A Message:

From Richard Saul Wurman

The word “indulgence” has connotations that people often try to distance themselves from. I feel quite differently. All the work I’ve done has been slathered with indulgence. It has been my modus operandi. I’m proud that there are things that interest me and drive me—perhaps at certain times in my life obsessively—to make or do something that indulges my curiosity. It’s only by indulging in my curiosity, my interest in something, that I can do what I call “good work.”  

When I was 25 years old I was working for Lou, and he had become the most important person in my life as far as my thinking and creative development was concerned. I wanted, perhaps needed, to have a piece of him—his words, his drawings—for myself.

Lou was the hero, the guru of Yale, of Princeton, and certainly of Penn. The students in the top architecture schools in the country were in awe of being in the presence of this struggling, odd force of nature that told the truth. Many academicians tend to shy away from—or rather than shy away from do not embrace—the truth. 

All of the students wanted a piece of Lou. If you worked in his office, you hated that he taught, because that took him out of the office. I had a relationship with him that I couldn’t talk about at the time because of this desire by so many to have a piece of Lou. I had tickets through my father to pro baseball and football games, and Lou loved that stuff. So we went to Franklin Field to see the Eagles when they played there and to Shibe Park to see the Phillies, occasionally with the landscape architect Ian McHarg. My father made Phillies cigars—no connection to the team—but he knew a lot of people in the organization, so he had a box there at the stadium. Lou also sometimes came to my parents’ apartment, and to my apartment, but I couldn’t talk about it.

I had never created a book. I had done a reasonable amount of graphic design but had never been trained to do it. I had a parallel friendship with an experimental printer by the name of Eugene Feldman, and I learned about offset printing from him. A number of people had asked to publish a book on Lou and his work. I didn’t have that ambition. I just wanted the spirit of Lou—I wanted a book of him. 

The students at Yale through their magazine Perspecta had done some marvelous articles on Lou, as had a few other student publications. Progressive Architecture had championed Lou and the Philadelphia School of Architecture, and those included in that group had become emboldened in their work because of Lou’s presence there.

One day I went into his office—his small corner office on 15th and Walnut—and said, “Lou, I’d like to do a book on you,” which was terribly presumptuous on my part. He replied, “Okay, tell me about it.” And I told him, “I just would like to have the best of what you said in some speeches that have been transcribed and some of your drawings.” Without hesitating he said, “Okay, let’s choose the drawings,” and we walked to the back of the main office space, where the long, skinny drawers were that were filled with his drawings on tracing paper (which he called yellow trash) that he was so fond of and he started riffling through them. Then I stopped him: “No, I want to choose them.” “You’re going to choose my drawings?” he said. “That’s the whole idea of it,” I responded. “I choose what I want to have”—once again, that word “indulgence.” 

He thought it was really funny that I would say that, but he went along with it: “Okay, I’ll be interested in what you choose.” In that moment the book was born. 

I didn’t choose what were considered his best, most finished drawings. I don’t remember that I really thought it out carefully, but I chose those that spoke to me—much in the same way that Lou would say you had a conversation with a building. I chose the drawings that spoke to me and told me what they were trying to be. Often they were developmental drawings. Sometime there were several drawings of the same thing, but not necessarily the finished sketch. 

While not academically written or formally polished, what Gene and I put together using Lou’s inspiring words and his brilliant images got something right about how to present his work: in a thin, large-format, linen-covered book, with plenty of breathing room in the interior and gold-stamped trees across the cover. 

It’s hard to remember how I arrived at the cover idea, but my best recollection is that there wasn’t a single building that represented what was in the book, but what did click for me were the trees in Lou’s drawing of the sculpture court at the Yale University Art Gallery. The way he drew them was angular, raw, and harsh, but full of life—contrasting with the gold in which they were stamped (and Lou loved gold leaf). There was no title on the cover, only on the spine.

Lou always referred to this as the first book ever done on him. And he loved it. He loved how it turned out. Just before he left on that fateful last trip he took to India in 1974, he bought two copies at Joe Fox’s bookstore on Sansom Street. (He didn’t pay for them; he said, “Put them on my bill.”) He liked giving away the book. 

Of course there have been many extraordinary books published on Lou since, but at that time, which was near the end of his life, he said it was his favorite book. He even wrote an introduction to the second edition (which was published by MIT Press in 1973) in which he made the observation that I had chosen several drawings of the same building showing not the finished thing but rather the thought process. (His hand-printed introduction will be included in the Reader’s Guide.)

In early 2018, Steve Kroeter called me and we spoke for the first time. We had never met, and he said that he would like to do a reproduction, a facsimile, of the book. I asked “why?” because it has been my policy in the many ensuing years since 1962 to do just a single edition of my books and then let them go out of print. And this book of course had long been out of print. Then Steve mentioned that he would like to include a Reader’s Guide accompanying the book, which would explain the story of how the book came about and provide context. I said I’d call him back and I did, to say yes. What changed my mind from a “no” was the idea of the Reader’s Guide.

The Reader’s Guide is an indulgence of mine of a different kind. I’m not creating it, and I’m not designing it—though perhaps in the wings, I’m making suggestions. But it is amazing stuff: drawings and all kinds of other materials from the grand collections in the Archives at Penn; reflections from people who haven’t commented before; and outtakes of dialogue from the marvelous film My Architect, by Nathaniel Kahn, Lou’s son. 

Perhaps the most important revelation to be found in the Reader’s Guide is the insider’s view of the magical Kahn archives at the University of Pennsylvania, curated by Bill Whitaker. It is a collection of things I’d like to have. So, in many ways I’m much more interested in the new Reader’s Guide than in the facsimile of the original book, since I am fascinated at being behind the curtains and face-to-face with things that I’ve never seen before. 

So indulge yourself observing the creative patterns within Lou’s work. There’s a tango between his words and his drawings—a conversation between crossed out and penciled in words and charcoal drawings that are drawn, smudged out, and re-drawn— that shows the journey to his discovered truths. These are truths he found through his ongoing indulgent embrace with becoming.

He was 59; I was 25; the book was first published in 1962. It was a moment.

Richard Saul Wurman — September 2020

Messages from:

Steve Kroeter, Designers & Books—

"Louis Kahn was a genius, a man of transcendent human superiority. 
. . . He left the world a richer place."

These words appeared in an editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer on March 21, 1974, shortly after Kahn’s death.
Read More

William Whitaker—

Wurman and Feldman’s Notebooks and Drawings of Louis I. Kahn is a big book ­not just by the measure of its folio size ­but by audaciously and courageously getting you into the head of the architect.
Read More