Louis Kahn

Louis Isadore Kahn (born Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky, February 20, 1901 – March 17, 1974, New York) was an American architect of Jewish origins.

He emigrated to Pennsylvania in 1906, where he received a degree in architecture in 1924, opened his first studio in 1935, and in 1947 began teaching at Yale University, a position that ended in 1957 when he began teaching at the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Influenced by the monumentality of classical buildings and Greek and Roman ruins, Kahn's architecture materialized in buildings with solemn Euclidean forms and monolithic symmetry, such as the Salk Institute or the Bengali Parliament building in Dhaka.

A work of art is not a living being that walks or runs, it is the creation of a life that triggers a reaction.
For some it is a miracle of the hand of man.
For some it is a miracle of the mind.
For some it is a miracle of technology.
For some it matters how real it is.
For some it matters how transcendental it is.
It's like the Fifth Symphony: it suggests a feeling that only those who have felt it at least once and are searching for it recognize.
You know him, but you want to hear him again. You know him, but you want to see him again.
A work of art reveals that Nature cannot do what man does.

Louis Kahn was born in 1901 in Kuressaare, on the island of Saaremaa, in the then Estonian Governorate of the Russian Empire, to a family of humble origins. At the age of three, he was burned on the face by some burning embers from the fireplace that set fire to the apron he was wearing and that caused scars that he carried for the rest of his life. In 1906, Louis moved with his brothers and mother Bertha to the United States, to Philadelphia, where his father Leopold had emigrated in 1904. On May 15, 1914, he became a US citizen and the following year he changed his name.

His talent for drawing earned him a series of scholarships that supported him until he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in architecture in 1924 and began working with John Molitor, where he used his skills to design the Sesquicentennial Exposition in 1926. Four years later, he took a trip to Europe, of which a body of sketches survive, where he was particularly impressed by the medieval town of Carcassonne and the Scottish castles, considered examples of classicism and modernism. Returning to the United States the following year, he began working with Paul Cret, a Beaux-Arts architect known for his buildings characterized by a refined sense of proportion. Continue on Wikipedia…>>