LOUIS KAHN

DONE BY, ARJUN.M DIVYA.S GAVYA.S GAYATHRI.D

LIFE

• Born February 20, 1901 on Saaremmaa Island in Kuressaare.• Kahn's Jewish parents immigrated to the United States in 1906. • His given name at birth was Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky but was changed upon arrival in the US. • Kahn's architecture is notable for its simple, platonic forms and compositions. • Through the use of brick and poured-in place concrete masonry, he developed a contemporary and monumental architecture that

maintained a sympathy for the site.• While rooted in the International Style, Kahn's architecture was an amalgam of his Beaux Arts education and a personal aesthetic impulse

to develop his own architectural forms. • Kahn received the AIA Gold Medal in 1971 and the RIBA Gold Medal in 1972. • Louis Kahn is considered one of the foremost architects of the late twentieth century.• On March 17, 1974, he died of a heart attack in a men's restroom in Pennsylvania Station in New York City.• Education/ Occupation• He attended the University of Pennsylvania and received his Bachelors degree in architecture at the age of 24. • After college, he worked as a senior draftsman in the office of Philadelphia City Architect John Molitor. • To find his inspiration, he traveled through Europe visiting castles and medieval strongholds in 1928, only 4 years after graduating. • He finally started his own firm in 1935. • While he still designed and worked as a design critic on the side, Louis became a professor of architecture at Yale school of Architecture. • Personal designsKahn created many unique an intricate buildings, but among his most memorable were…

* The Yale University Art gallery: 1951.* The Jonas Salk institute for Biological Studies: 1965* The Margaret Esherick house: 1961* The National Assembly building: 1962

Louis Kahn’s works in India :

• Indian Institute of Management,Ahemedabad• Institute of Public Administration• National Assembly at Dacca.

LIST OF WORKS

• Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut,(1951–1953), • Richards Medical Research Laboratories, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, (1957–1965), • The Salk Institute, La Jolla, California, (1959–1965),• First Unitarian Church, Rochester, New York (1959–1969),.• Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban (National Assembly Building) in Dhaka, Bangladesh (1962–1974)• Shaheed Suhrawardy Medical College and Hospital, Dhaka, Bangladesh• Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, in Ahmedabad, India (1962).• National Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases (NICVD), Dhaka, Bangladesh (1963)• Phillips Exeter Academy Library, Exeter, New Hampshire, (1965–1972), awarded the Twenty-five Year Award by

the American Institute of Architects in 1997. It is famous for its dramatic atrium with enormous circular openings into the book stacks.

• Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, (1967–1972), • Yale Center for British Art, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, (1969–1974).• Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, Roosevelt Island, New York, (1972–1974)

CONCEPT

Influenced by ancient ruins, Kahn's style tends to the monumental and monolithic; his heavy buildings do not hide their weight,

their materials, or the way they are assembled. Louis Kahn's works are considered as monumental beyond modernism.

The Jonas Salk institute for Biological Studies

The National Assembly building

Geometry in his work

Kahn used many different shapes and lines to create his masterpieces. However, among his most famous

creations, he seems to favor both parallel and perpendicular lines. Through his bold technique, he created streamline, radical, and futuristic looking buildings. His stile is his own, and his creations are legendary, through the use of geometry, he has created both beautiful works of art, and useful establishments, for the whole world to enjoy.

THE NORMAN FISHER HOUSE

• The Fisher House, also known as the Norman Fisher House was designed by the architect Louis I. Kahn and built for Dr. Norman Fisher and his wife, Doris, a landscape designer, in 1967 inHatboro, Pennsylvania. 

• The Fisher House is located in Hatboro, Pennsylvania• The Fisher House stands as the clearest example of Kahn's unique architectural style at the time, his use of the two almost perfect

cubes differing greatly from much of what was being done at the time and setting him apart in his own field of design.•  The house is sited along the top ridge of a slight hill just off of Mill Road. Its entry faces the street and is much more closed

on this side. At the rear of the house lies a small wood and a creek runs along at the bottom of the hill.• Kahn had originally planned on an all stone construction but was forced away from that idea due to the prohibitive cost of

building in all stone in Pennsylvania• The Fishers set a budget $45,000.00 and Kahn was forced to strike three rooms from the first sketch plan he drew.• According to the location of the building, Pennsylvania, which is really cold in winter and hot in summer, so the architect have created

the double window in the house, these double window have different size that can effective let the sunlight into the house due to the sun are rise very low in winter at Pennsylvania, meanwhile in the summer, the double window can keep the sunlight outside the building that keep the room in cool.

• The public volume intersects the north face of the private with its southeast corner. The public space, which is perfectly square in plan, holds the entrance corridor and the master bedroom at ground level and two other bedrooms above.

• Throughout the house there are deeply recessed windows. These allow light in during winter and keep out direct light in summer. The recession of the windows provides further use than simply the circulation of light and air through the home.

• Kahn sought a sense of monumentality and longevity in his work, but also strove to bring the ideas of modernism to a place of familiarity.

• In the Fisher house, Kahn uses the stone plinth to create a sense of timelessness. In this plinth he has created a piece of archeology.• The woodwork used in the Fisher house creates the sense of warmth and tradition to an otherwise starkly modern design.

• Material Choices• . The stone foundation was necessary due to the home’s placement on a slope and its’ need for a solid anchoring into the

ground of the site. •  The exterior and interior portions of the home are made from the same cedar wood sourced from the local Pennsylvania

area. This was done to keep down costs.•  The use of cedar wood throughout the interior and exterior of the home compelled Kahn to create amazing details in the

building simply by folding windows into the building envelope to provide new habitable space on both the interior and exterior of the building.

• orientation• the Norman Fisher house consists of three cubes, two cube forms appear like rolled dice sitting at ninety and forty-five

degree angles and  serve as the two buckets of living within the home. •  The orientation of the house gives an impression of an expansive space but these two forms clearly demonstrate a public

and private zone, as do many interior and materialistic features of the house. 

• The Creator's Words• Material we now use in architecture we know only for its superior strength but not for its meaningful form. Concrete and steel must

become greater than the engineer.• The expected wonders in concrete and steel confront us. We know from the spirit of architecture that their characteristics must be in

harmony with the spaces that want to be and evoke what spaces can be.

YALE CENTER FOR BRITISH ART

• The Yale Center for British "Art" is an art museum at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut which houses the most comprehensive collection of British Art outside the United Kingdom. It concentrates on work from the Elizabethan period onward.

• The building was designed by Louis I. Kahn and constructed at the corner of York and Chapel Streets in New Haven, across the street from one of Kahn's earliest buildings, the Yale University Art Gallery, built in 1953. 

• The exterior is made of matte steel and reflective glass; the interior is of travertine marble, white oak, and Belgian linen.• The building's discreet, grey, monotone exterior of mat steel and reflective glass and its clearly read concrete frame confer a certain

noble, armored mien appropriate to its purpose.• Without the plan being fully revealed upon entry, the entrance court immediately establishes a sense of logical orientation, and the

second-floor library court continues this interior organization so that the visitor intuitively feels familiar with the plan and can find his way around the galleries through reference to the courts.

• Louis Kahn's Yale Center for British Art, based on a repetitive 20-foot-square grid, was formally conceived as a series of highly structured 'roomlike' spaces.

• Organized around two inner courts which, like the fourth and top floor, are beautifully naturally lighted from above through a coffered skylight system, the whole ambiance of the building is rich, seductive, and well-scaled to the mainly eighteenth and early nineteenth century paintings.

• The exposed concrete structure with oak paneled inserts has led to a warmer, more sedate feeling, appropriate to the art displayed.• As Kahn asked himself questions about light to the interior he made openings in planes; as he broached questions of exhibit he devised

systems to place planes in space.

• The Creator's Words• A museum seems like a secondary thing, unless it is a great treasury. A treasury, a guarded love for your source. Oh, what a

place that would be! Not just an accumulation crowded together. You go through halls and halls and halls. The Museum of Cairo is a confined building that looks more like a storage house than it does a museum.

• Constructed of brick, concrete, glass, and steel, and presenting a windowless wall along its most public façade, the building was a radical break from the neo-Gothic buildings that characterize much of the campus, including the adjacent Swartwout building.

• When it opened in November 1953, the “Yale University Art Gallery and Design Center” included expansive, open spaces for the exhibition of art, as well as studio space for use by art and architecture students.

Indian Institute of Management,Ahemedabad

• The Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM Ahmedabad, also known as IIMA) is considered to be the premier institute of management education in India.

• Every time a student walks past a really expensive piece of architecture that belongs to his college.

• Louis Kahn, the American architect, was an exponent of exposed-brick architecture.

• The most distinctive feature of the plan was the numerous arches and square brick structures with circles carved out in the facade.

• These arches were first constructed by the architect himself and later on taught it to the workers on site.

• Those original prototypes could be found in the residential areas even today.

• Huge open spaces depict the freedom thought, the principles that this institute stand for.

• Even the classrooms have been designed to facilitate students’ participation in the class.

• The most awe-inspiring and photographed view is that of the main academic block which is built as a huge monolith.

• The dorms are connected to the main complex by a series of arched corridors and landscaped courts.

• The 132 feet long underpass connects the old campus to the new. • There is a stark contrast between the new campus and the old. • The new campus which came into being • only a few years ago has a starkly different architecture from the

one at the old campus. • The rooms here much more spacious and each dorm is home to a

larger number of students.

LOUIS KHAN WORKS IN INDIA & THEIR INFLUENCES ON EMPIRICISTS

•Louis khan was steeped in classicism by his beaux arts education and hisExperience at the American Academy in Rome.

•He came to India to in 1962 a decade later than Lecorbusier on being Selected to design IIM Ahemedabad.

•Kahn’s influence on the Indian architectural scene occurred in much sameWay as Lecorbusier but the time, volume , Location and size of his workResulted in a lesser impact. he was less of a guru for Indian Architects.

•Some of his work in India were the IIM in Ahemedabad and gandhinagarGujarat’s new capital.

•Kahn is officially listed as the architectural consultant to the National Insitute of design in Ahemedabad on the IIM Project but he was actuallyThe architect. Doshi & Anant Raje were the liason architects.

•In IIM he used local building skills and used brick , a common buildingMaterial rather than going for more sophisticated techniques used by Lecorb in Chandigarh.

Entrance to the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.

The main complex and Louis Kahn Plaza

•In South Asian work he was able to explore the use of brick in way that He had been unable to do in America. his Indian experiences thus very Much influenced the later American architecture.

•The IIM seems to have stood up well over time although shortcomings in Dealings with the climate are again in evidence.

•Kahn’s Indian colleagues such as Raje and assistants such as Kulbushan Jain were directly affected by the experience of working with him. his major Lessons for India stemmed from the grounding of his work in reality andTradition , local materials and methods .

•On Khan’s death and the withdrawal of his Philadelphia office from work On the IIM , Raje continued the development of the campus with the Designing of the dining halls , the Management Development center and The housing for staffs and students .

•To the lay person this work is almost this work is almost indistinguishable From Khan’s and gives consistency of design to the whole Institute.

•Like lecorbusier ,Kahn also had an impact on architectural education. His Collaboration with doshi occurred in formative years of the school of Architecture at the CEPT in Ahemedabad. With the development of such Schools and with the younger architects being Exposed to the work of Lecorbusier and Khan , a new period of ArchitecturalWork emerged in India. It is highly influenced by the Masters

Bibliography

Sokol, David. Louis Kahn-Designed House (Still) Up for Sale http://archrecord.construction.com/news/daily/archives/08052kahn.asp © 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Nov 8, 2008

Wikipedia, free encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Kahn

4 October 2008. Nov 9, 2008.

Cavern, Jackie. Louis Kahn, Modernist Architect. http://architecture.about.com/od/greatarchitects//louiskahn.htm. Nov 9, 2008.