KAHN, Louis Isidore

(b. 20 February 1901 in Saaremaa [now Oesel], Estonia; d. 17 March 1974 in New York City), architect who transformed the governing principles of design and influenced a shift away from modernism and toward post-modernism in architecture.

Kahn's parents, Leopold Kahn and Bertha Mendelsohn, immigrated to the United States in 1905 and settled in Philadelphia. He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1915. Kahn's childhood was marked by poverty and the misfortune of an accident that left him with a permanently scarred face; as a result, Kahn was always shy in public, even when he came to a position of national prominence. While attending Central High School and Public Industrial Art School in Philadelphia, Kahn displayed a talent as a draftsman. In his senior year of high school, after taking a course in architectural history, he decided that he would become an architect, and he enrolled in the design program at the University of Pennsylvania in 1920. There Kahn came under the influence of Paul Philippe Cret, himself a graduate of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Cret instilled in him a respect for the classical tradition, later reflected in Kahn's designs, which hearken back to ancient Greece and Rome and to even older styles of the Near East.

Upon receiving his B.A. degree in 1924, Kahn went to work for the Philadelphia architect John Molitor. Perhaps recognizing Kahn's abilities, Molitor gave the young architect a substantial role in large public projects; in fact, Kahn served as chief designer for the 1926 Sesquicentennial Exposition. (Half a century later in the early 1970s, Kahn—by then nationally and internationally famous—developed the design for the Bicentennial Exposition of 1976.) He left the firm in early 1928, studied for nearly two years in Europe, and in 1929 returned to Philadelphia. Also in 1930, Kahn married Esther Virginia Israeli, with whom he had one daughter.

With the Great Depression raging, Kahn found few opportunities for commissions, and he joined with other architects in 1931 to form the Architectural Research Group as a means of finding work. Nevertheless, Kahn's career prior to 1947 was confined primarily to consultancies. Then in 1947 George Howe (with whom Kahn had entered into a business partnership in 1941, and who later became chair of the Yale University department of architecture) recommended him as a visiting critic at the Yale School of Architecture.

In the quarter century that followed, Kahn, from his influential pulpit at one of the nation's most distinguished universities, transformed the way that American architects regarded their profession, its materials, and its purposes. Striking a tone that called to mind the notions of perfect form first articulated by Plato twenty-three centuries earlier, Kahn urged architects to seek out "what the building wants to be." His was not an architecture of functionality, although there was nothing whimsical or capricious in his designs. However, he maintained that the architect's role is not to give the client what he or she demands, but rather to seek out the essential quality of the building's own character.

Invigorated by a year spent as architect in residence at the American Academy in Rome between 1950 and 1951, during which time he had an opportunity to drink once again from the wellspring of Western architecture's guiding influence, Kahn began a series of designs that during the next two decades would quite literally give form to his ideas. First among these was the Yale Art Gallery (1951–1953), in which he became the first architect to leave duct-work and other mechanical features exposed in the ceiling. That this is commonplace today is a hallmark of Kahn's influence; in the early 1950s it was a daring move.

Kahn's work in the 1950s and 1960s showed an amazing versatility with regard to the varying scales of interaction that his designs addressed. He could work on large, potentially impersonal public spaces or on small, deeply intimate ones. His ability in the latter respect is displayed prominently with his plan for the Jewish Community Center Bath House in Trenton, New Jersey (1954–1959). A small, but highly influential project, the bath house gave the first physical expression to Kahn's emerging idea that the built environment could be divided into "served" and "servant" spaces. The first is the space for which the building is designed, whereas the second is the supporting space of mechanical rooms, heating and cooling systems, and other purely functional aspects of the building. In the bath house, composed of four small buildings, "servant space" was hidden in square blocks at the corner of each building.

The A. N. Richards Medical Research Building at the University of Pennsylvania (1957–1964) takes the idea of "servant" and "served" even further. Among the building's most striking features is a row of towers inspired by those built in Italian towns during the Renaissance, yet these towers actually hold mechanical and ventilating equipment.

The late 1950s and early 1960s saw the design and construction of Kahn's most important works, none perhaps more notable than the laboratory buildings at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California (1960–1965). The famed virologist Jonas Salk himself discussed with Kahn his ideas regarding his vision for the buildings as a place he "could invite Picasso to" but otherwise left the architect with a free hand. The resulting design at once pays tribute to and transcends a quintessential idiom of public space in American life—the New England town common.

By choosing the common as his template, Kahn seems to have made a deliberate statement regarding his attempt to rewrite the codes by which Americans view the built environment. Whereas the New England common symbolized an earlier America that still looked eastward toward Europe, the Salk Institute buildings gazed upon a western shore that points not so much to Asia as to a culmination of deeply felt aspirations in the American spirit. Kahn's design makes this purpose clear in its substitution of the key component in the New England common, the church. In place of its spire, anchoring the western fringes of the complex, he left open space, thus offering a view toward something even more majestic—the waves of the Pacific Ocean and the sun setting above it.

The La Jolla complex also reflects a continuing fascination with light, its qualities, and the creative approach to the practical needs of enhancing light in certain places and occluding it in others. Kahn's Yale Art Gallery, for instance, features a wide glass curtain wall to channel in the sunlight, whereas the Salk Institute Laboratory is designed in such a way as to diminish the brightness of excess light. Kahn later applied the same principles in his National Assembly Building in Dacca, Bangladesh.

Begun in 1962 as a building for the chief legislative body of the country that was then known as East Pakistan, the project was fraught with challenges, not least those brought about by the 1971 war that gave the country independence from the Pakistani government in Islamabad. For this reason, the Dacca project did not reach completion until 1974, the year of Kahn's death. Yet the design itself—although it clearly pays tribute to the region's ancient past—is so revolutionary that it would have looked contemporary if it had been completed a decade later. In designing it, Kahn as always applied creative solutions to practical problems, fashioning massive walls that provide a sheltering curtain against the relentless sunlight of the region.

Other notable designs by Kahn in the 1960s and thereafter include the Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, India (1962–1974); the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (1966–1972); the library and dining hall at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire (1967–1972); and the Center for British Art and Studies at Yale. The latter project brought his career full circle, inasmuch as it stood directly across the street from his Yale Art Gallery.

Throughout his life, Kahn had a sometimes unfulfilled longing to create and transform large public spaces. His career ended with several proposals still on the drawing board for the renaissance of his beloved Philadelphia. He did not live to see the completion of the Dacca or Ahmedabad project, and a large-scale design for Teheran, Iran, never came to fruition. On 17 March 1974, on his way home from a trip to Bangladesh and India, Kahn succumbed to a heart attack in a New York train station. He is buried at Montefiore Cemetery in Philadelphia. Despite his status as the most influential American architect since Frank Lloyd Wright, his firm was in grave economic trouble and was saved from bankruptcy only when a grateful State of Pennsylvania purchased his drawings and sketches.

Changes in architecture, the most practical of all arts, take longer to manifest than do those in other artistic fields, a function of the costs involved and the permanence of the creations themselves. A famous example of this is the magnificent vice-regal residence in New Delhi, widely regarded as representing the zenith of colonial architecture. When the British architect Edwin Lutyens designed it, Britain firmly controlled India, but by the time of its completion in 1931, British power had eroded, and thus the world that had created it was long gone.

This historical lag between conception and completion only served to heighten the impact of Kahn's work. Many of his designs from the early 1950s on belong to the world of the 1960s and much later. Even in the 1960s and early 1970s, most of the major buildings under construction reflected an earlier influence—that of Wright, though usually without many traces of Wright's genius. Only in the 1980s did postmodernism begin to take firm hold in American architecture, thus extending Kahn's influence far beyond his lifetime.

Kahn's papers, as well as his architectural drawings, models, and other materials, are housed at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. His collected writings appear in Alessandra Latour, ed., Louis I. Kahn: Writings, Lectures, Interviews (1991). For his designs and other works, see Eugene Feldman and Richard Wurman, eds., The Notebooks and Drawings of Louis I. Kahn (1973); Heinz Ronner, Sharad Jhaveri, and Alessandro Vasella, eds., Louis I. Kahn: The Complete Works, 1935–1974 (1977); and Jan Hochstim, ed., The Paintings and Sketches of Louis I. Kahn (1991). Two good introductions to Kahn's work are Romaldo Giurgola and Jaimini Mehta, Louis I. Kahn (1975), and John Lobell, Between Silence and Light: Spirit in the Architecture of Louis I. Kahn (1979). An obituary is in the New York Times (2 Mar. 1974).

Judson Knight