FEBRUARY 2007 » book review

Setback Style

Ely Jacques Kahn, Architect
Beaux-Arts to Modernism in New York
by Jewel Stern and John A. Stuart
W.W. Norton & Company, New York, NY; 2006
288 pp; hardcover, 200 b&w illus.;
8 color pages; $60
ISBN-10 0-393-73114-6;
ISBN-13 978-0-393-73114-9

Reviewed by Nicole V. Gagné

Authors Jewel Stern and John A. Stuart have provided a singular service with their important new book, Ely Jacques Kahn, Architect. Kahn, an overlooked figure in recent decades, is justly depicted by Stern and Stuart as a gifted artist who took traditional European methods of design into the brave new world of 20th-century urban architecture in America. Their book – meticulously researched, cogently written and lavishly illustrated – will not only raise Kahn's reputation to the stature it deserves, but it will also create new respect and enthusiasm for the setback-style office buildings that were his specialty.

Ely Jacques Kahn was born in New York City in 1884 to a Jewish family of mixed French and Austro-German extraction and entered the Columbia University School of Architecture in 1903. Kahn completed the program in less than four years and then studied in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts – an inevitable phase in his education. As he noted many years later: "When we, as young architects, thought of our future, it was automatic that, no matter what the problems, financial or otherwise, Paris was our goal and study at the École des Beaux-Arts practically required."

Scores of American architects studied at this prestigious school between its founding in 1871 and the start of World War I. But along with his lessons at the École, Kahn was also exposed to other, more radical aesthetic innovations of early- 20th-century Paris. A special eye-opener for Kahn came from the American writer Gertrude Stein, no lover of the Beaux-Arts system, who chided the young architect at their first encounter. Kahn later described how she had spoken of him and his peers as "young old fogies who assembled bits of ancient architecture [...] I didn't like the jolt at the time but had the sense to realize that she had put her finger on a rather sensitive spot. American architecture at that precise moment and later, unfortunately, was still rummaging about the attic for satisfactory remnants that could carry on, desperately and in a losing fight, a false tradition of the Renaissance that was as foreign to us, actually, as Chinese ornament."

These issues became increasingly important for Kahn once he returned to the States in 1911. He became a partner in the Manhattan firm Buchman & Kahn in 1917, when building design in New York City underwent a profound shift. Unrestricted commercial development in lower Manhattan had created extreme congestion and was depriving the area's narrow streets of sufficient light and air. By 1916 a new zoning restriction had been instituted, dividing the city into residential, business and unrestricted districts, and controlling the height, bulk and area that a building could occupy on a lot.

Commercial lots fell mostly into what were known as "one and a half times" or "two times" zones, in which the maximum building height available was either 150 or 200 percent of the width of the street. Greater height was made available through the use of setbacks: For every foot that the building was set back from the street, it could rise an additional four feet in height. A building's tower could obtain an unrestricted height, provided it used no more than 25 percent of the area of its plot.

For Kahn, the setback style was no setback at all: "[A] new style of architecture is being created that is so characteristic of New York that it would be more logical, by far, to call it a New York Style," Kahn wrote in 1926. "The New York laws protecting property rights, light, and air have encouraged a new art by reason of the very restrictions they contain. [...] The fact that the zoning law performed its artistic feat without premeditation is merely one of the curious tricks of fate that makes the new style doubly fascinating." Between 1919 and 1931, Kahn's firm designed more than 40 major buildings throughout Manhattan, thanks to the city's building boom in the 1920s. His stylish, handsome, thoroughly modern setback skyscrapers came to typify the New York skyline (and inspired the futuristic city of Fritz Lang's silent masterpiece Metropolis). By the end of the '20s Kahn was producing such major designs as the Bricken Textile Building and the Squibb Building, simplifying their exteriors but grandly designing their majestic entrances and lobbies, down to the ornate elevator doors, radiator grilles and mailboxes.

Buchman & Kahn became The Firm of Ely Jacques Kahn in 1930, but the Great Depression was a death blow to New York's building boom, and work for Kahn slowed in the '30s. In 1940 he made Robert Allan Jacobs a partner, forming Kahn & Jacobs. During the war years, Kahn was also president of New York's Municipal Art Society, advising on the city's defenses, encouraging the construction of middle-class housing, and trying to rein the developments proposed by Robert Moses. Although identified with the setback style, Kahn also played an important role in the quintessential International Style Modernist skyscraper, the Seagram Building, as the associate architect to Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson. This and other sheer, lofty boxes of glass and steel avoided the setback restrictions by creating ground-level plazas, arcades and malls that were open to the public. This wasn't really Kahn's cup of tea, and he retired from Kahn & Jacobs in 1965 at the age of 81.

Today, more than 50 Kahn-designed buildings continue to thrive in New York City – an impressive record in a city obsessed with change. Kahn's vision continues to represent not just New York City but American urban architecture of the first half of the 20th century, and his legacy seems all the more impressive and beautiful with this first-class tribute written by Stern and Stuart. TB

«BACK TO FEBRUARY 2007 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Have something to say about this article? Feel free to comment!

Comments feed