Louis I. Kahn
Louis I. Kahn was a prominent architect born on February 20, 1901, in Estonia, then part of the Russian Empire. He immigrated to the United States with his family as a child, where he developed a passion for art and architecture. Kahn studied at the University of Pennsylvania, influenced by the Beaux-Arts style, which emphasized symmetry and mass. His early career was shaped by the challenges of the Great Depression, leading him to design urban housing projects and later work on significant architectural commissions. Kahn's innovative style evolved to integrate modernism with monumental forms inspired by ancient architecture, emphasizing the use of materials like precast concrete and brick. His notable works include the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Kimbell Art Museum, each highlighting his sensitivity to light and space. Kahn's legacy lies in his ability to merge architectural form with human values, redefining modern architecture’s role in society. He passed away in 1974, leaving behind a profound impact on the field of architecture.
Subject Terms
Louis I. Kahn
- Born: February 20, 1901
- Birthplace: Pernau, Estonia, Russian Empire (now Pärnu, Estonia)
- Died: March 17, 1974
- Place of death: New York, New York
Estonian-born architect and educator
Kahn was a renowned architect in the school of international modernism who developed a personal style of monumental architecture distinctive for its innovative form and its advanced use of space, materials, and light.
Areas of achievement: Architecture and design; education
Early Life
Louis I. Kahn was born in Estonia, then part of the Russian Empire, on February 20, 1901. His Estonian father, Leopold, and his Latvian mother, Bertha, were Jewish. Kahn’s father immigrated to the United States in 1904 and settled in Philadelphia in 1905; the following year Kahn’s mother joined him, with Kahn and his two siblings.
His father, a skilled designer and stained-glass craftsman, found little work, and the family survived on his mother’s labor in the woolen industry. Although poor and often keeping a disorderly household, Bertha kept alive some of the German and Yiddish traditions of Europe; the family was Jewish but not strictly Orthodox.
Kahn’s lower face was scarred from burning coals he was carrying; scarlet fever gave his voice a high pitch and kept him from entering school on schedule. In grammar school he excelled in drawing, painting, and sculpture, and he was admitted to the selective Central High School. He took free drawing classes on Saturday and won citywide prizes. In addition, Kahn was a talented pianist. He turned down a music scholarship to concentrate on art.
A class in architecture prompted him to enroll at the University of Pennsylvania in 1920 to study architecture. There the Frenchman Paul Cret taught the principles of Beaux-Arts architecture. Kahn internalized from the Beaux-Arts style an emphasis on the form appropriate for a building: symmetry and a masonry architecture of weight and mass with clearly organized spaces created by structural solids. After graduation in 1924, Kahn worked for the city architect of Philadelphia, and he was chosen design chief for the city’s celebration in 1926 of the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
After a trip to Europe in 1928 and 1929, Kahn worked in Cret’s office, and Kahn married Esther Israeli in 1930. In Europe, in Cret’s office, and in the architectural community of Philadelphia, Kahn encountered the International Style of modern architecture, which was superseding Beaux-Arts. International Style modernism emphasized boxlike structures with thin skins, abstract forms, and open fluid spaces not defined by the structural steel skeleton. Kahn’s life’s work was to find a place within modernism.
Life’s Work
With no work for architects and engineers during the Great Depression, Kahn became an organizer of the Architectural Research Group from 1932 to 1934. Its concern for architecture’s social responsibility found expression in designing Depression-era urban housing projects. From friends in the Jewish community he obtained a commission for a synagogue for the Ahavath Israel congregation.
In 1935, he started a practice with Alfred Kastner, and they became involved in projects that incorporated new building technologies (such as slab roofs) with modernism to meet the needs of American housing. In 1941, Kahn formed a partnership with George Howe and later Oskar Stonorov, again working on war-effort public housing projects as well as on private homes. The best known is the Mill Creek project in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
In the mid-1940’s Kahn developed his idea that architecture should embody the values and needs of human institutions. Modern architecture must achieve “monumentality”: a spirituality inherent in a building that conveys a sense of eternity, with the greatness found in the monumental buildings of the past. The basic ribs, vaults, and domes of ancient buildings should enclose larger and simpler spaces and be made modern by application of new technologies. Kahn abandoned steel construction and thereafter designed in precast, bare concrete and textured brick.
Kahn began his teaching career as a visiting critic at Yale University in 1947, a position continued as a senior critic from 1950 to 1957. During a fellowship to the American Academy in Rome in 1950 and 1951, he traveled through Italy, Greece, and Egypt, where he was impressed by the elemental forms of masonry, stone, and columns and the play of light on the materials that he saw in ancient architecture.
In 1951, he received the first important commission of his career, the Yale University Art Gallery, which established his international reputation. The urban building featured ordered geometry and exposed structures.
Kahn’s first major project was the Richards Medical Research Laboratories at the University of Pennsylvania, which features several of Kahn’s principal architectural ideas. His creation of differentiated space, shaped by a rational structure, contrasted to the spatial continuity characteristic of modernism. His idea of “served spaces” and “servant spaces” was achieved by a scheme of towers containing large, undivided spaces for laboratories (served spaces) grouped around a servant tower containing mechanical equipment, stairwells, restrooms, storage, and service rooms.
The towers are created from a precast concrete frame with joints openly exposed that reveal the structural forms. The frame is filled in with brick and windows. Kahn’s integration of site, space, and function with construction and materials pointed a way to reinvigorate architecture in the 1960’s.
Kahn’s next major U.S. project was the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences in La Jolla, California. Kahn designed two long blocks containing study and laboratory spaces facing a long courtyard. The vast courtyard opens toward the Pacific Ocean. Dominant in the institute are the sensations of light and silence. In 1957, Kahn became a professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, a post he held until his death in 1974.
His later major works include two projects in south Asia: the Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad, India, and the new capital at Dhaka, Bangladesh. The latter expressed the function and spirit of assembly by incorporating the idea of the mosque. These two projects, well conceived for the sites, recall the monumental, archaic forms of ancient architecture.
Two further major projects in the United States were museums: the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and the Yale Center for British Art. The Kimbell museum, sited in the middle of a large park, is remarkable for its interior space and light. The public areas are covered by long concrete vaults resting on widely separated columns. Light enters from the top of the vaults and is reflected by diffusers, creating vast light-filled areas for the display of art.
At the end of his life, Kahn received numerous prestigious awards from chapters of the American Institute of Architects (1969, 1970), the national American Institute of Architects (1970), the Royal Institute of British Architects (1971), and the city of Philadelphia (1971), among others.
Kahn died of a heart attack at Pennsylvania Station in New York City in 1974, while returning from a trip to India. His last project, the controversial Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, remains unbuilt.
Significance
Kahn’s career passed through the Beaux-Arts tradition and dominant International Style to his personal, innovative style noted for its monumental and spiritual handling of form, materials, and light. He reconnected modern architecture with the fundamentals of historical buildings and revitalized the archaic forms and materials of architecture. His buildings are expressive forms embodying a meaningful order of structure, mass, and light.
Kahn’s ideas about architecture verged on neo-Platonism, meditating on the interplay of form, design, order, space, silence, and light. He saw architecture as the meeting of the measurable (light) and the unmeasurable (silence). Material, for Kahn, was spent light. Kahn restored moral importance to architecture and redirected modernism to serve the essence of human institutions.
Bibliography
Brownlee, David B., and David G. De Long. Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture. New York: Rizzoli, 1991. Illustrated catalog of Kahn’s buildings, with introductory essays on aspects of his buildings and ideas.
Scully, Vincent, Jr. Louis I. Kahn. New York: George Braziller, 1962. A concise, midcareer summary of Kahn’s building projects and ideas about architecture.
Tyng, Alexandra. Beginnings: Louis I. Kahn’s Philosophy of Architecture. New York: John Wiley, 1984. Long biographic essay and extensive discussion of Kahn’s architectural ideas.
Wurman, Richard S. What Will Be Has Always Been: The Words of Louis I. Kahn. New York: Access Press, 1986. Collection of Kahn’s writings about architecture.