Louis Kahn

Louis Kahn had his breakthrough only after the age of fifty but became one of the most influential architects of the post-war era. The Salk Institute, the Kimbell Art Museum and the parliament in Dhaka are monumental buildings of concrete, brick and light.

Louis Isadore Kahn was born in 1901 on the island of Ösel, today Saaremaa in Estonia, into a Jewish family that emigrated to Philadelphia in 1906. As a child his face was scarred in a fire. He studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in the classical Beaux-Arts tradition. During the Depression he worked on social housing. In 1950–1951 he travelled to Italy, Greece and Egypt as a resident at the American Academy in Rome, and the encounter with ancient ruins was decisive for him.

Kahn’s breakthrough was the Yale University Art Gallery, 1951–1953, followed by the Richards Medical Research Laboratories in Philadelphia, where he distinguished between servant and served spaces. The Salk Institute in La Jolla and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth are his best-known works in the United States. In India he built the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, and in Bangladesh the parliament in Dhaka, a huge complex with geometric openings in the concrete. He taught at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, where Robert Venturi was one of his collaborators.

Kahn died in 1974 of a heart attack at Pennsylvania Station in New York, on his way home from India. He was in debt, and his death did not become known for several days. His philosophical way of talking about light, silence and what a building wants to be has influenced architects all over the world, including in the Nordic countries. His son Nathaniel Kahn made the film My Architect about him in 2003.