Editor’s Note: The following is a letter to the editor submitted by Bill Fugate, of Rochester, New York in response to a recent featured by George Payne, a contributor to FingerLakes1.com. You can read the original piece that inspired this letter by clicking here.
George Payne’s recent article “Concrete Faith: The Brutalist Vision of Rochester’s First Unitarian Church” does a great job of generating awareness about this region’s architectural gem, which was designed by Louis Kahn, one of the world’s great architects. Paul Goldberger, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning architectural critic for the New York Times, described it in 1982 as “one of the greatest religious structures of the century.” Cynthia Howk, the head of the Landmark Society of Western New York, described it as is “the only building of international architectural significance in the Rochester area.” It is not as well known locally as it should be, but it does receive a steady stream of visitors from all over the globe. This October, for example, it was visited by a dozen architecture students from TEC Monterrey, a large university in Mexico.
As the historian at First Unitarian, I am grateful for the increased recognition that the article brings to the building. I must respectfully disagree, however, with the article’s title, which describes First Unitarian as a “brutalist” building. I have more than a dozen books about Kahn on my bookshelf, and they do not describe his work with that label. David Brownlee and David De Long’s book on Kahn barely mentions brutalism, referring (page 52) to, “… New Brutalism, a briefly fashionable term that captured only a single dimension of Kahn’s purpose.” Wendy Lesser’s book on Kahn approvingly quotes (page 341) another architect who said, “You could not put his work under any style, like International or Brutalist or Postmodern. His work was Kahn.” Robert McCarter’s massive work on Kahn doesn’t even mention the word “brutalism.”
“Brutalism” comes from the French “beton brut,” which means “raw concrete.” It is true that Kahn’s buildings typically feature exposed concrete and massive shapes, which are characteristic of brutalist architecture in general, but it is a question of what you do with exposed concrete and massive shapes. According to Vincent Scully, an architectural historian, Kahn was “opposed to what he regarded as the muscular posturing of most Brutalism,” referring to the sometimes harsh and intimidating atmosphere of many of the brutalist buildings.
Payne’s article leans heavily on Brady Corbet’s acclaimed Brutalism. Corbet has said that the film’s main character is based on a combination of several modern Jewish architects, including Kahn, and it is certainly true that some of those architects created buildings that can be classified as brutalist. I hope Corbet wasn’t implying that his film would be a good introduction to Kahn’s life and work, though, because it just isn’t. The fictional architect in the film had a successful career in Hungary prior to World War II but ended up as a traumatized Holocaust survivor who immigrated to the U.S. in 1947 with no easy way to rebuild his career. Kahn, by contrast, was brought to this country as a young child by his parents, who immigrated in 1906. He had a relatively happy life, developed his career here slowly and steadily, and died at the height of his career.
Far from being traumatized, Kahn talked about joy. In a lecture at the Pratt Institute, Kahn said, “I think joy is the key word in our work. It must be felt. If you don’t feel joy in what you’re doing, then you are not really operating.” Kahn spoke of joy in almost religious terms, saying, “And I began to realize that joy itself must have been the impelling force that was there before we were there. That somehow joy was in every ingredient of our making. That which was the ooze, you see, without any kind of shape or direction. There must have been this force of joy, which prevailed everywhere within the context, that was reaching out to express.”
All great works of architecture reflect the personality of the architect to some degree. Unlike the fictional architect in the film, however, who designed his first building in the U.S. to express his own trauma with Nazi death camps, Kahn worked to meet the deepest needs of the congregation when he designed First Unitarian. When the church’s search committee recommended Kahn to be the building’s architect, they assured the congregation that he was a “natural Unitarian” who could construct an appropriate building. August Komendant, Kahn’s structural engineer, wrote in his memoir that Kahn studied Unitarianism thoroughly during the design process and had many long conversations with our minister about the religion. The congregation grew rapidly after moving into Kahn’s building, an indication that he did his work well.
Komendant wrote that at the building’s dedication, Kahn “described the cathedrals, whose size and height was intended to show God’s greatness and might and man’s lowness, so that men would be frightened and obey His laws. For this church he used atmosphere and beauty to create respect and understanding for God’s aims, kindness, and forgiveness.”
Kahn said a church’s atmosphere should be based on “Silence and Light,” which became the title of one of his essays. Kahn used silence to refer to the fundamental urge to create, which he considered to be the essence of life itself. Life-supporting sunlight, in Kahn’s philosophy, gives silence the ability to act. The atmosphere that Kahn worked to create at First Unitarian, then, is a combination of what he called silence, which is the urge to create, and light, which powers that urge.
For me, the atmosphere in First Unitarian’s sanctuary expresses both serenity and energy, and it creates a feeling of open-ended possibilities. That is entirely appropriate for a religion that honors the wisdom of faith traditions around the world while not requiring adherence to any creedal belief at all.
Information about church tours can be found on the architecture page of First Unitarian’s website at https://rochesterunitarian.org/landmark-site/.
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