Louis Kahn

The scars on his face came from a stove. At three, in Kuressaare on the Baltic island of Saaremaa, then part of the Russian Empire and now Estonia, Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky was drawn to the light of the coals and carried some off in his apron. The apron caught fire, and he kept the burns for the rest of his life. In 1906 the family emigrated to Philadelphia, afraid the father would be recalled for the Russo-Japanese War. They were poor enough that the boy made his own charcoal sticks out of burnt twigs. His father changed the name to Kahn in 1915. He turned down a full art scholarship, and paid his own tuition for an architecture degree at Penn by playing piano in the dark for silent films.

He was about 50 before he built anything that mattered. Two decades of public housing work and teaching came first, then a residency at the American Academy in Rome in 1950 that rearranged what he thought a wall was for. What followed is heavy and quiet: brick that looks like brick, concrete that shows the marks of its forms, travertine, light treated as a material. He stopped hiding the plumbing. Stairs, ducts and shafts got volumes of their own. The Salk Institute, the Kimbell, the Yale Center for British Art and the National Assembly at Dhaka came out of that.

He had three children by three women and kept the households apart. Sue Ann was born to his wife Esther. Alexandra was born in Rome in 1954 to Anne Tyng, an architect in his own office. Nathaniel was born to the landscape architect Harriet Pattison. He stayed married to Esther, and the families knew little of one another. The practice was close to broke. On March 17, 1974, coming back from the institute he was building in Ahmedabad, he had a heart attack in a men's room at Penn Station and died there. Days passed before anyone identified him. The usual explanation is that he had crossed out the address in his passport, though his biographer Wendy Lesser found the space simply blank. The Times obituary listed Esther and Sue Ann as his survivors.

Architects have gone on rating him above almost everyone. Renzo Piano worked in his office and later added the wing beside the Kimbell. Robert Venturi, Moshe Safdie and Muzharul Islam came out of his studios. Isamu Noguchi called him a philosopher among architects. Bangladesh finished the National Assembly he designed in 1982, eight years after he died, and it is routinely called his masterpiece. The Four Freedoms Park he drew for Roosevelt Island, the drawings for which were in his case at Penn Station, opened in 2012. Outside the profession he stayed obscure until 2003, when his son Nathaniel released My Architect and the private life became the way most people meet him.

Louis Kahn's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Yale University Art Gallery building
  New Haven, Connecticut. His first significant commission, with a three-foot grid of triangular concrete openings that carries the services in plain sight 1953
• Richards Medical Research Laboratories building
  University of Pennsylvania. Brick towers for stairs and exhaust stand outside the laboratories they serve. The building that made his name 1965
• Salk Institute for Biological Studies building
  La Jolla, California. Two laboratory blocks framing a travertine court cut by one line of water and open to the Pacific 1965
• Kimbell Art Museum building
  Fort Worth, Texas. Repeated cycloid vaults slit along the apex so daylight washes down the curve of the concrete 1972
• Yale Center for British Art building
  New Haven, Connecticut. Designed from 1969 and finished after his death. His last building in America 1977
• Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban building
  The National Assembly of Bangladesh at Dhaka, begun in 1962 and completed eight years after he died. Usually called his masterpiece 1982

• February 20, 1901 aged 0 Born Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky in Kuressaare, on the island of Saaremaa Then the Governorate of Livonia in the Russian Empire. Some sources give the New Style date as March 5.
• 1904 aged ~3 At three, carries live coals in his apron and is badly burned The scars stayed on his face for the rest of his life.
• 1906 aged ~5 The family emigrates to Philadelphia They left fearing his father would be recalled to the army for the Russo-Japanese War. Louis was naturalized on May 15, 1914.
• 1924 aged ~23 Finishes a Bachelor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania He studied under Paul Philippe Cret in a Beaux-Arts tradition that discouraged ornament, and paid his own way through.
• February 1942 aged 40 Forms a partnership with Oscar Stonorov and works on wartime housing The office produced 54 documented projects before it broke up in March 1947. Most of his 1930s public housing schemes were never built.
• 1950 aged ~49 Architect in residence at the American Academy in Rome He went on to the ruins of Italy, Greece and Egypt and came back with the mass and light he is known for.
• 1957 aged ~56 Returns to Penn to teach, and begins the Richards laboratories He had taught at Yale from 1947 and at MIT from 1956. He held the Paul Philippe Cret chair at Penn until his death.
• 1962 aged ~61 Begins the National Assembly complex at Dhaka His former Yale student Muzharul Islam brought him the commission. The building was finished in 1982.
• March 17, 1974 aged 73 Dies of a heart attack in a men's room at Penn Station He was returning from Ahmedabad. Days passed before he was identified, and his case held the drawings for the Roosevelt memorial.

• Jonas Salk 1914–1995
  Medical researcher who developed the first safe and effective polio vaccine. built for
• Philip Johnson 1906–2005
  Named the International Style at MoMA, then built it and publicly repudiated it. opposite number
• Frank Lloyd Wright 1867–1959
  Architect and engineer whose organic architecture, including Fallingwater, reshaped the built environment. measured against
• I. M. Pei 1917–2019
  Architect whose monumental modern buildings reshaped American civic and cultural architecture. spoke about him in My Architect
• Maya Lin b. 1959
  Designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial whose work transformed American memorial architecture. influenced