Louis Kahn

Louis Isadore Kahn was an architect and urban planner from the US with estonian origins. After a tough childhood being a jewish immigrant in US, he was able to graduate as an architect from the University of Pennsylvania in 1924.

Louis Kahn began to project at an advanced age with the premise that he was searching for his own style and because the country didn’t have enough job offers due to war.

His main themes were space and light, he defined his work as the “reflective construction of spaces”, which is clear when comparing the interior of his buildings with the exterior, quite less dramatic. It can be said that he left aside the modern tradition. His approach to the classics and the indian culture caused on his work a search to transcend in an imposing manner, to coexist with any urban variation eternally.

Kahn coped with philosophical concepts with technical consequences or relative design decisions. He used to think that “the project is a circumstantial act (which depends on different possibilities), the form can not be subjected to such conditions. In architecture, the form characterizes a harmony of spaces for certain human activities”

The materials bring with them the possibility to govern a composition. The forms, the textures, the colors and other aspects that might be simple details, can generate objects in bigger scales and filled with meanings. During his life he completed around 200 projects, although his drawing collection in the archives at the University of Pennsylvania holds 6363 drawings, many works and other formal documents from his office, and includes 100 models and photos.

​Louis Kahn was an architect with a strong vocation for service and interest for others, which is seen in the construction in Bangladesh, a big construction in one of the poorest countries in the world. Kahn had an idealist thinking, he didn’t build a vast quantity of buildings but a few of the best quality, dedicating himself deeply in each of his works.

Rafael Moneo comments “…years haven’t turned down the interest that his work upbrings. A building that curiously claims, as the best architecture always does, the direct experience: it’s then that the dimension of Kahn is made present, when his greatness is manifested without the need to justify it.”

Kahn’s work is a way to demonstrate that architecture is not only a mechanical process, but that it can also be sensitive and a evoker of feelings, thoughts and personalities.