Louis Kahn

One of the most influential architects of the mid-20th century, Louis Kahn (1901-1974) realised relatively few buildings, yet the formal restraint and emotional expressiveness of his Jonas Salk Institute, Kimbell Art Museum and the Capital Complex in Dhaka are regarded as an inspired progression from the International Style.
When Louis Kahn’s corpse was found by the NYPD on the evening of 17March 1974 in the public lavatory at Penn Station in New York, it took several days for the police to identify him as one of the world’s most admired architects. Kahn had died swiftly of a heart attack and the only form of identification among his possessions was his passport in which he had crossed out his address.
On the evening of his death, Kahn had flown back to the US from India where he wasbuilding the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. He had gone to Penn Station to board a train home to Philadelphia. The Institute of Management and another ongoing work, the Capital Complex of government buildings at Dhaka in Bangladesh, were not only Kahn’s most ambitious project, but among his architectural masterpieces. Yet he had built so little during his life that he died bankruptowing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The few buildings that Louis Kahn did realise were so remarkable that they established him as one of the most important figures in 20th century architecture, whose influence is compared to that of Le Corbusier and Mies Van Der Rohe, yet whose work offered new intellectual possibilities to the younger generation of architects searching for alternatives totheir hegemonic International Style. Convinced that contemporary architects could – and should – produce buildings which were as monumental and as spiritually inspiring as the ancient ruins of Greece and Egypt, Kahn devoted his career to the uncompromising pursuit of formal perfection and emotional expression.
Eminent though he later became, much of Kahn’s life was a struggle. His Estonian father,Leopold, met Louis’ mother, Bertha, in the Latvian city of Riga, while there on army leave. The couple settled on the Estonian island of Saarema (then called Ösel) where Louis was born in 1901 followed by his sister, Sarah, and brother, Oscar. The family was so poor that Leopold left for the US and, once he had found work, sent for Bertha and the children to join him in Philadelphia. Shortly aftertheir arrival, five year-old Louis was afflicted by scarlet fever. Together with the facial scars left by an earlier accident, when he burnt himself on a coal fire, this illness left him too weak to start school and he was taught at home. When Louis finally went to school, the shy boy was so gifted at art and music that his teachers steered him towards the special courses for talented students inPhiladelphia’s enlightened education system. Despite his family’s poverty, Kahn received an excellent education and, inspired by a high school course in architectural history, won a scholarship to study architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.
There he was taught by Paul Philippe Cret, a Frenchman schooled in the rigorous Beaux-Arts tradition. An inspiring teacher, Cret instilled hisstudents with his own belief that the architect’s responsibility was to interpret their own time. “Our architecture is modern and cannot be anything else,” he decreed. Kahn excelled in his four years at the University of Pennsylvania and, after graduating in 1924, was employed by the Philadelphia architect John Molitor. Four years after graduating he had saved enough money to travel to Europe, where hevisited his relatives in Estonia and saw his first modern movement buildings in Berlin. Back in Philadelphia, he found work with Paul Cret and married Esther Israeli, a research assistant at the University of Pennsylvania.
When the 1930s depression struck, Kahn was made redundant and, for several years, he and Esther were supported by her parents. Despairing of finding work as an architect, he...