Kahn's heavy concrete made modern rooms feel ancient
At three, a boy on the Estonian island of Saaremaa scooped glowing coals into his apron and scarred his face for life. As Louis Kahn (1901–1974), he later raised massive buildings that flaunt their weight, from the Salk Institute's ocean-framing courtyard to Dhaka's National Assembly, and collected both the AIA and RIBA gold medals.
Born Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky to a poor Jewish family, probably in Kuressaare, he reached America in 1906 because his parents dreaded his father being called up for the war with Japan. Too poor for pencils, the family burned twigs into charcoal so he could sell drawings, and he later played piano for silent films; he was naturalized on 15 May 1914, and the surname became Kahn a year later. He refused a Pennsylvania Academy art scholarship to pay his own way through Penn under Paul Philippe Cret, graduating in 1924, then drafted Exposition work for John Molitor before a 1928 European tour spent on Carcassonne and Scottish castles.
Partnerships with Howe and Stonorov produced housing schemes; his own atelier opened in 1935, yet the signature language waited until after a 1950 American Academy in Rome residency among ruins. Yale Art Gallery (1951–53) exposed triangular ceiling services; Richards Labs split served and servant spaces; Salk Institute (1959–65) frames the Pacific with a thin fountain between lab blocks—often called his defining work. Unbuilt Philadelphia viaduct fantasies imagined streets reclaimed from through traffic.
Teaching began at Yale in 1947, took in an MIT chair in 1956, and ended at Penn, where he held a professorship named for his old teacher Cret until a heart attack killed him in 1974, soon after a work trip to India. He fathered a child with each of three women: Sue Ann with his wife Esther, Alexandra with the architect Anne Tyng, who, pregnant in 1953, left for Rome to give birth away from gossip, and Nathaniel with the landscape architect Harriet Pattison. Paul Goldberger's obituary in The New York Times named only Esther and Sue Ann; Nathaniel's Oscar-nominated 2003 film My Architect filled in the rest.
Daylight and mass drive the later buildings. The Phillips Exeter Academy library opens its atrium onto the stacks through giant circles; the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth rolls cycloid vaults with slits of light along their crowns; Rochester's First Unitarian Church washes its sanctuary from four light towers. His final project, worked on from 1962 until his death and won with help from his former Yale student Muzharul Islam, was the National Assembly complex in Dhaka, which the author Robert McCarter ranks as his magnum opus. Jerusalem's Hurva Synagogue stayed on paper, and Roosevelt Island's Four Freedoms Park was completed only in 2012.
Source: Louis Kahn
