Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India (1962-1975)
Bangladesh Parliament building, Dhaka
design
Yale University Art Gallery
(Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut (1951...)
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 structure itself. Like many of Kahn's buildings, the Art Gallery makes subtle references to its context while overtly rejecting any historical style.
1951
Richards Medical Research Laboratories
(Richards Medical Research Laboratories, University of Pen...)
Richards Medical Research Laboratories, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1957–1965), a breakthrough in Kahn's career that helped set new directions for modern architecture with its clear expression of served and servant spaces and its evocation of the architecture of the past.
Salk Institute for Biological Studies
(The Salk Institute, La Jolla, California (1959–1965) was ...)
The 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 built. The two laboratory blocks frame a long view of the Pacific Ocean, accentuated by a thin linear fountain that seems to reach for the horizon. It has been named "arguably the defining work" of Kahn.
Phillips Exeter Academy Library
(Phillips Exeter Academy Library, Exeter, New Hampshire (1...)
Phillips Exeter Academy Library, Exeter, New Hampshire (1965–1972), awarded the Twenty-five Year Award by the American Institute of Architects in 1997. It is famous for its dramatic atrium with enormous circular openings into the book stacks.
Kimbell Art Museum
(Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas (1967–1972), featur...)
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas (1967–1972), features repeated bays of cycloid-shaped barrel vaults with light slits along the apex, which bathe the artwork on display in an ever-changing diffuse light.
Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park
(Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, Roosevelt Islan...)
Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, Roosevelt Island, New York (1972–1974), construction completed 2012
Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban
(Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban (National Assembly Building) in Dh...)
Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban (National Assembly Building) in Dhaka, Bangladesh was Kahn's last project, developed 1962 to 1974. Kahn got the design contract with the help of Muzharul Islam, one of his students at Yale University, who worked with him on the project. The Bangladeshi Parliament building is the centerpiece of the national capital complex designed by Kahn, which includes hostels, dining halls, and a hospital. According to Robert McCarter, author of Louis I. Kahn, "it is one of the twentieth century's greatest architectural monuments, and is without question Kahn's magnum opus."
Louis Isadore Kahn was an American architect based in Philadelphia. His works include public bousing, theaters and museums, churches, factories and office buildings. He served as a design critic and professor of architecture at Yale School of Architecture. Louis was searching for a long time for his own style, but his search was to be rewarded.
Background
Louis Kahn (born Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky) was born on the 20th of February, 1901 in Pärnu, Governorate of Livonia, Russian Empire (now Parnu, Estonia). In 1905 his family moved to Philadelphia.
He spent his early childhood in Kuressaare on the island of Saaremaa, then part of the Russian Empire's Livonian Governorate. At the age of three, he saw coals in the stove and was captivated by the light of the coal. He put the coal in his apron, which caught on fire and seared his face. He carried these scars for the rest of his life.
Education
In 1906, his family emigrated to the United States, as they feared that his father would be recalled into the military during the Russo-Japanese War. Later he earned money by playing piano to accompany silent movies in theaters. He became a naturalized citizen on May 15, 1914. His father changed their name to Kahn in 1915.
Kahn trained at the University of Pennsylvania in a rigorous Beaux-Arts tradition, with its emphasis on drawing. After completing his Bachelor of Architecture in 1924, Kahn worked as senior draftsman in the office of the city architect, John Molitor. He worked on the designs for the 1926 Sesquicentennial Exposition.
In 1928, Kahn made a European tour. He was interested particularly in the medieval walled city of Carcassonne, France, and the castles of Scotland. After returning to the United States in 1929, Kahn worked in the offices of Paul Philippe Cret, his former studio critic at the University of Pennsylvania, and then with Zantzinger, Borie and Medary in Philadelphia.
In 1932, Kahn and Dominique Berninger founded the Architectural Research Group, whose members were interested in the populist social agenda and new aesthetics of the European avant-gardes. Among the projects Kahn worked on during this collaboration are schemes for public housing that he had presented to the Public Works Administration, which supported some similar projects during the Great Depression. They remained unbuilt.
Among the more important of Kahn's early collaborations was one with George Howe. Kahn worked with Howe in the late 1930s on projects for the Philadelphia Housing Authority and again in 1940, along with German-born architect Oscar Stonorov, for the design of housing developments in other parts of Pennsylvania. A formal architectural office partnership between Kahn and Oscar Stonorov began in February 1942 and ended in March 1947, which produced fifty-four documented projects and buildings.
Kahn did not arrive at his distinctive architectural style until he was in his fifties. Initially working in a fairly orthodox version of the International Style, he was influenced vitally by a stay as Architect in Residence at the American Academy in Rome during 1950, which marked a turning point in his career. After visiting the ruins of ancient buildings in Italy, Greece, and Egypt, he adopted a back-to-the-basics approach. He developed his own style as influenced by earlier modern movements, but not limited by their sometimes-dogmatic ideologies.
In 1961 he received a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts to study traffic movement in Philadelphia and to create a proposal for a viaduct system.
Kahn's teaching career began at Yale University in 1947. He eventually was named as the Albert F. Bemis Professor of Architecture and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956. Kahn then returned to Philadelphia to teach at the University of Pennsylvania from 1957 until his death, becoming the Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture. He also was a visiting lecturer at Princeton University School of Architecture from 1961 to 1967.
Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture
The American architect Louis Kahn is one of the great master builders of the twentieth century. With complex spatial compositions, an elemental formal vocabulary and a choreographic mastery of light, Kahn created buildings of powerful archaic beauty. Among his most important works are the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California (1959–65), the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (1966–72) and the National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh (1962–83). Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture is the first comprehensive publication on this architect in 20 years, and presents all of his important projects. Essays by prominent Kahn experts discuss the sources, contexts and influences of his work; among the authors are such renowned art and architectural historians as Stanislaus von Moos, William J. R. Curtis, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen and Neil Levine. Topics discussed include Kahn’s pioneering role in concrete construction; the visionary plans for his home city of Philadelphia; his years at Yale University; his dialogue with Josef Albers; and his importance for modern architecture in Southeast Asia. An illustrated biography provides new facts and insights about Kahn’s life and work. In interviews, leading architects such as Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, Peter Zumthor and Sou Fujimoto explain Kahn’s significance in today’s architectural discourse. An extensive catalogue of works features original drawings and architectural models from the Kahn archive, many of which are presented with high-quality images for the first time. The book is further augmented by a portfolio of Kahn’s travel drawings as well as photographs by Thomas Florschuetz, which offer completely new views of the Salk Institute and the Indian Institute of Management. Born in Estonia, Louis Kahn (1901–1974) emigrated to the U.S. with his family in 1906. After studying at the University of Pennsylvania, and working for several architecture firms in Philadelphia, Kahn founded his own atelier in 1935. From 1947 to 1957, Kahn served as a design critic and professor at the Yale School of Architecture, and later as professor of architecture at the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.
