strategy of mirroring and rotation emerges inthe play of units, spaces, and walls. Unit C is mirroredin unit F across the presence of the virtual wall thatis established by the square column aligned with theexisting wall. However, the grain produced by theorientation of rectangular columns also suggests arotational relationship.

Units A and E seem to mirror each other across a lineperpendicular to the existing wall and established bythe square column between units C and F . The units inthe DeYore House can beread as a series of shearing androtational movements. The effect of the superpositionof these multiple systems both reinforces and displacesthe relationships of unit to wall to conceptual grid.


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32. DeVoreHouse, ground-floor plan and sublevel, axonometric view.


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33. DeVore House, ground floor, axonometric view.81 UOT ECA


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1 2 6 Adler & DeVore Houses

34. DeVoreHouse, roojplan, axonometric view.