Louis I. Kahn

Louis I. Kahn (1901-1974), American architect and teacher, whose original, powerful designs in brick and concrete won him a prominent place in 20th-century architecture.

Born February 20, 1901, on the Isle of Osel, Estonia, Kahn was taken to the United States as a child. After gaining (1924) a degree in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, he spent the first 20 years of his practice mostly in association with other architects, working on a great variety of projects, many involving new housing. The Carver Court War Housing Project (1942-1943) at Coatsworth, Pennsylvania, on which he collaborated with others, earned wide praise.

Kahn's Yale Art Gallery (1952-1954), with its spacious, flexibly partitioned rooms, introduced the idea of exposing air ducts and lighting fixtures in a ceiling. For the Richards Medical Research Laboratories (1958-1961) at the University of Pennsylvania, he designed a remarkable structure that differentiated between the “served spaces” (laboratories and living quarters) and “servant spaces” (housing lifts, utility lines, and ventilating systems). Other notable designs include the Salk Institute (1965) in La Jolla, California, the Kimbell Art Museum (1972) in Fort Worth, Texas, and the capitol buildings (1960s) at Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Kahn stood apart from the Bauhaus and other modern schools in his insistence on beauty and elegance as integral parts of functionalism. Space and light were primary concerns for him; he defined his work as “the thoughtful making of spaces” and bore this out by making his interiors generally more striking than his exteriors. An example of his handling of light is his last work, completed in 1977, the Yale Center for British Art. A gifted teacher, at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, he was something of a mystic who liked to personify materials and forms, attributing to them will and spirit. He died March 17, 1974, in New York.