Toward Modernist Urban Design: Louis Kahn's Plan for Central Philadelphia

Abstract

By re-visiting Louis Kahn's urban design plan for Central Philadelphia in the 1950s, this paper explores the history and controversy of one of the most provocative modernist urban design ideas through the debate between architect Kahn and planner Edmund Bacon. While Bacon was a trained planner who represented the economic needs of the public realm, Kahn was an architect who advocated for the powerful form and the system of movement at large. This paper presents a methodological search for the distinctive characteristics of Kahn's plan that might have made it practical for Philadelphia—the idea of the city of flow and the monumental civic centre.

Acknowledgements

This paper owes great debt to Bill Whittaker, a curator at the University of Pennsylvania's Architecture Archives, in his immense assistance on providing lists of important primary and secondary sources on Kahn, without whom this paper would never have been started. The author also owes a particular debt to Julian Beinart and Stanford Anderson at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for their constant enthusiasm about the project, their generous support, and most importantly their knowledge guidance toward unfamiliar examples of Modern architecture and urban forms. Finally, the author remains grateful to the wonderful editing of Victor Alexander Wong, Marylin Levine, Robert Doherty, Dr Robert Irwin, Thalia Rubio, Susan Carlisle, Elizabeth Fox, and Melissa Ming-Hwei Lo.

Notes

1. Although Bacon admired Le Corbusier for his ingenious and artistic vision of the Modern city, he highly criticized Le Corbusier for his ignorance of the particular city's context: “[for the city of Chandigarh], Le Corbusier was blind to the design requirements of relating his buildings to the city, and, indeed, of relating his building to one another” (Bacon, 1967, p. 219). From that experience of Modernism, it is reasonable to assume that Bacon felt the same way with Kahn's design of Central Philadelphia. Later, Jane Jacobs, who may be counted as one of the severest and most famous critics and grassroots opponents of Le Corbusian city planning, rejected Le Corbusier's ‘architecture own’ principle on urbanism, opting instead for lively streets, participatory planning and the integration of old buildings into the new urban fabric.

2. Architecture Forum (June, 1952), pp. 118–119. Also see quotation in Time magazine, 6 November 1964: “By the 1950s, the city's businessmen recognized that Philadelphia was a city in a state of collapse, to use Bacon's phrase. Industries were beginning to move out, sales in the centre city were declining, and stores were moving to the suburbs, or talking about it”. Quoted in Time, ‘Under the knife, or all for their own good’, Time Electronics Archive. Available at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,876419-3,00.html (accessed 24 September 2006). In addition, with a city commission to destroy the ‘Chinese Wall’, a massive, stone structure that supported the railroad tracks and ran right through Philadelphia's downtown blighting the entire area, there were abundant opportunities for the city to grow. The decision to submerge railroad tracks, replacing an immense, elevated railroad connectors located north of Market and West of Broad, were Bacon's vision of the new Philadelphia.

3. Kahn made no distinction between architecture and urban design; thus he often used the phrase ‘architect planner’ in the 1950s to describe a role of an architect who worked in a city planning scale.

4. The author finds no way to explain Kahn's conception of the motor car better than his own words:

the circumstantial demands of the car, of parking and so forth, will eat away all the spaces that exist now and pretty soon you have no identifying traces for what I call loyalties—the landmarks. Remember, when you think of your city, you think immediately of certain places, which identify the city, as you enter it. If they're gone, your feeling for the city is lost to gone … If because of the demands of the motorcar, we stiffen and garden the city—omitting water, omitting the green world—the city will be destroyed. Therefore the car, because of its destructive value, must start us rethinking the city in terms of the green world, in terms of the world of water, and of air, and of locomotion. (Louis Kahn (1962) The animal world, Canadian Art 19(1), pp. 29, 31, quoted in Frampton, 1995).

5. Kahn had already established his major architectural principle ‘Monumentality’ in the contribution to Paul Zucker (1944). There are some similarities between Kahn's principle ‘Monumentality’ and J. L. Sert et al. (1984). The main ideas of both are the same: “to use a symbolical realm of monumentality to express man's highest cultural needs. See J. L. Sert et al. (1984).

6. Critics say that this was one of the main disputes, not only to Kahn but, to everyone who tries to propose a building that is taller than 491-feet high by the top of the William Penn's statue on top of the City Hall. Bacon was very concerned with symbolic historicism of the city as he once proposed the redevelopment plan that only reached to the base of the city hall, but not the semiotic tower of Penn's statue This may explain why Bacon was very upset at Kahn's proposal for civic centres where almost every building was taller, larger and seemed to capture more monumental power, than the city hall.

7. Bacon's work involving planning for the city had been in motion since his undergraduate senior thesis at Cornell entitled ‘Plans for a Philadelphia Center City’, one of the important sources that will lead to the understanding of Bacon's formation of urban design ideology, which the author anticipated to investigate in a more detail. This contains detailed and comprehensive theses on Bacon's ideological development. In addition, Bacon was a planning student of Eliel Saarinen at the Cranbrook Academy of Art after he graduated from Cornell University. Bacon said: “Eliel Saarinen was my great master and teacher. He emphasized design as the relationship of form and space; so the real design problem is the city. Saarinen taught us that harmony of form and mass doesn't stop at property lines but continues” (Time, 6 November 1964) (accessed 24 September 2006).

8. As context and scale were always important design criteria, the two-sided linear arrangement of his buildings, which work well for the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, might turn out to be completely brutal for people's perception of the new Philadelphia. In addition, the form of the city might not be perceivable and recognizable in a perceptive way because of the overwhelming images of the civic centres on the Market Street as well as the parking garage on Vine Street. The other elements, which Lynch proposed as ideas to define the psychological image of the city, might be dominated by the scale of monumental buildings, thus diminishing the sense of a good city (see Lynch, 1960).

9. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the fact that Kahn had ‘attempted to compromise’ with the public and Bacon, Kahn's proposal—already the most expressive and the most useful, he claimed—for Philadelphia would not, by any means, be significantly changed as he had already pinpointed fundamental problems from the start, and had developed it through his sensibility conceived from direct experience of the city and his romanticized historicism established as his mature principle of his design. The reason that Kahn's could not compromise more on the idea of civic centre is described by Giedion:

Everybody is susceptible to symbols … Not haphazard world's fairs, which in their present form have lost their old significance, but newly created civic centres should be the rise for collective emotional events, where the people play as important a role as the spectacle itself, and where a unity of the architectural background, the people and the symbols conveyed by the spectacles will arise. (Giedion, 1984, p. 60)