Preserving Kahn’s Bath House
Architects work to save the Trenton Jewish Community Center Bath House

by Meredith Arms Bzdak
Farewell Mills Gatsch Architects LLC

Summary: The Jewish Community Center of the Delaware Valley retained Farewell Mills Gatsch Architect LLC, to complete a preservation plan for Louis Kahn’s Bath House and Pavilions upon receiving a grant from the New Jersey Historic Trust in the spring of 2001. In completing the preservation plan, Farewell Mills Gatsch documented the historic development of the site to ensure that future preservation efforts would regain the historic significance of the structures and appropriately restore the materials used in their construction. In addition to assessing the structural and architectural conditions of the buildings, the team evaluated the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems for repair or replacement.

In July 1954, the Trenton Jewish Community Center (JCC) selected Philadelphia architect Louis I. Kahn to design its new facility. The commission represented Kahn’s largest and most complex project to date and immediately followed his successful completion of the design for a new Jewish Community Center in New Haven. Although the original plan included a community center as well as a bath house, pool, and outdoor pavilions, a range of issues led to the construction of only Kahn’s Bath House and Pavilions. The firm of Kelly & Gruzen completed the community center building several years later.

Turning point for Kahn
The Bath House, in particular, is widely regarded as a turning point in Kahn’s career and the first realization of his concept of “servant” and “served” spaces, which he further developed in the Richards Medical Center at the University of Pennsylvania, the Salk Institute, and the Kimbell Art Museum. Influenced by his 1950–51 stay at the American Academy in Rome and travel to Egypt and Greece, Kahn sought to demonstrate in this and the projects that followed, that architecture could simultaneously be Modern and classically monumental.

The Bath House was listed on the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places in 1984, and an architectural history of the commission was published in 2000 by author Susan Solomon.

Few changes have been made to the Bath House since its completion in the mid-1950s, although it has suffered from exposure to the elements and deferred maintenance that has been magnified by the openness of the structure and fragility of the original fabric.

The preservation issues associated with the Bath House were essentially divided into three categories:

• Removal of elements not intended by Kahn, but added after building completion (including the snack bar, storage shed, and fencing)
• Restoration of elements intended by Kahn but removed after building completion (including the entrance mural and gravel “forecourt”)
• Completion of elements intended by Kahn but never carried out (including roof drainage and extensive landscaping).

The future of the Bath House
Several years passed as the JCC considered relocation and sale of their Ewing property. Finally, in 2006, the property, which included the Kahn Bath House and Pavilions, was conveyed from the Jewish Community Center to the County of Mercer, and then, with preservation easements, to Ewing Township. The ultimate goal of the county and the township is the repair and restoration of the structures for ongoing use as a community center and pool, and to that end they are working with Farewell Mills Gatsch and their consultants, Heritage Landscapes and The RBA Group, to return these locally and internationally significant historic resources to their intended use and original appearance while simultaneously improving the weatherability of the structures and facilitating their future maintenance.