When a Photographer Stumbles upon a Home Designed by Louis Kahn

Shortly after moving to Philadelphia a few years ago, someone tipped me off that there was a Louis Kahn house for sale—the Shapiro House. I hadn’t seen any of Kahn’s houses in person. I heard there was an open house, so I grabbed my camera gear and bolted out there.

I’m not necessarily an architectural photographer. I’ve just grown up with industrial designers and have more of a flair, I guess, in regards to architecture. I’ve been someone who’s on the outside, looking in.

I was somewhat startled to find the house located in a typical ’60s- and ’70s-style neighborhood, full of Brady Bunch–esque homes situated on modest acreage. In fact, I accidentally missed the driveway on the first pass.

That, I realized, is the first quiet genius of the Shapiro House. It can be hard to find, even though it lies in plain sight. The side of the house facing the street appears as a discreet one-story home, concealing the back and sides, which are much more monumental. As you approach, the house gradually reveals itself as a multistory structure that seems to grow out of the land and be a part of it. The driveway is designed with a long, slow curve, giving you a sweeping right-to-left view as you arrive. This has a calming and slightly hypnotic effect.

The front door is mirrored by a floor-to-ceiling window that aligns with another window on the opposite side of the house. This creates the impression of both a literal and metaphorical point of entry. When you enter the building, the stairs lead down, so you’re looking into the space, and when you’re at the bottom of the stairs and look back up, the light shines through the front door, creating this shaft of light on the ground floor. It gives you a sense of awe and wonder, but also of openness and respect.

Just inside the entrance, I was greeted by a real estate agent who immediately launched into a description of the house’s features—how many bedrooms and bathrooms, that sort of thing. She wasn’t exactly sure who had designed it but did mention it was someone special. In her opinion, the kitchen could be opened up to connect more directly with the living room: It felt a bit crowded upon entry, with passages leading off in every direction and the stairwell descending into darkness.

As someone who tends to explore spaces like a flâneur, I found it jarring to be trapped in this awkward foyer space with the realtor. I enjoy experiencing a place uninterrupted at first, then circling back for information, and seeing it again in a new light.

There are feelings, intuitive insights, and a sense of discovery that often get lost when everything is explained up front. Imagination is one of the most incredible aspects of humanity. Yet in our modern age, we default to overexplaining and intellectualizing experiences. This can dull our unconscious understanding of space, form, and our place within it.

The house was completely empty. It wasn’t staged, or it was sparsely staged, pretty much devoid of whoever was living there. It was a time capsule of Kahn’s vision. You kind of wished you could’ve seen how people were actually living there, but it gave you this feeling of being both a monolithic testament to time and history, and also still very functional and warm.

All great buildings and objects, no matter their size or grandeur, can create a feeling of reverence and connection to something larger. The brilliance of Kahn, and of the Shapiro House, lies in its ability to transcend literal design. It creates a livable environment that connects us to something ineffable. Every detail, from the door handles to the materials and their placement, works together to reinforce that feeling.

You can have all the technical knowledge, resources, and skills in the world, but if a structure lacks soul, it’s just another building. The fact that the Shapiro House has remained untouched for so long is a testament to how deeply it meets fundamental human needs.

It’s not easy to put a finger on why good design can affect you positively, but it absolutely can. I always find it crazy how so many people spend so little time thinking about things like the chairs, the lamps. It’s not that things need to be expensive. They just need to be thought out. And when things are thought out, when people go through the same intentionality that Kahn put into the Shapiro House, they elevate the spaces they’re in.

That’s different from a lot of contemporary architecture, which maybe starts off in that direction. Then people simply appease the homeowner’s desires, and you end up with  interiors that don’t necessarily relate to the exterior, or these 10,000-square-foot houses with big connecting corridors.

Some people have all the right objects, but they don’t mean anything; they have no purpose. You can get the USM table and the Louis Poulsen light, but merely having designer objects doesn’t make a space. If it doesn’t have personal objects, historical things, the kid’s hand-scribbled painting stuck up on the wall—the space becomes this nothing. It could be so close and then fail.

There’s a reason why we trust architects and designers to help build our homes. You can’t distill the world into a series of processes. In photography, I often encounter people who think you can. They’re like, “Could you just set up a system that we can use?” And I’m like, “Yeah, but every object photographs differently. I could set up a light, but you have to have the intuition to know when to move that light two inches to the left or right.”

In their system-based mind that our commercial world rewards, there’s this thinking that everything should be: “I could do that. I could make that.” But it’s like, no. There are all these nuances that take so much time and expertise to perfect, and it’s really hard to prove the value in something to those people.

Something that connects great architecture in my mind is when buildings make you want to live in them, and are not simply designed in the pursuit of winning a prize or getting written up in a magazine. The real testament is, What buildings don’t get ripped down? What buildings do people want to stay in and live in for extended periods of time?

You see a lot of buildings that come up and are kind of incredible, especially from a photographic standpoint. But then in a couple of years, people are selling them and making new ones. This Shapiro House was built and there was a sense of not wanting to change anything with this building, wanting to live in it, using the system Kahn built as a guidepost and a way through life.

We have all these technological advances that have given us tools that are supposed to help us, but it’s actually just given us more work and people are in this state of perpetually seeking perfection. That tends to end up in, “How many bedrooms do I have? How many features do we have in the house? Do we have the newest technology in the house? Do we have the best?” I’ve heard that in work I’ve done—clients telling architects that they want the best house, the best things possible. What’s getting lost is, How does the house make you feel?

In our pursuit of technological and commercial progress, we’ve convinced ourselves that everything can be measured and explained. That the world is just a string of ones and zeros, or one thing or the other. In doing so, we’ve traded faith for the illusion of certainty. We assume that if we blindly trust our intellect, we can design a perfect place. However, we often overlook a fundamental truth about our biology: We are wired to be dissatisfied.

As the Zen saying goes, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” Perfection, thinking we know it all, is an illusion. At some point, Kahn must have arrived at this realization. Perhaps the most we can do is create spaces that invite a connection to something greater than ourselves. Perhaps it’s not the answers we seek, but the questions themselves.


This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.