On the evening of March 17, 1974, a 73-year-old man died of a heart attack at New York’s Pennsylvania Station while returning home from a business trip to India. The only means of identification found on the corpse was a passport with the address scratched out, so it took police two days to establish that this small man with a heavily scarred face and hands had been an architect based in Philadelphia.

The circumstances of Louis I Kahn’s departure from the world reflected only too accurately the mess and precariousness that had characterised much of his life. At the time he was facing bankruptcy and the failure of his marriage, one of three concurrent relationships that had each resulted in a child. And yet somehow amid the chaos of his personal arrangements, Kahn succeeded in realising some of the most magisterially assured works of architecture of the 20th century, an achievement that has now been celebrated by a major retrospective at London’s Design Museum. Marked by a positively Roman feeling for scale, order and longevity, the monumental output of his final 20 years seems particularly freighted with longing for a stability that the architect, himself, was denied.

Born in 1901 on the island of Saaremaa, in Estonia, Kahn was the son of a German-speaking Jewish couple, his father a scribe and stained glass artist. The scarring resulted from a near-fatal accident suffered at the age of three when he shovelled burning coals onto the apron of his pinafore. The family was highly cultured but poor and, in search of a better life, emigrated to the United States when Kahn was five. Their circumstances were slow to improve. Kahn’s father found employment as a construction worker but succumbed to illness. Supported by his mother’s work as a seamstress, the family moved 17 times in the first two years of their life in Philadelphia.

Visionary: Louis Kahn in 1972 (© ROBERT C LAUTMAN PHOTOGRAPHY COLLECTION)

Despite the challenges of his upbringing, Kahn soon demonstrated an aptitude both for music – he bolstered the family income through work as a pianist at a silent movie theatre – and for drawing, a passion that led to him securing a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania’s architecture school. Throughout his life, he felt a debt to the city agencies that had allowed him to escape poverty and, on his graduation, began to focus on the design of low-cost housing. However, for all his evident talent and energy, his professional progress was hampered by the Depression. For several years he failed to find work as an architect and often relied on his wife’s income. It was only in 1947, when he was almost 50, that he felt sufficiently secure to establish his own practice....Continue Reading

> via The Telegraph