The spartan pool building that Kahn created for the Trenton Jewish Community Center isn't the sort of architecture you fall in love with at first sight. It's too plain and too cerebral, especially in an age when judgments are often made from photographic eye candy. The Trenton Bath House is a building that hides its wisdom in cool, shadowy corners, and is best experienced in person.
Soon, more people will have the opportunity to see it for themselves. Mercer County is wrapping up a painstaking $2.1 million restoration, the kind of preservation effort normally reserved for colonial-era cabins and majestic estate houses.
When its architects, Farewell Mills Gatsch, complete their work this summer, the Trenton Bath House, which is actually located just over the city line in Ewing Township, N.J., should look as pristine as the day it opened - maybe better. Of course, that doesn't guarantee people will ever warm to the solid concrete block walls.
You never know. Kahn's work began to come back in favor in the 1990s, and his reputation experienced a big bump after the documentary My Architect by his son, Nathaniel Kahn, was released in 2003. While the Philadelphia architect didn't complete a huge body of work during his career, ended by a fatal heart attack at age 73 in 1974, his major buildings have, one by one, been rediscovered and restored.
Now it is the turn of the Trenton Bath House, which is where architecture really began for Kahn, says Susan G. Solomon, a historian who has written extensively about the project. He was almost 50, and had just started his own firm, when he was hired by the Jewish group to design a day camp in suburbanizing Ewing Township. Even though he later lost the commission, the bath house - a rather grand name for the pool's dressing rooms - "was where he found himself as an architect," Solomon believes.
