Louis Kahn (1901 – 1974)
Kuressaare, Estonia.
Louis I. Kahn competed only a few buildings, yet he is widely considered one of the great architects of the twentieth century.
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. Louis I. Kahn grew up in Philadelphia. As a young man, he struggled to build his career during the height of America’s Depression. Kahn established three families that lived only a few miles apart.
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.
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 illegitimate son, Nathaniel Kahn.
Quotes:
“Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.”
“Design is not making beauty, beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love.”
Distinguished work:
1965: Jonas Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA
1962: National Assembly Building, Dhaka, Bangladesh
1966: Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX
1974: Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut
