LOUIS KAHN
Louis Isadore Kahn was born in Estonia in 1901, in 1906 he immigrated to the United States with his family, where they settled in Philadelphia. First training in the Beaux-Arts tradition at the University of Pennsylvania, Kahn then went on to work at a number of architecture firms in Philadelphia before founding his own office in 1935. During this time, Kahn was heavily influenced by the International Style, working largely on public housing projects around Philadelphia.
Kahn's philosophy of architecture emerged in the early 1950s, following a year spent as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, during which he traveled in Italy, Greece, and Egypt. His design for the Yale University Art Gallery, completed in 1953 is celebrated as his early masterpiece, notable for its tetrahedral ceiling, cylindrical staircase, and innovations with geometry and light.
Often realized in glass, brick, and concrete, Kahn’s style of monumental, monolithic, sometimes brutalist architecture is both formal and elegant, divided between “served” and “servant” spaces—like stairwells, corridors, and restrooms. Kahn embraced the poetics of modern architecture and material tectonics. Across many of his works, he experimented with simple shapes at grand scale. By many, he is regarded as an expert at interweaving modernist gestures with principles he observed in ancient monuments and temples.
Kahn’s work spanned the globe. In addition to the gallery, he is known for designs his designs of the Richards Laboratories, the Jonas Salk Institute, the Kimbell Art Museum, the Yale Center for British Art and the Exeter Library, all in the US, as well as the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, India, and the Sher-e-Bangla naga capitol complex in Bangladesh.
Both a professor and a practitioner, Kahn taught at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Princeton University School of Architecture over the course of his career. In addition to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Kahn received numerous awards, including the AIA Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects, the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement, both in 1971, and the Royal Gold Medal, in 1972, from the Royal Institute of British Architects. He died in 1971.
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