The social poetics of urban design: rethinking urban design through Louis Kahn’s vision for Central Philadelphia (1939–1962)

Abstract

The architect Louis Kahn is known for the simple yet poetic composition of his words. Through some of the unique features of his unbuilt master plan for the urban centre in Central Philadelphia, this paper argues that we can understand the true quality of Kahn’s design only when we look at his proposals through the lens of linguistics and semiotics. The appeal of Kahn’s design lies in what semioticists and linguists would call ‘poetic quality’, or the production of inventive understandings of both the conventions and new inventions of the shared social milieu. It is precisely because the poetic function in language is humanistic, that Kahn’s use of social poetics has brought the abstract ideas of urban planners down to earth in a way that everyone can appreciate.

Acknowledgements

The author is especially grateful to Dr Michael Herzfeld and his colleague Leo Pang who carefully read the entire manuscript to sharpen the argument and improve its prose with wit and energy. Thanks are also due to readers on various occasions: Kevin Beier, Alan C. Braddock, Sonia Hirt, Laura Turner Igoe, Xinyan Peng and Leslie Sklair. The author owes a great debt to the Archivists Bill Whitaker and Heather Isbell Schumacher at the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania for their uninterrupted and responsive research support. Finally, this paper is dedicated to the author’s mentor, friend and colleague, the late Professor Stanford Owen Anderson (1934‒2016) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), whose passion for the works of Louis Kahn resonated deeply with him. Stan taught him the beauty of Kahn’s architectural poetics. Whatever he has learned about architecture in the larger social context as well as its cultural role, the author shall always be indebted to him.

Notes

1. Famous examples include the pronouncement of marriage at a church where the combination of words ‘I pronounce you husband and wife’ has an operative effect compared to if it was being uttered elsewhere, such as at a bar. When Kahn uttered the combination of words that form a sentence ‘architecture is the thoughtful making of space’, he was conscious both of his audience and the context in which he made the speech, therefore making this particular sentence one of the most profound architectural tenets of his time and beyond.

2. It should be noted here that, considering the impact of the Jakobsonian school of linguistics, it is certain that any trained linguists will be well versed in Jakobson’s complex four-directional schematic diagrams of verbal communication as well as the corresponding fundamental factors. This paper, however, will not use too much specialized terminology or go into too much depth and detail about linguistics. Concepts will only be provided insofar as they will help to understand Kahn’s work from such perspectives.

3. The writings of enlightenment philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham, for example, are full of idiomatic proses that are not necessarily grammatical in the strictest sense. His most famous (far from being a complete) sentence is ‘mankind governed by pain and pleasure’ and then a period denoting that this is a full sentence consisting of just these six words despite the lack of the crucial model verb ‘is’ between the subject and the passive verb form. Yet, it was precisely an example of what Herzfeld (2005) would call a ‘creative play’ that makes his writings on utilitarianism widely influential and accessible. According to Jakobson et al. (1985, 38) ‘Bentham is perhaps the first to disclose the manifold “linguistic fictions” which underlie grammatical structure and which are used throughout the whole field of language as a necessary resource.’