Discover

'Louis Isadore Kahn' (born 'Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky') (February 20, 1901 or 1902 – March 17, 1974) was a world-renowned architect based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After working in various capacities for several firms in Philadelphia, he founded his own firm in 1935. While continuing his private practice he served as a design critic and professor of architecture at at Yale University from 1947 to 1957. From 1957 until his death he was a professor of architecture and eventually Dean of the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.

Contents

Life

Legacy

Important works

Timeline of Works

See also

References

Further reading

External links

Life

Louis Kahn, whose original name was Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky (Schmalowski), was born in Kuressaare on the Estonian island of Saaremaa, then part of the Russian Empire. His actual birth year may have been inaccurately recorded when, in 1906, his Jewish family immigrated to the United States, fearing that his father would be recalled into the military during the Russo-Japanese War. Perhaps because of this fear, the family moved seventeen times. He was raised in Philadelphia and became a naturalized citizen on May 15, 1914. His father changed their name in 1915.
He trained in a rigorous Beaux-Arts tradition, with its emphasis on drawing, at the University of Pennsylvania. After completing his Master's degree in 1924, Kahn made a European tour and settled in the medieval walled city of Carcassonne, France, rather than any of the strongholds of classicism or modernism. In 1925 and 1926, the bowtie-sporting Kahn served as Chief Designer for the Sesquicentennial Exposition. Initially working in a fairly orthodox version of the International Style, a stay at the American Academy in Rome in the early 1950s marked a turning point in Kahn's career. The back-to-the-basics approach he adopted after visiting the ruins of ancient buildings in Italy, Greece and Egypt helped him to develop his own style of architecture influenced by earlier modern movements but not limited by their sometimes dogmatic ideologies.
Kahn had three different families with three different women: his wife, Esther; Anne Tyng, a co-worker; and Harriet Pattison. His obituary in the ''New York Times'', written by Paul Goldberger, famously mentions only Esther and his daughter by her as survivors. But in 2003, Kahn's son with Pattison, Nathaniel Kahn, released an Oscar-nominated biographical documentary about his father, titled '', which gives glimpses of the architecture while focusing on talking to the people who knew him: family, friends and colleagues. It includes interviews with renowned architect contemporaries such as B. V. Doshi, Frank Gehry, Philip Johnson, I. M. Pei, and Robert A. M. Stern, but also an insider's view of Kahn's unusual family arrangements. The unusual manner of his death is used as a point of departure and a metaphor for Kahn's "nomadic" life in the film.
He died of a heart attack in a bathroom in Pennsylvania Station in New York City. He was not identified for three days, as he had crossed out the home address on his passport. He had just returned from a work trip to India, and despite his long career, he was deeply in debt at death.

Legacy

Louis Kahn's work infused International style with a fastidious, highly personal taste, a poetry of light. His few projects reflect his deep personal involvement with each. Isamu Noguchi called him "a philosopher among architects." He was known for his ability to create monumental architecture that responded to the human scale. He was also concerned with creating strong formal distinctions between ''served'' spaces and ''servant'' spaces. What he meant by ''servant'' spaces was not spaces for servants, but rather spaces that serve other spaces, such as stairwells, corridors, restrooms, or any other back-of-house function like storage space or mechanical rooms. His palette of materials tended toward heavily textured brick and bare concrete, the textures often reinforced by juxtaposition to highly refined surfaces such as travertine marble.
While widely known for his spaces' poetic sensibilities, Kahn also worked closely with engineers and contractors on his buildings. The results were often technically innovative and highly refined. In 1962 he received a grant from the Graham Foundation to document the structuralist movement in architecture and architectural education. His work was highly influential among 'high tech' architects of the late 20th century (e.g. Renzo Piano, who worked in Kahn's office, and Norman Foster) in addition to those who hewed more closely to his heavier, more monumental style (Tadao Ando, for example).
His prominent apprentices include Moshe Safdie and Robert Venturi.

Important works

★ Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut (1951–1953), the first significant commission of Louis Kahn and his first masterpiece, replete with technical innovations. For example, he designed a hollow concrete tetrahedral space-frame that did away with the need for ductwork and reduced the floor-to-floor height by channeling air through the strucutre itself. Like many of Kahn's buildings, the Art Gallery makes subtle references to its context while overtly rejecting any historical style.

★ Richards Medical Research Laboratories, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, (1957–1965), regarding which Kahn said, “No space you can devise can satisfy these requirements. I thought what they should have was a corner for thought, in a word, a studio instead of slices of space.”

★ Jonas Salk Institute, La Jolla, California, (1959–1965), was to be a campus composed of three main clusters: meeting and conference areas, living quarters, and laboratories. Only the laboratory cluster, consisting of two parallel blocks enclosing a water garden, was actually built. The two laboratory blocks frame an exquisite view of the Pacific Ocean, accentuated by a thin linear fountain that seems to reach for the horizon.

★ Phillips Exeter Academy Library, Exeter, New Hampshire, (1965–1972), awarded the Twenty-Five year award by the American Institute of Architects.

★ Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban (National Assembly Building) in Dhaka, Bangladesh (1962–1974), considered to be his masterpiece and one of the great monuments of International Modernism.

★ Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, (1967–1972), features repeated bays of cycloid-shaped barrel vaults with light slits along the apex, which bath the artwork on display in an ever-changing diffuse light.

★ Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, (1969–1974).

★ Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad in India.

Timeline of Works

All dates refer to the year work commenced

★ 1951 - Yale University Art Gallery

★ 1954 - Trenton Bath House

★ 1957 - Richards Medical Center

★ 1959 - Salk Institute

★ 1959 - Esherick House

★ 1959 - First Unitarian Church of Rochester

★ 1960 - Bryn Mawr College's Erdman Hall Dormitory and Cafeteria

★ 1960 - Norman Fisher House

★ 1961 - Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad

★ 1963 - Institute of Public Administration

★ 1962 - National Assembly Building, Dhaka, Bangladesh

★ 1967 - Phillips Exeter Academy Library

★ 1967 - Kimbell Art Museum

★ 1969 - Yale Center for British Art

See also

★

References

★ Modern Architecture Since 1900, , William, Curtis, Prentice-Hall, , ISBN 013586694

Further reading

★ Louis I.Kahn: Complete Work 1935-1974, , Louis I., Kahn, Birkhauser Verlag AG, , ISBN 3764313471

★ Louis I. Kahn, , Robert, McCarter, Phaidon Press Ltd, , ISBN 0714840459

★ Louis I. Kahn : Beyond Time and Style : A Life in Architecture, , Carter, Wiseman, W.W. Norton, , ISBN 0393731650

External links

★ Friends Of The Trenton Bath House

★ The Trenton Bath House of Louis Kahn

★ A Site About Louis Kahn's Bath House

★ Great Buildings on-line, with links

★ Factsheet

★ Honoring Kahn at his centennial, with photographs

★ Drawings for the Kimbell Art Museum, Beaux-Arts training as applied to Modernism

★ ''My Architect'', biographical movie (IMDb, 2003)

★ The Louis Kahn Archive, University of Pennsylvania

★ Louis I. Kahn biography from Philadelphia Architects and Buildings, including photographs of the architect, project references, and links to collections holding Kahn materials.

★ Space is the place, a personal collection of photographs taken at various Kahn buildings

★ Yale University Art Gallery - Louis I. Kahn building, information from the Yale University Art Gallery on the renovations being done to highlight Kahn's original intentions for the YUAG building.