Brilliant buildings
Louis Isadore Kahn and a luminous modernist language

Louis Isadore Kahn (1901–1974) treated each building like a temple. Across the United States, in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Israel, his designs combined the sleek, utilitarian surfaces of modernism with a devotion to geometric forms and a reverence for natural light that suffused his stuctures with a monumental and breathtaking spirituality. Kahn was born in Estonia in 1901 but emigrated with his family to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1906. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania School of Fine Arts in 1924 and worked in different architecture offices before setting up his own atelier in 1934. 

Kahn devoted much time to the study of contemporary architecture and housing, blossoming with his own unique style in the last two decades of his life.