1. Home & Garden
About.com
Architecture

Discuss in my forum

Louis Kahn, Modernist Architect

By , About.com Guide

See More About:
Louis Kahn, architect

Yale Center for British Art, Louis Kahn, architect

Photo © Jackie Craven
Louis I. Kahn competed only a few buildings, yet he is widely considered one of the great architects of the twentieth century.

Born:

February 20, 1901 or 1902 in Kuressaare, in Estonia, on Saaremmaa Island

Died:

March 17, 1974 in New York, N.Y.

Name at Birth:

Born Itze-Leib (or, Leiser-Itze) Schmuilowsky (or, Schmalowski). Kahn's Jewish parents immigrated to the United States in 1906. His name was changed to Louis Isadore Kahn in 1915.

Early Training of Louis I. Kahn:

  • University of Pennsylvania, Bachelor of Architecture, 1924
  • Worked as a senior draftsman in the office of Philadelphia City Architect John Molitor.
  • Traveled through Europe visiting castles and medieval strongholds, 1928

Important Buildings by Louis I. Kahn:

Major Awards :

  • 1971: AIA Gold Medal. Elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
  • 1972: RIBA Gold Medal in 1972.

Private Life of Louis I. Kahn:

Louis I. Kahn grew up in Philadelphia, the son of poor immigrant parents. As a young man, Kahn struggled to build his career during the height of America's Depression. Kahn established three families that lived only a few miles apart.

Louis I. Kahn died of a heart attack in a men's restroom in Pennsylvania Station in New York City. He was deep in debt and his body was not identified for three days.

Louis I. Kahn's troubled life is explored in My Architect, a 2003 documentary film by his son, Nathaniel Kahn. Louis Kahn had three children with three different women:
•  Sue Ann Kahn, daughter with his wife, Esther Israeli Kahn
•  Alexandra Tyng, daughter with Anne Griswold Tyng, associate architect at Kahn's firm
•  Nathaniel Kahn, son with Harriet Pattison, landscape architect

Note: For more information about Kahn's children, see "Journey to Estonia" by Samuel Hughes, The Pennsylvania Gazette, Digital Edition, Jan / Feb 2007 [accessed January 19, 2012].

Quotes by Louis I. Kahn:

  • "Architecture is the reaching out for the truth."
  • "Consider the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted and the column became."
  • "Design is not making beauty, beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love."
  • "A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable."

About Louis I. Kahn:

During his training at the Pennsylvania School of Fine Arts, Louis I. Kahn was grounded in the Q Beaux Arts approach to architectural design. As a young man, Kahn became fascinated with the heavy, massive architecture of medieval Europe and Great Britain. But, struggling to build his career during the Depression, Kahn became known as a champion of Functionalism.

Louis Kahn built on ideas from the Bauhaus Movement and the International Style to design low-income public housing. Using simple materials like brick and concrete, Kahn arranged building elements to maximize daylight.

The commissions that Kahn received from Yale gave him the chance to explore ideas he'd admired in ancient and medieval architecture. He used simple forms to create monumental shapes. Kahn was in his 50s before he designed the works that made him famous. Many critics praise Kahn for moving beyond the International Style to express original ideas.

©2012 About.com. All rights reserved.

A part of The New York Times Company.