Orthodox church plans and Louis Kahn's idiom

Louis Kahn once said, that while the world discovered him via his Richards Medical Building in Philadelphia, he discovered himself with a bathhouse he designed in Trenton in 1955. It may be one of Kahn’s most modest works, but the Trenton Bathhouse prefigures an obsession with polygonal plan forms and squares in Kahn’s mature work. What does Kahn mean when he says he discovered himself with this building? He undoubtedly discovered a way of doing subsequent buildings, a way that may in turn have led to a quasi-platonic language. However, he claims to have discovered himself in Trenton, in a way that alludes to something innate. The paper examines previous explanations for Kahn’s obsession with polygonal plan forms, and finds they cannot be fully reconciled with his oeuvre, or his remarks about the bathhouse in Trenton. His exposure to Wittkower, via Rowe, was too late to have been causative. Esoteric sources, such as diagrams associated with Jewish Kabbalah, account for some works, but not polygons generally. Paintings by Kahn of ruins in Europe explain load-bearing masonry, but say nothing about his planning. Neither do explanations which point to Kahn’s Beaux-Arts training explain why so many of his buildings should be characterised by radial symmetry, as opposed to the biaxial symmetry preferred by Kahn’s teacher Paul Cret. The paper offers an alternative explanation, that the Greek cross plan form in Trenton is a reference to Kahn’s Eastern European ancestry. It is argued that Kahn turned to his cultural background as a way of stamping his work, and thus differentiating himself from his contemporaries. While there is no more evidence to support this hypothesis than there is to support those offered by previous scholars, it better tallies with the dates of Kahn’s buildings and the central claims he directed toward them.