Kahn’s mytho-poetic life seems to follow the fabled rags-to-riches pattern. He was born in 1901 in modest circumstances in Russian-controlled Estonia. A few years later the family emigrated to the US. He was nurtured in Philadelphia and professionally trained at the University of Pennsylvania, where he followed the French-inspired Beaux Arts tradition – based on European academic instruction – which had a serious influence on his thinking.

He worked for and with other distinguished architects, mostly on common war and postwar housing problems, and set up his own practice in the late 1940s. His year in Rome at the American School is thought to be his seminal experience. Here his Beaux Arts training helped him ingest Roman forms and grandeurs and later employ them as significant elements in certain buildings, absorbed and regenerated. About this time he received the commission for the Yale University Art Gallery where his latent ideas first achieved built form, though still perhaps in the more International mode popular before the war. Thereafter all his work, private houses to public buildings, proclaim his authorship, a remarkable body of authentic architecture, striding east and west, beyond what few have been able to achieve in more productive practices. Private houses, residential buildings, laboratories, libraries and art galleries, an institution and a Parliament building: all organised on ideal geometries and realised through lucid structure and building fabric.....Continue Reading

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