Stephen Kieran (MArch’76) says it’s not very often that he gets invited to speak in Philadelphia, the city where he has lived since the 1970s and built his award-winning architecture practice, Kieran Timberlake. So it was a special occasion when Kieran spoke at the Center for Architecture and Design recently to kick off a two-month series of events celebrating the exhibition Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture, which draws heavily on the holdings of the Architectural Archives at PennDesign and is on display at The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) through November 5.
Entitled “The Meaning Within Materials: Louis Kahn’s Gift to Us,” the talk was framed around Kahn’s famous koan urging young architects to ask the brick what it wants to be. For Kieran, like Kahn, the materials of architecture have an agency all their own, with particular strengths and weaknesses. He said that his work at Kieran Timberlake, including the firm’s research, seeks to foreground the craft of architecture and concerns itself first with materials, systems, and structures.
“Questions that can never be answered with finality are a gift that never ends, and he was the master at it.”
“I often think of T.S. Eliot in this regard,” Kieran said. “When someone once came up to him and said, ‘I’ve got a great idea for a poem,’ he proffered back . . . that poems aren’t made out of ideas, they're made out of words. Architecture’s the same. It's made out of the materials and systems we have to work with.” Showing samples of Kieran Timberlake’s work—from earlier commissions like the University Center at East Stroudsburg University and the Shipley School in Bryn Mawr to more recent designs for the Loblolly House in Maryland and the U.S. embassy in London—Kieran said his approach has been concerned with sustainability, energy performance, materiality, and exploring more efficient construction processes. (The Loblolly House was built in six weeks.) “In the end, we believe that it's through attention to all of these crafts of making that we get to the poetics of architecture,” he said.
Which is not to say that Kieran Timberlake is averse to a sweeping gesture. For its redesign of Dilworth Park in front of City Hall in Philadelphia, Kieran said the work had to celebrate the monumentality of City Hall while creating a welcoming place for people to spend time. The defining feature of the space now is the two transparent, all-glass stairways that rise out of the subway system. The light-filled stairways are meant to celebrate the commuter’s return to the cityscape. And if you trace a circle resting on their arc, the top of City Hall’s tower is located at its center. Kieran Timberlake has worked in materials from glass and concrete to SmartWrap and ETFE. The notion that these materials may have some agency of their own is a mystical one, Kieran said, but its unresolvability has carried him through a life in architecture.
“Our debt to Kahn is multifold,” said Kieran. “Questions that can never be answered with finality are a gift that never ends, and he was the master at it.”
On October 25, PennDesign and The Fabric Workshop and Museum will present a lecture on the exhibition by curator William Whitaker entitled “Uncrating Kahn.” The following Saturday, October 28, PennDesign hosts a two-part panel discussion and film screening examining the life, vision and work of Kahn by those who knew him: Louis I. Kahn: My Teacher, My Friend, My Father, My Architect. For more lectures and events in the Louis Kahn series, visit FWM’s website.
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