Louis Kahn, Modernist Architect

• 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

• 1953: Yale University Art Gallery and Design Center, New Haven, CT
• 1955: Trenton Bath House, New Jersey
• 1961: The Margaret Esherick House, Philadelphia, PA
• 1961-1982: Jatiyo Sangsad Bhaban, National Assembly Building, Dhaka, Bangladesh
• 1962: Richards Medical Research Laboratories, University of Pennyslvania
• 1965: Jonas Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA
• 1966-1972: Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX
• 1974: Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut

A young Moshe Safdie apprenticed with Kahn in 1963.

Posthumous Work:

• 2010-2012: FDR Memorial Four Freedoms Park, Roosevelt Island, New York City (Read "The Genius of Louis Kahn's Connected, Contemplative Roosevelt Memorial — and How Builders Avoided the Usual Perils of Posthumous Architecture" by Paul Goldberger, Vanity Fair, October 19 2012.)

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

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].}

• "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."

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.

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