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Louis I. Kahn (born in 1901 in Saaremaa, Estonia, died in 1974 in New York, New York) practised as an architect in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and taught architecture there and at Yale.
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2 Important works include 3 External links |
Life
Raised in Philadelphia where his family had emigrated and trained in a rigorous Beaux-Arts tradition, with its emphasis on drawing, at the University of Pennsylvania, after completing his Master's in 1924, Kahn made a European tour and settled on the medieval walled city of Carcassonne, rather than the monuments of classicism or modernism. In 1925-1926 Kahn served as Chief Designer for the Sesquicentennial Exposition. From 1947 he spent a decade teaching at Yale, where his influence was paramount, then moved to Penn. His prominent apprentices include Moshe Safdie and Robert Venturi.
Louis Kahn's work infused International style with a fastidious, highly personal taste, a poetry of light. His few projects reflect his deep personal involvement with each. Isamu Noguchi called him "a philosopher among architects".
Kahn had three different families with three different women: his wife, Esther, Anne Tyng, a co-worker, and Harriet Pattison. His son with Pattison, Nathaniel Kahn, made an Oscar-nominated biographical documentary about Louis Kahn, entitled My Architect, which gives glimpses of the architecture while it focuses on talking heads. It includes interviews with renowned architect contemporaries such as Frank Gehry, Philip Johnson, I. M. Pei, and Robert Stern, but also an insider's view of Kahn's unusual family arrangements.
Important works include
He was no relation to the other American architect, Albert Kahn.