Louis I. Kahn (1901-1974) was one of the most significant and influential American architects from the 1950s until his death. His work represents a profound search for the very meaning of architecture.Louis I. Kahn was born February 20, 1901, in Estonia on the island of saaremaa His face was severely burned as a child, resulting in lifelong scars. His Jewish family immigrated to America in 1905 and settled in Philadelphia, where Louis was raised in poverty. A precocious artist and musician in high school, Kahn was inspired to become an architect during an architectural history course he took his senior year. He studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (1920-1924), where the Classical tradition in architecture was taught by Paul Philippe Cret, a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. This would prove to have a significant influence on his later career.
Kahn became a renowned architect only late in his life, after a long period of maturation. After graduating in 1924 he worked for a number of architects, including his former teacher Cret. The Classically-trained Kahn began to develop an appreciation for the emerging architecture of the International Style through his contacts with such Philadelphia architects as Oscar Stonorov and George Howe, both of whom Kahn was associated with in private practice during the 1940s. He especially respected the architecture and writings of the modern master le corb usier. Like Le Corbusier, Kahn was drawn to the ancient architecture of the Mediterranean. He made his first trip to Europe in 1928-1929, and in 1950-1951 was a resident at the American Academy in Rome. The timeless, monumental grandeur of ancient Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern ruins was often suggested in his later buildings.
Kahn's rise to prominence began in 1948-1957 when he was a professor at Yale University. In 1957 he returned to the University of Pennsylvania and taught there until his death. Kahn was a highly respected and influential teacher. His exploratory, questioning attitudes probed in a poetic manner the inner meaning of architecture. For Kahn, the designing of buildings went well beyond just fulfilling utilitarian needs. He searched for "beginnings" and wanted to discover what a particular building "wants to be." In creating a building Kahn first sought to understand its "Form," or inner essence, which he considered to be "unmeasurable." Once the "Form" was conceived, it was then subjected to the realities of the "measurable" through "Design." In a successful final product, Kahn believed, the original "Form" can still be strongly felt.
Kahn was entering his fifties when he built his first major design, the Yale University Art Gallery (1951-1953) in New Haven, Connecticut. In this building the open lofts of the galleries are "served" by an inner "servant" core containing such services as stairs and an elevator. The ceiling of each gallery is a concrete space frame (with a pattern of tetrahedrons) which allows the mechanical services to spread horizontally without intruding into the gallery. Kahn was beginning to distinguish between primary, human-oriented spaces and the necessary, but secondary, support spaces. He first crystallized his approach to "served" and "servant" spaces in his modest, but critically important, Trenton Bath House (1955-1956) in New Jersey.
Kahn emerged as a major figure in architecture with his Richards Medical Research Building (1957-1961) at the University of Pennsylvania. This work can be interpreted as a summary of the positive accomplishments of modern architecture in its clarification and expression of functions (once more through "served" and "servant" spaces), honest use of materials, and use of advanced structural systems (precast-prestressed concrete). Yet Kahn was striving for something more. Despite the requisite emphasis on technology in such a commission, he was just as concerned with the human side of the scientists, both as a scholarly community and as independent researchers. Also, his use of picturesque "servant" towersclad in brick provided a visual link with the older and more traditional buildings nearby.
Kahn had thoroughly absorbed his sources. He was able to unite characteristics of modern architecture with those of historical architecture, which he knew well from his Beaux-Arts training. By extending the potential of modern architecture toward a new stability and inner security, while responding to the architecture of the past, Kahn became a pivotal figure in the history of architecture during the 1960s and 1970s..........
the sansad bahavan of bangladesh is his one of the gretest architectural milestone........ he is one of the gretest architect of this century......
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