It's true that when you look at Frank O Gehry, Philip Johnson, IM Pei, one after another, the big names appear, but it's one old man after another. When you look into their wet, cloudy eyes, hear the choked sobs in their throats, and talk about the death of their old man, everyone can feel the stinginess of time. In front of every tall and solid building they erected, the old architects were especially fragile and thin. Imagine that on the other side of the thick red brick wall of the Indian Institute of Management, a few strands of Kahn's white hair were limply shrugging from time to time. Being lifted up by the wind, the birth of the building is like a snake.
They were all young once, if one tried to remember.
Almost all architects have forgotten green years. They only made their first baby cries in the construction industry at the age of fifty, and they died only ten or twenty years ago. Already an old man. Kahn was left with a flabby, pale, round face, and IM Pei's age spots and Philip Johnson's wrinkles said everything about being a master.
We are young, yet so tragically young.
If you look for the shining eyes through the thick black-framed round mirror, you can always find it. As time passed, that light was buried deeper and deeper, but it became stronger and stronger. It's almost divine, you look straight at it and you're going to be shot through the heart.
Kahn always seemed alone, even though he was surrounded by hundreds of students and the lecture was his, he didn't seem to be there. He has never really integrated into any family. He has moved 17 times in the two months he first arrived in the United States. There is no love that can give him a sense of security, and no kind of waiting worthy of his care. He ended up dying in a toilet at the station, and no one knew where he was going.
Imagine Kahn as a silent person, and you can imagine him sitting side by side with his building, like old friends who know each other without too many words. Imagine Kahn as a coward who dared not stop anywhere, he had to build himself a strong fortress, and let the mysterious atmosphere choke people's throats, so to rest his lonely soul.
To this day, all those buildings seem to open their mouths to say something, but froze there dumbfounded. About them, their builders don't say much, "Kahn can be heard in the silence".
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