Shri Ram College of Architecture I 3rd Year I Semester VI I Theory of Design I 2012-13

Shri Ram Group of Colleges

Modern Architects I Louis Kahn

Scientist
Inventor
Artist

Architect

Artist
Poet
Author
Moni bhardwaj

Louis Kahn
Louis Isadore Kahn (born Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky) (February
20, 1901 March 17, 1974) was an American architect, based
in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. After working in
various capacities for several firms in Philadelphia, he
founded his own atelier in 1935. While continuing his private
practice, he served as a design critic and professor of
architecture at Yale School of Architecture from 1947 to
1957.
From 1957 until his death, he was a professor of architecture
at the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.
Influenced by ancient ruins, Kahn created a style that was
monumental and monolithic; his heavy buildings do not hide
their weight, their materials, or the way they are assembled.
Louis Kahn's works are considered as monumental beyond
modernism. Famous for his meticulously built works, his
provocative unbuilt proposals, and his teaching, Kahn was
one of the most influential architects of the 20th century. He
was awarded the AIA Gold Medal and the RIBA Gold Medal.

Louis Kahn Quotes

Consider the momentous event in architecture when the wall parted and the column became.
The nature of space reflects what it wants to be.
The sun never knew how great it was until it struck the side of a building.
To express is to drive. And when you want to give something presence, you have to consult nature. And there is
where Design comes in. And if you think of Brick, for instance, and you say to Brick, What do you want Brick?
And Brick says to you I like an Arch. And if you say to Brick Look, arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete
lintel over you. What do you think of that? Brick says:...I like an Arch.
A city is a place where a small boy, as he walks through it, may see something that will tell him what he wants to
do his whole life.
One might feel that only persons who are in flight from themselves, who need plaster and wall paper for their
emotional security, can be uncomfortable in this building...In its spaces there is no room for the interior
decorator. Kahn on Yale Art Gallery.
Architectural interpretations accepted without reflection could obscure the search for signs of a true nature and
a higher order.
The school and the dormitories are a unit, like a monastery. Corridors are avoided by having deep porches, off
all the dormitory rooms, where tea is served and things are discussed. The school is around a court which has in
it an amphitheatre. Everything here is planned around the idea of meeting. Kahn on IIM Ahmedabad.

Early life
Jesse Oser House, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania (1940)
Louis Kahn, whose original name was Itze-Leib (Leiser-Itze)
Schmuilowsky (Schmalowski), was born into a poor Jewish
family in Prnu, Estonia and spent his early childhood in
Kuressaare on the Estonian island of Saaremaa. It was then part
of the Russian Empire. At age 3, 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.
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. His birth year may have been
inaccurately recorded in the process of immigration. According
to his son's 2003 documentary film, the family could not afford
pencils. They made their own charcoal sticks from burnt twigs so
that Louis could earn a little money from drawings. 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.

Career

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 particularly interested in the medieval walled city of
Carcassonne, France and the castles of Scotland, rather than any of the strongholds of classicism or
modernism. After returning to the 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 unbuilt schemes for public housing that he had
presented to the Public Works Administration, which supported some similar projects during the Great
Depression.
Among the more important of Kahn's early collaborations was 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.

Career

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 by a stay at the American Academy in Rome
in the early 1950s, 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 create a proposal for a viaduct system.
He described this proposal at a lecture given in 1962 at the International Design Conference in Aspen,
Colorado:
In the center of town the streets should become buildings. This should be interplayed with a sense of
movement which does not tax local streets for non-local traffic. There should be a system of viaducts which
encase an area which can reclaim the local streets for their own use, and it should be made so this viaduct has
a ground floor of shops and usable area. A model which I did for the Graham Foundation recently, and which I
presented to Mr. Entenza, showed the scheme.
Kahn's teaching career began at Yale University in 1947. He was eventually named Albert F. Bemis Professor
of Architecture and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962, followed by appointment as the
Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1966. He was also a Visiting
Lecturer at Princeton University from 1961 to 1967.

Louis Kahn's Salk Institute

360 panorama in the courtyard of the Salk Institute for

Biological Studies, La Jolla, California (195965).

Panorama of the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, Gujarat,

Reconstructed model (2008) of Trenton Bath House,

Ewing, New Jersey (1954).

Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

(196672)

Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban,

Dhaka; considered as
Kahn's magnum opus

Interior of First Unitarian Church, Rochester, New York (1959)

Play of
light
inside
Jatiyo
Sangshad
Bhaban

Kimbell Art
Museum,
Fort Worth,
Texas
(196672)

Interior of Phillips
Exeter Academy
Library, Exeter, New
Hampshire (196572)