11 Louis Kahn Architecture

The Architectural design work of Louis Kahn.

1. LOUIS I. KAHN

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. DE V ELOPEMENT 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 19 th 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

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

13. 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.”

14. 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

15. 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 .

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. SALK INSTITUTE (1959-1965)

22. 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)

23. 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.

24. 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.

25. 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. 

26. 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.

27. 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.

28. 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.

29. 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.

30. 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.

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

32. 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.  

33. 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.”

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

35. 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.

36. 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.

37. 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.