Louis Isadore Kahn (born Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky) (February 20, 1901 – March 17, 1974) was an American architect, based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. After working in various capacities for several firms in Philadelphia, he founded his own atelier in 1935. While continuing his private practice, he served as a design critic and professor of architecture at Yale School of Architecture from 1947 to 1957. From 1957 until his death, he was a professor of architecture at the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Influenced by ancient ruins, Kahn's style tends to the monumental and monolithic; his heavy buildings do not hide their weight, their materials, or the way they are assembled. Louis Kahn's works are considered as monumental beyond modernism. Famous for his meticulously built works, his provocative unbuilt proposals, and his teaching, Kahn was one of the most influential architects of the 20th century.

Biography
Early life

Jesse Oser House, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania (1940)

Louis Kahn, whose original name was Itze-Leib (Leiser-Itze) Schmuilowsky (Schmalowski), was born into a poor Jewish family in Pärnu and spent the rest of his early childhood inKuressaare on the Estonian island of Saaremaa, then part of the Russian Empire. At age 3, he saw coals in the stove and was captivated by the light of the coal. He put the coal in his apron which caught on fire and seared his face. He carried these scars for the rest of his life.

In 1906, his family immigrated to the United States, fearing that his father would be recalled into the military during the Russo-Japanese War. His actual birth year may have been inaccurately recorded in the process of immigration. According to his son's documentary film in 2003 the family could not afford pencils but made their own charcoal sticks from burnt twigs so that Louis could earn a little money from drawings and later by playing piano to accompany silent movies. He became a naturalized citizen on May 15, 1914. His father changed their name in 1915.

Career
He trained in a rigorous Beaux-Arts tradition, with its emphasis on drawing, at the University of Pennsylvania. After completing his Bachelor of Architecture in 1924, Kahn worked as senior draftsman in the office of City Architect John Molitor. In this capacity, he worked on the design for the 1926 Sesquicentennial Exposition.

In 1928, Kahn made a European tour and took a particular interest in the medieval walled city of Carcassonne, France and the castles of Scotland rather than any of the strongholds ofclassicism or modernism. After returning to the States in 1929, Kahn worked in the offices of Paul Philippe Cret, his former studio critic at the University of Pennsylvania, and in the offices of Zantzinger, Borie and Medary in Philadelphia. In 1932, Kahn and Dominique Berninger founded the Architectural Research Group, whose members were interested in the populist social agenda and new aesthetics of the European avant-gardes. Among the projects Kahn worked on during this collaboration are unbuilt schemes for public housing that had originally been presented to the Public Works Administration.

Louis Kahn's Salk Institute

Among the more important of Kahn's early collaborations was with George Howe. Kahn worked with Howe in late 1930s on projects for the Philadelphia Housing Authority and again in 1940, along with German-born architect Oscar Stonorov for the design of housing developments in other parts of Pennsylvania.

Kahn did not find his distinctive architectural style until he was in his fifties. Initially working in a fairly orthodox version of the International Style, a stay at the American Academy in Rome in the early 1950s marked a turning point in Kahn's career. The back-to-the-basics approach he adopted after visiting the ruins of ancient buildings in Italy, Greece, and Egypt helped him to develop his own style of architecture influenced by earlier modern movements but not limited by their sometimes dogmatic ideologies.

In 1961 he received a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts to study traffic movement in Philadelphia and create a proposal for a viaduct system. He describes this proposal at a lecture given in 1962 at the International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado:
In the center of town the streets should become buildings. This should be interplayed with a sense of movement which does not tax local streets for non-local traffic. There should be a system of viaducts which encase an area which can reclaim the local streets for their own use, and it should be made so this viaduct has a ground floor of shops and usable area. A model which I did for the Graham Foundation recently, and which I presented to Mr. Entenza, showed the scheme.

Kahn's teaching career began at Yale University in 1947, and he was eventually named Albert F. Bemis Professor of Architecture and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962 andPaul Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1966 and was also a Visiting Lecturer at Princeton University from 1961 to 1967. Kahn was elected a Fellow in the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1953. He was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1964. He was awarded the Frank P. Brown Medal in 1964. He was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1968 and awarded the AIA Gold Medal, the highest award given by the AIA, in 1971 and the Royal Gold Medal by the RIBA in 1972.

Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban

Play of light inside Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban

Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban (National Assembly Building) in Dhaka, Bangladesh, is perhaps the most important building designed by Kahn. Kahn got the design contract with the help of Muzharul Islam, his student at Yale University, who worked with him on the project. It was Kahn's last project during 1962 to 1974. It is the centerpiece of the national capital complex designed by Kahn that includes hostels, dining halls, and a hospital. According to Robert McCarter, author of Louis I. Kahn, "it is one of the twentieth century's greatest architectural monuments, and is without question Kahn's magnum opus."

Death
In 1974, Kahn died of a heart attack in a men's restroom in Pennsylvania Station in New York. He went unidentified for three days because he had crossed out the home address on his passport. He had just returned from a work trip to India, and despite his long career, he was deeply in debt when he died.

Personal life
Kahn had three families with three women: his wife, Esther, whom he married in 1930; Anne Tyng, who began her working collaboration and personal relationship with Kahn in 1945; and Harriet Pattison. When Tyng became pregnant in 1953, to mitigate the scandal she was sent away to Rome, Italy where their daughter was born.

Kahn's obituary in the New York Times, written by Paul Goldberger, mentions only Esther and his daughter by her as survivors. But in 2003, Kahn's son with Pattison, Nathaniel Kahn, released anOscar-nominated biographical documentary about his father, titled My Architect: A Son's Journey, which gives glimpses of the architecture while focusing on talking to the people who knew him: family, friends, and colleagues. It includes interviews with renowned architect contemporaries such as Muzharul Islam, B. V. Doshi, Frank Gehry, Ed Bacon, Philip Johnson, I. M. Pei, and Robert A. M. Stern, but also an insider's view of Kahn's unusual family arrangements. The unusual manner of his death is used as a point of departure and a metaphor for Kahn's "nomadic" life in the film.