Louis Kahn was an influential American architect born in Estonia in 1901. He studied under Paul Cret and was trained in the Beaux-Arts style. However, he was also influenced by modernist architects like Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. A turning point came in the 1950s when visiting ancient ruins in Italy, Greece, and Egypt inspired his monumental yet human-scaled style using materials like brick and concrete. Notable works included the Salk Institute, Kimbell Art Museum, and National Assembly Building of Bangladesh, all of which featured dramatic light and space.

2. INTRODUCTION
 Louis Isadore Kahn was
born in 1901 on the Baltic
island of Osel, Estonia.
 At the age of four, Kahn
moved with his family to
Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania.

3.  Kahn earned his bachelor’s degree from Pennsylvania
University in 1924. He closely studied under Paul
Philippe Cret, an architect trained under École des
Beaux Arts.
 It is thought that the educational model of École des
Beaux Arts that Thomas Eakins had an impact on
Kahn both as a professor and as an architect.
 After graduating from Penn, Kahn went on to work
for Philadelphia City Architect, John Molitor.
Working primarily as a draftsman, Kahn was
involved on a number of civic designs.

4.  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. In 1935, he
began his own
architectural practice.
Carcassonne, France

5. •He served as a design
critic and professor of
architecture at the Yale
School of Architecture
from 1947 to 1957. From
1957 until his death in
1974, he was a professor
of architecture at the
School of Design at the
University of
Pennsylvania.
Louis Kahn, the Acropolis from the
Olympieion, Athens, Greece, 1951

6. DEVELOPEMENT AS AN ARCHITECT
 Kahn’s education
occurred before modern
architecture had
established a firm hold
on the world. He was
rigorously trained in
Beaux-Arts style:
historical and eclectic
design on a monumental
scale, as taught in the
School of the Beaux-Arts
in 19th century Paris. Louis Kahn, the Parthenon, 1951

7.  He was aware of the need
for architectural change
which better
accommodated the
needs and the
technology of the times.
He seemed to gravitate
toward the ideas of
Sullian, Wright, and
Mies Van der Rohe.
Louis Kahn, the Ponte Vecchio, Florence, 1930

8.  With the construction of
Le Corbusier’s Villa
Savoye in 1929, architects
began to reject the
classical order, in which,
Kahn had been trained;
now architecture had to
be thin, taut, light,
asymmetrical, and
stretched out to pure
concept. Suddenly, Kahn
found himself at an
intersection of two
diverging architectural
perspectives: Beaux-Arts
and Modernism.
Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye, 1930

9.  A stay at the American
Academy in Rome in
the early 1950s marked
a turning point in
Kahn's career: the
back-to-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.
Louis Kahn, Pyramids No. 8, Egypt, 1951

10.  Influenced by
ancient ruins,
Kahn's style tends
to be both
monumental and
monolithic. His
heavy buildings do
not attempt to hide
their mass, their
materials, or the
way in which they
are assembled.
Louis Kahn, National Assembly Building,
Dacca, Bangladesh

11. Étienne-Louis Boullée:
Cenotaph for Sir Isaac Newton, 1784
Claude Ledoux:
Design for a Bridge, 1847
DESIGN INFLUENCES

13. Louis Kahn, National Assembly Building,
Dacca, Bangladesh
Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Imaginary Prison
1745-1761

14. Louis Kahn's work
infused the
International Style
with a fastidious,
highly personal taste;
a poetry of light. His
projects reflect his
deep personal
involvement with
each. “A plan of a
building should be
read like a harmony
of spaces in light.”

15. He was known for his ability to create monumental architecture
whose discrete functions could be easily broken down into human-
sized units. He also was concerned with creating strong formal
distinctions between served spaces (primary function areas) and
servant spaces (spaces that serve other spaces, such as stairwells,
corridors, restrooms, or any other back-of-house function such as
storage space or mechanical rooms).
‘The Served
and the
Servant
Spaces’ in
Kahn’s
Richards
Medical
Research
Laboratories
Building,
Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania

16.  A recurring
device in Kahn’s
plans is the
primacy of the
central space,
with secondary
spaces set out as a
fringe around the
center.

17. His palette of
materials tended
toward heavily
textured brick
and bare
concrete, often
reinforced by
juxtaposition
with highly
refined surfaces
such as
travertine
marble.
Louis Kahn, the Salk Institute, La Jolla, California

18.  Kahn was able to achieve
a spirit of order in his
architecture, not by
copying the past, but by
studying and
implementing the
underlying design
principles of classical
works. His designs were
often inspired by
symbolic and
cosmological geometry,
and ancient ruins.
Louis Kahn, Kimbell Art Gallery, Fort Worth, Texas

19. YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY
(1951-1953)
.
 His first significant commission, the
Yale University Art Gallery in New
Haven, Connecticut was designed
when Kahn was a visiting critic at the
Yale School of Architecture. It was the
first of three art museums he designed
and built.

20.  The building’s blank walls
stand out against the neo-
Gothic background of
majority of the university
buildings. Kahn's critics
blasted this aspect of the
design.
 The building is a
masterpiece of simplicity of
form and light; a sleek,
four-story box with austere
glass and gray concrete
walls divided by a central
elevator bank and
cylindrical stairwell.

21.  The effect of light
falling over the
diagonal-grid ceiling
and the bare
concrete supports is
dramatic. Kahn’s
interest in pushing
the boundaries with
technology led him
to design this waffle-
slab that served as
the floor of one room
and, just as
functionally, became
the ceiling of
another.

22. SALK INSTITUTE (1959-1965)

23.  The Salk Institute was conceived
in 1960 by Jonas Salk, the
developer of the polio vaccine,
who approached Kahn about
designing a biomedical research
facility. Salk’s vision that
medical research belongs to the
populace, rather than to
medicine or physical science
intrigued Kahn, who believed
Salk could understand his
architectural vision.
 The three main clusters that
comprise the form of the Salk
Institute are the Laboratory, the
Meeting Place, and the Living
Place.
SALK INSTITUTE (1959-1965)

24. 24
Kahn’s three
architectural building
blocks:
• Form – conceptual
ideas of fundamental
masses
• Function – the
underlying nature of
what a space needs to
be; what role it needs
to accomplish.
Function modifies
Form
• Structure - how to
make possible the
building of a
particular form.
Structure should be
perceivable.

25. 25
Design is the way
an architect makes
form material. It
means organizing
spaces for each
function according
to their worth,
articulating them
through a
structural system,
and infusing them
with light.

26. MATERIAL
 Concrete was chosen as
the material for the
exterior facade of the
towers, the Living and
Meeting places, and
travertine was chosen
for the courtyard.
 The punctures left by
the formwork ties were
not patched; their
spacing was carefully
planned, and each was
filled with a lead plug,
further accentuating
their appearance.

27.  Kahn also decided to
accentuate the joints
between the panels
instead of hiding them
by chamfering the edges
to produce a V-shaped
groove at these points
along the wall surface.

29. SHER-E-BANGLANAGER, DACCA
(1962-1974)
 Louis Kahn designed the entire Sher-E-Banglanagar
complex in Dacca, Bangladesh, which includes
lawns, lake and residences for the Members of the
Parliament.

30. The architect’s key design philosophy was to reference
Bangladeshi culture and heritage, while maximizing efficiency.
The Assembly building is striking in its simplicity, with huge walls
incised with large openings of regular geometric shapes.

31. The main building, which is at the center of the complex, is
divided into three parts – the Main Plaza, South Plaza and
Presidential Plaza. An artificial lake surrounds three sides of the
main building of the Sher-E-Banglanagar complex , extending to
the Members of Parliament hostel complex.

51. Kahn’s National Assembly Building
of Bangladesh in Dacca is an extraordinary example
of modern architecture being transcribed as a part
of Bengali vernacular architecture.

52. PHILIP EXETER LIBRARY
(1965-1972)
 The Phillips Exeter
Academy
Library in Exeter, New
Hampshire, is the
largest secondary-
school library in the
world.

53.  A circular double
staircase built from
concrete and faced
with travertine greets
the visitor upon
entry into the library.
At the top of the
stairs one enters a
dramatic central hall
with enormous
circular openings
that reveal several
floors of book stacks.
At the top of the
atrium, two massive
concrete cross beams
diffuse the light
entering from the
clerestory windows.

54.  Architect David
Rinehart, who
worked for Kahn,
said, "For Lou,
every building was
a temple. Salk was
a temple for
science. Dhaka was
a temple for
government. Exeter
was a temple for
learning.”

55. KIMBELL ART MUSEUM
(1966-1972)
 The Kimbell Art Museum
has been admired, studied
and emulated by
architects and museum
specialists since it first
opened.

56.  The manner, in which, Kahn
introduces light into the
Museum is unique. Natural
light enters the space through
a 2½-foot wide slit at the apex
of each gallery’s distinctive
vaulted ceilings. The light
strikes a suspended curved,
perforated-aluminium
‘natural light fixture,’ that
prevents direct light from
entering the space. As the
light reflects onto the cool,
curved concrete, it retains
what Kahn called the “silver”
quality of Texas light.

58.  As the light bounces off the
travertine walls and oak
floor, it warms up and
seamlessly blends with the
warm light from the
incandescent lamps
suspended along the outer
edge of the natural light
fixtures. With this design,
Kahn avoids many of the
problems inherent in gallery
space lit with natural light.
 Kahn draws inspiration
from the forms of classical
Roman vaults.

59.  The roofs of the curved,
double-shelled bays are
elliptical in section, and
are constructed from
post-tensioned concrete.
This eliminates the need
for columns within the
bays; support columns
are only need at the four
corners of each bay.