page_title: August Komendant
section_title: Richards Medical Research Laboratories
hierarchical_section_title: August Komendant / Collaboration with Louis Kahn / Richards Medical Research Laboratories
caption_attribution_description: English: Entrance porch at Richards Labs. This is from the northeast, but there is a matching entrance that would give "the same photo" from the northwest.
context_page_description: August Eduard Komendant was an Estonian and American structural engineer and a pioneer in the field of prestressed concrete, which can be used to build stronger and more graceful structures than normal concrete. He was born in Estonia and educated in engineering in Germany. After World War II he immigrated to the United States, where he wrote several books on structural engineering and served as a professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.
  Komendant worked with architect Louis Kahn in a productive but contentious collaboration that lasted from 1956 until Kahn's death in 1974. His innovative work as Kahn's structural engineer helped Kahn create several architecturally significant buildings, including two that won the prestigious Twenty-five Year Award given by the American Institute of Architects. He also served as structural engineer for architect Moshe Safdie on the Habitat 67 project in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
context_section_description: For the eight-story Richards Medical Research Laboratories (1957–1965) in Philadelphia, PA, Komendant engineered the structure of pre-cast and pre-stressed concrete columns, beams and trusses that were trucked in from a factory and fitted together with a crane.  Hydraulic tension was then applied to internal post-tensioning cables running in all three dimensions, locking the structural elements into place something like a child's toy that is floppy until its parts are pulled together tightly with a string.  There were a total of 1019 of these structural elements, and for the post-tensioning to be effective, they had to be precisely dimensioned and perfectly formed.  Komendant worked closely with the manufacturer to ensure that outcome, with the result that the largest offset between any two elements in the finished structure was only ¹⁄₁₆ inch (1.6 mm).
  In line with his belief that structure should be made visible, Kahn exposed these structural elements on the building's exterior and in the laboratory ceilings.  He also left the ceiling of the entry porch open so the public could inspect the structure there, including the Vierendeel trusses that Komendant engineered to support each floor.  Looking something like ladders turned on their sides, these trusses have large, rectangular openings that make it easy to thread pipes and ductwork into the laboratories.
  Despite significant shortcomings from the viewpoint of the scientists who worked there, the building won international acclaim not only for its architecture but also for its innovative building techniques.
  In 1961 the Museum of Modern Art sponsored an exhibition devoted exclusively to this building, describing it in a brochure as "probably the single most consequential building constructed in the United States since the war".
  Architectural historian Vincent Scully said the pioneering work by Kahn and Komendant on this project "was to affect for good the techniques of the whole concrete pre-casting industry from the factory to the site."
  The Architectural Record noted at the time that the precision achieved was "more typical of fine cabinetwork than of concrete construction."
caption: Entry porch at Richards Medical Research Laboratories.  The ceiling exposes concrete structural elements that are bound together with internal cables to form Vierendeel trusses.
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