Until the age of fifty, Louis I. Kahn (1901–74) was more known as an architect’s architect than a public figure, but in the last twenty-four years of his life he designed some of the finest buildings of twentieth-century modern architecture. His built work was admired and studied in detail while his persona became mythic. The documentary film My Architect (2003) by his son, Nathanial, from a secret second family, has generated a much broader public awareness of Kahn the man. Ironically, this interest appears at a time when Kahn’s vision of modern architecture—based on the abstraction of historical archetypes, the careful juxtaposition of masonry, wood, glass, and metal, the obsessive elaboration of details and joints, a heavy massive volumetric expression, and fundamental meditations on the nature of institutions—is out of favor, as a neo-modernism of transparent, gossamer lightness, and computer-generated biomorphic forms are the current stylistic vogue. A further difference is that Kahn believed modern architecture’s job was to transform society; such convictions are considered rather naïve these days. He sought timeless archetypal forms, not ephemeral fashion and celebrity.
His parents recognized, as did his teachers, his early innate skills in drawing.
Born Leiser-Itze Schmuilowsky in Pernau (now Pärnu) in Russian-controlled Estonia, not on an island off the Estonian coast as he claimed, he became Louis Isidor Kahn only after his family emigrated, like many poor Jews, to America in 1906 and changed their names in 1915. His childhood was marked not only by the struggle of
