Louis Kahn

• Louis Isadore Kahn was an Estonian-born American architect based in Philadelphia.

• Monumental, modern and brutalist were his architectural style.
• He was considered as one of the GREATEST ARCHITECT in US, in the 20th Century.
• Kahn has also achieved great awards and medals for his unrealistic works.
• He was an unenthusiastic and undistinguished student at Philadelphia Central High School until he took a
course in architecture in his senior year, which convinced hum to become an architect.

This was his short description, now let me take you through some of his chapters.
So, there are so many chapters of Louis Kahn and I’m going to give a short summary of one of the chapters;
subjected as THE MIND OPENS TO REALIZATIONS, conceiving a New Architecture, 1951-61.

Kahn was not so famous architect in 1951 when he received the commission for Yale Art Gallery. But in the time of
ten years he worked with his potential, hard works and vocabulary to reshape architecture till his death. In his
determination, inventions became very important than achieving timelessness of a great architecture. When word
came to the Yale commission, Kahn was working in American Academy in Rome, where he decided to take some
rest from practice to reconsider the direction of his work. After that, the directions of his work was final!! The
physical presence of Rome was overwhelming which offered fundamental presence of history.
He described BATHS OF CARACALLA as his favourite building “It is ever a wonder when man aspires to go beyond
the functional. Here was the will to built a vaulted structure 100 feet high in which men could bathe. 80 feet would
have sufficed, now even as a ruin, it is a MARVEL.” Roman architecture was revealed as pure geometric volumes
shaped by powerful walls and concrete vaults.

Determining when Kahn actually read while in Rome, or, indeed, in any later period, is more problematic than
determining what he saw. He always claimed never to have read, and there is no reason not to believe him. For
example: to a group of architecture students he once said, “I consider myself a rather interesting kind of a scholar
because I don’t read and I don’t write.” yet he constantly examined books and listened perceptively.

Kahn’s travel sketches reveal a strong sense of ancient architecture. After returning form Rome, he presented his 1st
ideas for the Yale Art Gallery. By June 1951, he designs were approved!!! Kahn has often been described as
approaching modernism uneasily, yet there is no record of his actually speaking against it. Instead he rethought it
by dealing with its parts, and in so doing came ultimately to change it as a whole.
In England, the gallery was seen as the best American example of New Brutalism, a briefly fashionable term that
captured only a single dimension of Kahn’s purpose. Kahn’s work presents us with two complementary yet utterly
opposed principles. The first is categorically anti-progressive and asserts the presence of a collective abstract
architectural memory in which all valid compositional types are eternally present in their disjunctive purity. The
second principle is vehemently progressive and pursues the renovation of architectural form on the basis of
advanced technique. It seems that Kahn believed that this second principle, as it responded to new tasks and uses,
would be able to lead, when combined with the first, to an appropriate architectural expression, resynthesizing
fresh poetic and institutional values in terms of concrete form.
 The architect must always
start with an eye on the best
architecture of the past
~ LOUIS KAHN
Name: Ishika Panchal Roll no.: 2113
Subject: Allied Design Batch: F.Y. B.ARCH 2021-22
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