LOUIS KAHN

March 5,1901
• Louis Kahn, whose original name was Itze-
Leib (Leiser-Itze) Schmuilowsky (Schma-
lowski), was born into a poor Jewish family,
at that time in the Russian Empire .
• Louis Isadore Kahn was Estonian-born
American architect based in Philadelphia.
• Early Life:Kahn excelled in art from a young
age, repeatedly winning the annual award
for the best watercolor by a Philadelphia
high school student. He was an unenthusi-
astic and undistinguished student at Phil-
adelphia Central High School until he took
a course in architecture in his senior year,
which convinced him to become an archi-
tect.
• After working in various capacities for sev-
eral 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 Architec-
ture 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.

1935-1974
• Early Career:After completing his Bache-
lor of Architecture in 1924, Kahn worked
as senior draftsman in the office of the city
architect, John Molitor. He worked on the
designs for the 1926 Sesquicentennial Ex-
position.
• 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 schemes for public
housing that he had presented to the Pub-
lic Works Administration, which supported
some similar projects during the Great De-
pression.
• Kahn worked with Howe in the late 1930s
on projects for the Philadelphia Housing
Authority and again in 1940, along with Ger-
man-born architect Oscar Stonorov, for the
design of housing developments in other
parts of Pennsylvania.
• A formal architectural office partnership
between Kahn and Oscar Stonorov began
in February 1942 and ended in March 1947,
which produced fifty-four documented
projects and buildings.
1939- 1943
Oser House (Montgomery County)
• Commissioned by Jesse and Ruth Oser,
good friends of Kahn and his wife, Esther,
the house was built in a hillside forest of
Montgomery County, while originally was
designed for another place in Melrose Park
• Formally, the Massif Oser rectangular of the
house is clad in stone and any addition or
subtraction to the massif is divided into hor-
izontal wood cladding. With this simple ges-
ture is achieved that changes in the areas of
the massif of the building to be associated
visually with different materials..

1948-1950
Genel House (Montgomery County)
• The house has a fairly rigid H-shaped plan,
but the combination of asymmetrical roof-
ing, rough stones and angled steps leading
to the entry gives the house a very informal
air.
• That informality extends to the interior,
where brick, exposed wood structure, red-
wood panels (the same as the exterior) and
stone jostle for attention.
• Carrara marble fireplace is the angular,
L-shaped, partial-height enclosure juts into
the hallways, much the way the chimney on
the Roche House bursts through the exteri-
or wall.
1949-1953
Philadelphia Pyschiatric Hos-
pital
• The hospital is organized so that spaces
warranting more privacy are at higher lev-
els, corresponding with glazing that is pro-
portionally shorter than at the lower levels.
• Horizontal shading devices of three differ-
ent depths are shallower at the upper levels
in acknowledgement of a reduced shading
burden when windows are shallower.
• In this context, passive strategies to counter
excessive solar heat gain when daylighting
was desirable, since thermal discomfort
could not be completely offset by mechan-
ically.
1950-1953
Yale Art Gallery
• The university clearly articulated a program
for the new gallery and design center (as it
was then called): Kahn was to create open
lofts that could convert easily from class-
room to gallery space and vice versa.
• Kahn’s early plans responded to the univer-
sity’s wishes by centralizing a core service
area—home to the stairwell, bathrooms,
and utility shafts—in order to open up unin-
terrupted space on either side of the core.
1954-1955
DeVore House
• In the Adler and DeVore Houses of 1954-55,
unlike in many of his other projects, Kahn
achieves what could be considered an archi-
tectural text in diachronic space.
• This is brought about by the superposition
of classical and modern space.
• In the Adler and DeVore Houses, Kahn pres-
ents architecture both as a complex object
and as the potential for the subject to expe-
rience the object as both a real space and an
imaginary space.

1954-1955
Adler House
• The organization of the Adler House sug-
gests that the house has a conceptual origin
in a nine-square grid, fi ve pavilion units and
fi ve square outdoor spaces.
• The organization of the pavilions seem to
originate in the nine-square grid. While the
lowest row can be conceptually returned to
such an origin, the center row and the upper
row cannot.
• The column grid of the Adler House has a
prob-lematic pier arrangement within the
nine-square grid. There are four different
pier organizations which con-tribute to a
striation of space in the Adler House.
1959-1965
Salk Research Institute
• Kahn’s scheme for the Institute is spatially or-
chestrated in a similar way to a monastery: a se-
cluded intellectual community.
• Three zones were to stand apart, all facing the
ocean to the west: the Meeting House, the Vil-
lage, and the laboratories.
• Meeting House was to be a large community and
conference venue, while the Village was to have
provided living quarters; each part of the complex
would then have been separated from its parallel
neighbors by a water garden.
• he central court is lined by a series of detached
towers whose diagonal protrusions allow for
windows facing westward onto the ocean.
• These towers are connected to the rectangular
laboratory blocks by small bridges
1961-1973
Fine Arts Centre
• Kahn’s original proposal encompassed a philhar-
monic hall, art school, gallery and civic theatre
bound together in a large complex.
• A site plan reveals a campus of nine buildings or-
biting around central courts and gardens. In this
concept, the Philharmonic Hall was linked to the
Theater of Performing Arts by an octagonal Phil-
harmonic Annex bridging the spaces.
• A central courtyard connected these theatres to
the Historical Museum, Art Museum, Reception
Centre, and Amphitheatre while the School of Art
occupied four separate structures at the edge of
the site.
1962-1974
IIM Ahmedabad
• In 1961, a visionary group of industrialists
collaborated with the Harvard Business
School to create a new school focused on
the advancement of specific professions to
advance India’s industry.
• Their main focus was to create a new school
of thought that incorporated a more west-
ern-style of teaching that allowed students
to participate in class discussions and de-
bates in comparison to the traditional style
where students sat in lecture throughout
the day.
• The classroom was just the formal setting
for the beginning of learning; the hallways
and Kahn’s Plaza became new centers for
learning.
1966-1972
Kimbell Art Gallery
• The element of natural light is the main fo-
cus of the design, and creates elegant spac-
es that are perfectly suited for the art that
it houses.
• The distinct form of the Kimbell Museum’s
cycloid barrel vaults are rimmed with nar-
row plexiglass skylights, providing room for
natural light to penetrate into the spaces.
• To diffuse this light, pierced-aluminum
reflectors shaped like wings hang below,
illuminating the smooth surfaces of the
concrete vault while providing elegant and
enchanting light conditions for the works of
art.
Refrences:

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Solar-design-For-Wellbeing-and-Expres-
sion%3A-Louis-Fordham/42b2d12d5e53e5cbade8bbdf22f5b5d5d577d4bb

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Kahn#cite_note-12

https://www.getty.edu/conservation/publications_resources/pdf_publications/pdf/
buildings_of_louis_kahn.pdf?luicode=10000011&lfid=231522type%3D1%26t%3D1
0%26q%3D%23%E6%96%87%E5%8C%96%E9%81%97%E4%BA%A7%23&u=htt
ps%3A%2F%2Fwww.getty.edu%2Fconservation%2Fpublications_resources%2F-
pdf_publications%2Fpdf%2Fbuildings_of_louis_kahn.pdf

https://www.houzz.com/photos/genel-house-louis-kahn-modern-exterior-phvw-
vp~6205938

https://www.archdaily.com/891939/ad-classics-arts-united-center-louis-kah

https://www.archdaily.com/83697/ad-classics-indian-institute-of-man-
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