Louis Kahn was awarded the AIA Gold Medal and the RIBA Gold Medal.
31 Facts About Louis Kahn
2.
Louis Kahn, whose original name was Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky, was born into a poor Jewish family, at that time in the Russian Empire, but now in Estonia.
3.
Louis Kahn spent his early childhood in Kuressaare on the island of Saaremaa, then part of the Russian Empire's Livonian Governorate.
4.
Louis Kahn put the coal in his apron, which caught on fire and burned his face.
5.
Louis Kahn carried these scars for the rest of his life.
6.
Louis Kahn became a naturalized citizen of the US on May 15,1914.
7.
Louis Kahn's father changed their name to Kahn in 1915.
8.
Louis Kahn excelled in art from a young age, repeatedly winning the annual award for the best watercolor by a Philadelphia high school student.
9.
Louis Kahn was an unenthusiastic and undistinguished student at Philadelphia Central High School until he took a course in architecture in his senior year, which convinced him to become an architect.
10.
Louis Kahn turned down an offer to go to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to study art under a full scholarship, instead working at a variety of jobs to pay his own tuition for a degree in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania School of Fine Arts.
11.
Louis Kahn worked on the designs for the 1926 Sesquicentennial Exposition.
12.
Louis Kahn was interested particularly in the medieval walled city of Carcassonne, France, and the castles of Scotland, rather than any of the strongholds of classicism or modernism.
13.
Louis Kahn worked with Howe in the late 1930s on projects for the Philadelphia Housing Authority and again in 1940, along with German-born architect Oscar Stonorov, for the design of housing developments in other parts of Pennsylvania.
14.
Louis Kahn did not arrive at his distinctive architectural style until he was in his fifties.
15.
Louis Kahn developed his own style, as influenced by earlier modern movements, but not limited by their sometimes-dogmatic ideologies.
16.
Louis Kahn described this proposal at a lecture given in 1962 at the International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado:.
17.
Louis Kahn eventually was named as the Albert F Bemis Professor of Architecture and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956.
18.
Louis Kahn then returned to Philadelphia to teach at the University of Pennsylvania from 1957 until his death, becoming the Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture.
19.
Louis Kahn was a visiting lecturer at Princeton University School of Architecture from 1961 to 1967.
20.
Louis Kahn was elected a Fellow in the American Institute of Architects in 1953.
21.
Louis Kahn was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1964.
22.
Louis Kahn was awarded the Frank P Brown Medal in 1964.
23.
Louis Kahn was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1968 and awarded the AIA Gold Medal, the highest award given by the AIA, in 1971, and the Royal Gold Medal by the Royal Institute of British Architects, in 1972.
24.
In 1974, Louis Kahn died of a heart attack in a restroom at Penn Station in Manhattan.
25.
Louis Kahn had just returned from a work trip to India.
26.
In 2003 Nathaniel Louis Kahn released a documentary about his father, My Architect: A Son's Journey.
27.
Louis Kahn's work infused the International style with a fastidious, highly personal taste.
28.
Louis Kahn argued that brick can be more than the basic building material:.
29.
Louis Kahn worked closely with engineers and contractors on his buildings.
30.
Many years after his death, Louis Kahn continues to provoke controversy.
31.
Louis Kahn was the subject of the 2003 Oscar-nominated documentary film My Architect: A Son's Journey, presented by Nathaniel Louis Kahn, his son.