Anthony Stoeckert

LOUIS I. Kahn was a revered architect whose groundbreaking works included the Trenton Bath House in Ewing, and whose complicated personal life was explored in an Oscar-nominated documentary directed by his son. But it’s an unfinished project of Mr. Kahn’s that is the subject of Susan Solomon’s newest book.

   In Louis I. Kahn’s Jewish Architecture: Mikveh Israel and the Midcentury American Synagogue (Brandeis University Press, 2009), Ms. Solomon examines Mr. Kahn’s unrealized plans for Philadelphia’s Mikveh Israel synagogue and makes the case that Kahn’s ideas about light, nature and decoration influenced the post-war synagogue in ways that are still felt today. The author will discuss her book at Labyrinth Books in Princeton Oct. 27.

   Ms. Solomon wrote a dissertation on Mr. Kahn in 1997 as “an elderly graduate student” (her words). Mikveh Israel was one of Mr. Kahn’s “many unexecuted projects” she studied.

   The architect received a commission to design a synagogue for Mikveh Israel, which was the oldest Sephardic Orthodox congregation in the U.S., in 1961. A lack of funds kept the project from completion. Mr. Israel died in 1974 after suffering a heart attack in a rest room in Penn Station. He was in debt at the time and had three families with three different women. That story is told in the 2003 documentary My Architect by Mr. Kahn’s son, Nathaniel. Ms. Solomon’s writings focus on the architect’s work.

   ”I thought the Mikveh Israel stuff was special and deserved some attention,” she says. “And then I tried to (look at it) in the context of why it was different from everything else that was going on at the same time, which was suburbanization and big space and enormous sanctuaries that opened up into even larger special halls and created a single space.”

   For the project, Ms. Solomon says, Mr. Kahn had to balance the preservation of one of America’s oldest synagogues with modernism and the role of Jewish Americans post World War II.

   ”I think that’s very much what those suburban synagogues were about,” she says. Following the war, areas of society that were closed to Jews were suddenly open, including where they could live. Building synagogues in suburbia, she says, marked the coming of age of Jews outside of urban areas. They were also “a way of saying, ‘We’re here, we’re part of America.’”

   That marked a drastic change from the early 20th century when Jewish immigrants were focused on how to “become American.”

   ”The synagogues they built after World War II are also about being American but also saying, ‘We’re now part of this society, we don’t have to find ways to become American, we are American,’” Ms. Solomon says.

   In seeking modern synagogues that are influenced by Mr. Kahn, Ms. Solomon says one of her favorites is San Francisco’s Beth Shalom, a 2008 building designed by Stanley Saitowitz, a South African-born architect who has taught in the Bay Area for more than 30 years.

   ”I thought I saw a real connection between his work and Kahn’s. And it was very funny because it’s hard to ask an architect outright, ‘So were you looking at Kahn?’” she says.

   When she finally did ask Mr. Saitowtiz that question, his answer was a definite yes.

   ”He said, ‘Of course, everybody I trained with in South Africa was (influenced) by Kahn at Penn,’” she says. “So it was really nice for him to acknowledge that connection. And it’s a very powerful building, particularly because he uses light the way Kahn used light.”

   Ms. Solomon says many people have written about Mr. Kahn’s light representing Jewish mysticism. It’s a theory she quickly dismisses. “He was a realist, he was an idealist in a lot of ways but he certainly wasn’t a mystic,” she says.

   Rather than being mystic, she says the light represents a spiritual and comforting experience. It also provides synagogues with an identity that opposes stained glass or tapestries.

   In the book, Ms. Solomon writes that light was nature for Mr. Kahn, and that he sought a way to bring natural light into a building while avoiding glare. She adds that natural light was a defining element for Kahn’s buildings and quotes words he wrote in 1959:

   ”If architecture can be defined in a sentence it might be defined as a thoughtful way of making spaces. And if one thinks of the space as being architectural I think one must think of it as being in natural light, never in artificial light because the way that you make the space should be evident in the space itself.”

   As opposed to Catholic churches where everything is designed to represent the sacred, she says there’s little that is intrinsically sacred about the space in a synagogue. “It’s really about the community, people, that’s much more important than the actual space,” she says. “I think that’s something Kahn also grasped.”

Louis Kahn’s Jewish Architecture: Mikveh Israel and the Midcentury American Synagogue author Susan Solomon will discuss her book at Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau St., Princeton, Oct. 27, 5:30 p.m. Admission is free; 609-497-1600.