A somewhat exasperated review of the rather disappointing exhibition on Louis Kahn that was held 9 July – 12 October 2014 at the Design Museum in London.
I waited until just before this exhibition closes to write this piece. It’s an unconventional way of writing a review, I know, but I wanted to see what other people’s responses were to the exhibition before I had my say. The reasons for that will hopefully become clear as you read on. A word of caution: I’m not going to talk much about the themes or ideas the exhibition was trying to explore, or, indeed, Kahn himself; rather, I will focus on the ways those were communicated – or not, as it transpired.
I visited the exhibition just after it opened. I immediately felt mugged, inadvertently paying the £2 or something ‘suggested donation’ per ticket that most museums now seem to try to extract from their visitors. Curiously, it doesn’t seem to be applicable when buying a ticket online. We eventually made our way up to the galleries and were immediately met with a wall of text that tried to give a sense of the timeline of Kahn’s life. It was a dense and unexciting way to begin the exhibition. And it was, furthermore, unclear which direction we were then meant to proceed. We gambled and went right.
Things didn’t improve. The timeline continued and became harder to read, let alone begin to comprehend. Black text on dark grey panels is not a recipe for legibility at the best of times. In such a gloomy and badly lit exhibition as this, it was as if the curators – from the Vitra Design Museum in Germany – were playing a joke on the visitor, forcing us to get right up close to their hallowed commentary. Upon this forced microscopic inspection, it became clear that letters were missing from the text panels. This would be understandable, if not forgivable, if we were to visit the exhibition at the end of a several month run – wear and tear is inevitable – but the day after the exhibition opened? It was just unprofessional, both on behalf of the person who installed it and, frankly, on the curators for not spotting it and getting it corrected. In an exhibition that relied so heavily on its extended text panels, it was the equivalent for putting up paintings crooked: completely inexcusable.
The one consolation to the wall panels’ illegibility was that the texts were barely worth reading. All were far too long, badly written, full of sweeping assumptions and littered with terrible jargon. They offered no insight into Kahn’s influences and the thinking behind his buildings – and did little to justify the at times puzzling thematic arrangement of the exhibition. No more illuminating were the talking heads of the great and the good of the architecture world who punctuated the exhibition’s various sections, discussing what Kahn’s work means to them. Perhaps it was hoped that the exhibition’s assortment of drawings, models, letters, prints and books might tell the story on their own? Alas, no. There were some wonderful objects on show, particularly Kahn’s own drawings and models. But, looking at much of the rest of the material, it was often hard to understand why particular objects had been included. Of the labels that were actually present (many labels were missing or obscured under frames or cabinets), hardly any had descriptive information that might explain the relevance of this particular object for Kahn or his architecture. In the worst instances books were placed in cabinets unopened and the viewer was left simply to guess at their significance.
All this the exhibition might have got away with, if either through his models, drawings or even photographs of his buildings, the viewer got a sense of the captivating spirit of Kahn’s architecture. Unfortunately, again the curators’ presentation of objects in the exhibition almost completely destroyed their significance for the viewer. The cardinal sin of architecture exhibitions of drawings and models being presented decontextualised – standing in for the buildings and essentially as art – was committed with wilful abandon. We were left with little sense of how Kahn formed his ideas on paper or in three dimensions and consequently how the drawings or models we saw fitted in his design process, generally or in particular. This was compounded by the mixing up of Kahn’s original models with newly made recreations. The grainy black and white photographs pasted on the wall were little help either.
The curators’ closest attempt at actually giving the viewer a sense of Kahn’s architecture were in the films shot in and around his buildings. Unfortunately the soundtrack of an otherwise promising film of Kahn’s parliament building in Dhaka could be heard reverberating around the galleries, ruining our already incredibly disappointing visit to the exhibition. (I was told this was a problem just on the day of our visit). Ironically, the exhibition’s only real highlights were the almost silent series of films by Alice Masters, shown, as if incidental, in another room adjacent to the exhibition. Finally, in these sensitively shot and edited films we came across someone who actually ‘gets’ what Kahn’s architecture is about.
In a way, our experience of the exhibition was summed up in its subtitle: ‘The Power of Architecture’. It’s a phrase which is trying to allude to something profound going on in Kahn’s work, but through its inherent lack of specificity – the power to do what? – actually becomes numbingly banal. In a figure like Kahn, the curators were met by an architect with a reputation as monumental as his buildings, yet someone who is surprisingly elusive too, who revelled in the seemingly incidental details of his buildings, as much as their grand gestures. And ultimately, in all this the curators were found wanting.
Taking on someone of such towering artistic achievement as Kahn, whether in a monographic exhibition or a book, one has a duty, a great burden in many ways, of doing justice to and producing something that is worthy of their work. The curators should have been deeply anxious about what they’ve created. Instead, we get the slightly smug impression that the curators felt they had Kahn all worked out. Well, if this exhibition, ridden, as it is, with technical and conceptual faults, is anything to go by, they didn’t come close. What, ironically, it does reveal is that the curators have little understanding of architecture at all, at least in any meaningful sense. For them the exhibition was merely an instrument for faddish pseudo-intellectualism and leaden-footed didacticism, allowing them to parasite themselves onto the back of possibly the twentieth century’s greatest architect.