Louis I Kahn National Assembly building Dhaka 1962 83 Center of - AH - 205 View Full Document 23. Louis I. Kahn, National Assembly building, Dhaka 1962-83.  Center of government for East Pakistan, completed as East Pakistan became Bangladesh  Mosque, president’s residence, assembly halls 24. Louis I. Kahn, National Assembly building, Dhaka 1962-83, two views of the prayer hall.  Architecture could influence ideas of Western democracy in newly formed country 25. Louis I. Kahn, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad 1962-74.  Large university campus  Design based on geometric view of architecture This preview has intentionally blurred sections. Sign up to view the full version. View Full Document  Uses local materials and those which are easier to use: reinforced concrete 26. Jeet Lal Mahotra, High School, Chandigarh 1959-60.  Geometric repetition  Use of brick  Predates Kahn in SE Asia 27. Balkrishna V.

Doshi, Architect’s Studio (Sangath), Ahmedabad 1979-81.  Vaults covered in ceramic to protect from sun, openings, 28. Balkrishna V. Doshi, Architect’s Studio (Sangath), Ahmedabad 1979-81, interior view.  Part of building is below ground to keep temperature down 29. Balkrishna V. Doshi, Husain-Doshi Gufa, Ahmedabad 1992-95.  Construction is below ground  Each hall covered by thin reinforce concrete dome  Pillars to hold up, covered by ceramic tiles to reflect sunlight and control temperature 30. Stupa, Sanchi (near Bopal, Madhya Pradesh) 5th century BC-1st century AD. 31. Charles Correa, Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya, Ahmedabad 1958-63.  Gandhi Memorial  Large pavilion built of reinforced concrete and bricks  Very large horizontal space open on all sides  32.

Charles Correa, Kovalam Beach Hotel, Kovalam 1969-74. This is the end of the preview. Sign up to access the rest of the document. TERM Technological Advancements of the 60s BU The off-kilter life of a great American architect Thursday 3, March 2016 The off-kilter life of a great American architect Louis Kahn, whose work is on display at the Bellevue Arts Museum, designed buildings that he called “ruins in reverse.” His personal life was eccentric in the extreme. Louis Kahn, 1972 Credit: © Robert C. Lautman Photography Collection, National Building Museum The two New York cops discovered the old man’s body in a men’s room toilet on the lower level of Penn Station. It was Sunday night. The only ID was a passport issued to Louis I. Kahn. The address had been deliberately scratched out. For three days, the body lay unclaimed in the city morgue. Eventually, someone figured out that Louis I. Kahn, the mystery corpse, was actually the Louis Kahn, one of the 20th century’s giants of architecture.

The New York Times put the story on Page 1 the following day. Louis Kahn’s undignified death in March 1974, at age 73, was in keeping with a professional and personal life that was remarkably off kilter, even by the often quirky standards of the design trade. Kahn’s output was modest compared to other big names in the field. He never designed a commercial building. His best buildings came in a decade late in life. Several major projects were never built, victims of his notorious fussiness and client budget limits. A bitter feud with Philadelphia’s urban planning boss effectively blacklisted Kahn for large projects in his hometown. His domestic life was unconventional, to put it mildly. He was pathetic with money and his firm was perpetually on the financial brink. He died broke. But oh, the successes. The Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla. The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and two art museums at Yale. The library at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. And Kahn’s final masterpiece, albeit off the beaten track, the National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Each a “must see” on anyone’s short list of modern architectural marvels.

These, and other built and unbuilt projects from Kahn’s drawing board, plus drawings, paintings and intriguing objects from his professional life, are on display at the Bellevue Arts Museum (BAM). It’s the first retrospective of Kahn’s work in 20 years and it confirms, if confirmation were needed, why Kahn is worshipped by architects, past and present. Frank Gehry is one of Kahn’s acolytes. The swooping, computer-generated curves in Gehry’s buildings, like Seattle’s Experience Music Project Museum , seem light-years removed from the grounded designs that flowed from Kahn’s drawing board, but Gehry, in a short video at the Kahn show, gives proper credit: “My first work came out of my reverence for him.” Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, 1959-65 Born in 1901 in Baltic Russia (now Estonia), Kahn came to the U.S. with his parents as a young boy and settled in Philadelphia, where he lived his entire life. At the University of Pennsylvania, his talent as an artist morphed into a love of architecture. Early on, he designed houses and several public housing projects.

Intrigued by the novel construction principles in Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome , Kahn and colleague Anne Tyng designed a 540-foot twisting City Tower for municipal workers in center city Philadelphia. A 12-foot model of the tower dominates the BAM show. The real thing was never built. Neither were massive cylindrical parking garages that Kahn wanted to place on the downtown perimeter, making center city Philadelphia largely pedestrian. All of Kahn’s urban planning ideas, some of them clearly utopian, were shot down by Edmund Bacon , executive director of the city planning commission — and the father of actor Kevin Bacon. Bacon’s blueprint for reshaping Philadelphia made him nationally famous and put him on the cover of Time magazine. The two men, each with a Type A ego, clashed. Bacon won. “It would have been an incredible tragedy if they had built one single thing Lou recommended for downtown Philadelphia,” said a self-satisfied Bacon, years later. “They were all brutal, totally insensitive, totally impractical.” A fellowship at the American Academy of Rome came just in time. Always a traveler, Kahn discovered a spiritual link in ancient structures. Grecian temples. The French walled city of Carcassonne.

His excitement at first seeing the Egyptian pyramids jumps off a postcard he sent to Anne Tyng at the home office: “No pictures can show their monumental impact. They are any color you want them to be.” A large 18th century print of Piranesi’s proposed plan for Rome’s Campo Marzio was added visual inspiration for an architect reaching back in time. It hung for years on a wall in Kahn’s office and is hanging these days on a wall at BAM. The more Kahn travelled, the more he retreated into antiquity, out of step with peers like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson . The modernists were fixated on airy buildings with glass walls. Kahn’s designs had thick slabs and huge circular cutouts. Spaces were painstakingly arranged to capture and modulate outside light. Brick and exposed concrete were his favored materials. In a word, Kahn was designing modern buildings that looked timeless. “Ruins in reverse” is a favorite Kahnism. In 1959, Jonas Salk , developer of the polio vaccine, asked Kahn to design a research institute on a prime 27-acre Pacific Ocean shoreline site in La Jolla, outside San Diego.

“Create a facility worthy of a visit by Picasso,” Salk told Kahn. Mission accomplished. A symmetrical series of poured concrete ”study towers,” with walls pivoted 45 degrees, provide space for large open labs and windows with spectacular ocean views. One wonders how any research gets done. The towers flank a long rectangular courtyard, bare except for a thin rill stretching toward the blue Pacific. Kahn wanted a garden between the buildings but noted Mexican architect Luis Barragán convinced him to keep the plaza bare except for the water feature. Give Kahn credit for knowing a great idea when he heard it. In Fort Worth, Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum resembles a half dozen horizontal farm silos, stacked together. A clever skylight system diffuses the burning Texas sun into a lush interior glow in the barrel vault galleries. An ideal environment for Rembrandt, Michelangelo and other masterpieces from the Kimbell’s collection. In the eyes of some critics, it’s the 20th century’s most revered museum.

Louis Kahn in front of a model of the City Tower Project in an exhibition at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, February 1958 It’s impossible to consider Kahn and ignore his bizarre domestic life, an aspect barely mentioned in the BAM show. Kahn was married for 44 years to Esther Israeli. Subsequently, he had romantic relationships with two women, his professional colleague Anne Tyng , and Harriet Pattison , a landscape architect who played a major role in the Kimbell’s site design. Pattison also collaborated with Kahn on Franklin Delano Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park at the tip of Roosevelt Island in New York City’s East River. Each of these three woman had a child with Kahn at widely spaced intervals. The relationships were barely acknowledged by the adults and the three children didn’t know the other two existed until after Kahn’s death. This odd arrangement is explored in My Architect , a widely praised documentary film by Nathaniel Kahn, Pattison’s son and the youngest of the three children. In the film, Tyng and Pattison speak poignantly about their conflicted relationships with Kahn. Esther Kahn refused to talk.

In a heart-wrenching moment, Nathaniel, who was 11 years old when his father died, meets his two older half-sisters in a house designed by their father. They discuss what it means to be a family. Nathaniel also visits several of his father’s buildings and talks with Kahn’s colleagues. My Architect was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2003. Said New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp: “I have never seen or read a more penetrating account of the inner life of an architect, or of architecture itself, than that presented in this movie.” My Architect is virtual prerequisite for anyone attending the BAM show. BAM screened it once last month with Nathaniel Kahn in attendance. Not showing it regularly during the exhibit seems like a lost opportunity. Fortunately, you can watch it free online . National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, 1962-83 The BAM show’s final gallery highlights Khan’s most complex project, Sher-e-Bangla Nagar, Bangladesh’s national parliament building.

Film shot by Nathaniel Kahn contrasts Dhaka’s urban ruckus — overcrowded buses, noisy tuk-tuks, helter-skelter river boat traffic — with the silence and order that the parliament house seems to command. A lone woman in a purple sari sweeps a broad flight of steps with a broom. A handful of young men do coordinated calisthenics in the shade of the parliament walls. A panoramic view shows a portion of the monumental government complex sitting placidly in a reflective man-made pond. Is the building waterlogged and sinking — an appropriate image for a sea-level country where vast numbers are regularly drowned in floods and cyclones, and for a national economy that struggles mightily just to stay above water? Or does it symbolize the hope of a desperately poor country on the upswing, a government rising from the water like an aquatic phoenix? Maybe both. Inside, it is quiet. A handful of parliamentarians do the people’s business. And worshippers bow toward Mecca in a large prayer room. Kahn, a secular Jew, threw all his efforts at the end of his life into designing the governmental centerpiece for an Islamic nation with a major space in that complex dedicated to daily Muslim prayer.

The Dhaka complex took 23 years to complete. Khan never saw it. It was finished in 1983, nine years after his death. A scene in My Architect captures the impact. Shamsul Wares, a Bangladeshi architect, says the parliament complex was an impossible dream for his country. Kahn was “not a political man but he’s given us the institution for democracy from where we can rise,” Wares says. “He wanted to be Moses here. He gave us democracy.” Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture, is at The Bellevue Arts Museum until May 1. It travels to the San Diego Museum of Art in November and to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth in March, 2017. The show was organized by the Vitra Design Museum in Weil Am Rhein, Germany.

Show comments Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture | San Diego Museum of Art Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture Now through January 31, 2017 Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture is the first retrospective of Louis Kahn's work in two decades, presenting over 200 objects related to Kahn's selected buildings and projects in the form of architectural models, plans, original drawings, photographs, films and more. With complex spatial compositions and a mastery of light, Louis Kahn's architecture is regarded as a touchstone of 20th century modernism. Dignified, beautiful, and imbued with a powerful universal symbolism, Kahn's designs remain a testament to his belief that architecture should be monumental and spiritually inspiring. Among his most famous works are the Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA ; the Kimbell Art Museum in Forth Worth, TX; and the National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh. At The San Diego Museum of Art, Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture will be accompanied by Shape, Shadow, Space , an exhibition of architectural photography from students of the Woodbury University School of Architecture .

The Museum will also present a symposium on Saturday, November 5, 2016, featuring Ariel Plotek, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, The San Diego Museum of Art; Wendy Lesser, editor of The Threepenny Review and author of the forthcoming biography, You Say to Brick: The Life of Louis Kahn (due in spring 2017); William Whitaker, Curator and Collections Manager, Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design; and Sara Lardinois, Project Specialist, The Getty Conservation Institute. The Museum will also screen the film My Architect, A Son’s Journey, presented by the director and Kahn’s son, Nathaniel Kahn on January 13. Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture is accompanied by a series of programs and events.

November 4 | Friends' Lecture and Reception November 5 | Members' Preview Louis Kahn in Ahmedabad and Dhaka Louis Kahn in Ahmedabad and Dhaka Kathleen James-Chakraborty Deutsch English Español Français Italiano Das Büro Louis Kahn nahm 1962 die Arbeit am Indischen Institut für Management (Indian Institute of Management) in Ahmedabad, Indien und an der Nationalversammlung in Dhaka, Bangladesch auf. Diese Bauten sollten nicht als Werk eines einzelnen Architekten oder eines Architektenbüros angesprochen werden, sondern auch die zahlreichen anderen an ihrer Entstehung beteiligten Fachkräften honorieren, von den Bauarbeitern, die neue Verfahren des Ziegelmauerns und Betongießens meisterten, bis zu den Akademikern und Beamten, deren Anforderungen ebenfalls die Formen prägten.

Die Verhandlung der verschiedenen Interessen und der kulturellen Hintergründe dieser oft miteinander in Konkurrenz stehenden Kompetenzen verzögerte zwar die Fertigstellung beider Bauvorhaben, trug aber letzten Endes wesentlich zu ihrem Erscheinungsbild bei. Louis Kahn’s office began work on the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, India, and the National Assembly in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 1962. Rather than the work of a single architect, or even of that architect’s office, these buildings should more properly be credited as well to the many other experts involved in their creation, from the construction force that mastered new ways of laying brick and pouring concrete, to the academics and officials whose demands also shaped their forms. Negotiating the different interests, as well as cultural backgrounds, of these often competing kinds of expertise slowed the completion of both projects but ultimately contributed in powerful ways to their appearance.

En 1962, el estudio de arquitectura de Louis Kahn empezó a trabajar en los edificios del Instituto Indio de Administración (Indian Institute of Management) en Ahmedabad, India, y de la Asamblea Nacional de Bangladesh, en Dhaka. El valor de estos edificios no se debe únicamente a que sean la obra de un mismo arquitecto, ni siquiera de un mismo estudio de arquitectos: sería más exacto atribuir el mérito a los numerosos profesionales que contribuyeron a su creación, desde el trabajo de los obreros que dominaron nuevas formas de enladrillar y colar el cemento, hasta el de los académicos y los funcionarios cuyos requisitos también moldearon sus formas. Las negociaciones, superando intereses y culturas diferentes, y a menudo la experiencia antagónica de cada colectivo, ralentizaron la finalización de ambos proyectos, pero en última instancia fueron una poderosa contribución a su aspecto externo.

En 1962, le cabinet de Louis Kahn a débuté son travail sur le bâtiment de l’Institut indien de gestion (Indian Institute of Management) à Ahmedabad, en Inde, et sur celui de l'Assemblée nationale à Dhaka, au Bangladesh. Mais plus qu’à un seul architecte, ou même à un cabinet d'architecture, ces bâtiments devraient plutôt être attribués à la fois aux nombreux experts impliqués dans leur réalisation, depuis la main-d’œuvre maîtrisant de nouvelles technique de maçonnerie et de coulage du béton, jusqu’aux universitaires et fonctionnaires dont les exigences se répercutèrent également sur la forme. La négociation des différents intérêts ainsi que les origines culturelles de ces types d’expertise souvent en concurrence entre elles ont ralenti l’aboutissement des deux projets pour finalement contribuer de façon déterminante à leur aspect final.

Lo studio di Louis Kahn iniziò a lavorare al progetto dell’Istituto indiano di gestione (Indian Institute of Management) di Ahmedabad, India, e all’Assemblea nazionale di Dacca, Bangladesh, nel 1962. Più che come opera di un solo architetto, o del suo studio, questi edifici dovrebbero piuttosto essere considerati come l’opera collettiva di tutti gli esperti coinvolti nella loro creazione: dalla manodopera che ha saputo padroneggiare nuove tecniche per posare mattoni e colare cemento, agli accademici e ai funzionari le cui richieste hanno contribuito a modellarne le forme. Il fatto di dover far coesistere interessi e background culturali diversi e competenze spesso in contrasto tra loro ha certo rallentato il completamento di entrambi i progetti, ma ha contribuito in modo consistente al loro aspetto finale. 1In 1968 a Pakistani civil servant, M. G.

Siddiqui, recently appointed Chief Engineer of the American architect’s Louis Kahn’s National Assembly under construction in Dhaka, wrote home following his visit to the architect’s Philadelphia office: 1 I thank the Graham Foundation for funding this research. M. G. Siddiqui, typescript of tour notes, (...) The method of working of Professor Louis I. Kahn's office is unusual. In a normal commercial Architect's office the original idea is sketched by the Architect himself and its further development, detailed planning, etc., is left to the office. Professor Kahn waits for the inspiration and then personally supervises further development of his idea at all stages of its development. On most of the occasions, the original idea and almost each stage of its development is discussed by the Professor with his staff, the aesthetic feature explained, comments obtained and considered. On many occasions far-reaching changes are made. Then while the idea of the day for a particular work is being developed by the office, the Professor may think out a better solution and the whole process of discussion, amendments and developments is repeated. The first lot of drawings and models go into the record of development of the final idea and are of no other use.

Sometimes the process is repeated many times before the plans are finalized and sent to the client. The staff are paid on an hourly basis and are naturally very happy with this arrangement as they get paid even for the period when the Professor is expounding theories applicable to the case under consideration. 1 2 David B. Brownlee and David De Long (eds.), Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture, Los Angele (...) 2Siddiqui’s astonishment to find that Kahn did not conform to his expectation of an efficient western professional raises the question of who is an expert. What, moreover, are experts expected to provide, and what can they in fact deliver? And how is the situation affected by cultural difference when European-born architects (Kahn immigrated to the United States as a child) work in the Third World? Many different groups contributed expertise to the design and construction of Kahn’s Indian Institute of Management (IIM) in Ahmedabad and the National Assembly in Dhaka (fig. 1 and 2).

2 In addition to the international team in Kahn’s own office, local architects played a key role, as did businessmen and economists in the case of IIM, and engineers from the Pakistani Department of Public Works in the case of Dhaka. The role of contractors and construction labor was also crucial. Figure 1: Indian Institute of Management, courtyard with faculty offices block on left and classroom block on right, Louis Kahn, Ahmedabad, India, 1962-74. Source: Wikipedia Commons: ​wikipedia/​commons/​thumb/​f/​fb/​Dhaka02.jpg/​1280px-Dhaka02.jpg 3 Timothy Mitchell, The Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity, Berkeley, CA: University (...) 3Each group provided distinct kinds of expertise. Kahn could be depended upon for a high quality of design that would receive worldwide attention. He could facilitate also the training of local construction labor to participate in a global workforce, and could assist local architects in establishing high profiles in the international architectural community.

His talent did not always dovetail exactly, however, with the expectations of his clients, who wanted large and complex buildings delivered in an efficient manner that would in the case of Pakistan also fuse the integration of the latest technology with respect for Islamic precedent and local social mores. 3 Mediating between these two groups were the interests of the architects who turned down prestigious commissions in order to bring Kahn to South Asia. 4The interactions between these groups could fail, be negotiated, or prove mutually beneficial. In the case of Kahn’s major buildings in South Asia, difficulties in communication and differing expectations about whether modern architecture was primarily a theoretical position regarding how one builds, or the delivery of the most up to date technological systems delayed the design and construction process, all but bankrupted his firm, and hindered the ability of his clients to realize their own goals. Construction proved to be an arena of cross-fertilization, as both parties shifted their standard practice in ways that transformed Kahn’s architecture, the architecture of a younger generation of leading Indian architects, and the careers of construction workers in Bangladesh, as East Pakistan became in 1971. And there were successes, not all of them specifically Kahn’s. IIM became one of Asia’s best business schools.

The new nation of Bangladesh acquired one of its key symbols. Indian architects, especially those affiliated with the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT) in Ahmedabad built careers as architects and academics in India and abroad, especially in the United States. 5Kahn was clearly not the kind of expert his Pakistani client expected. He ran a boutique rather than a corporate practice. His goal was not profit or the efficient delivery of product but the aesthetic quality of the building. This he believed resided above all in the way it was constructed and the society it helped shape. As such he was not, despite the international renown he increasingly enjoyed by 1962, conventionally well equipped to deal with the scale of South Asian commissions he received that year and on which he worked for the rest of his life. 6The biggest and most highly regarded building Kahn had completed to date was the Richard Medical Research Laboratories on the University of Pennsylvania campus. The core of this project, finished in 1960, was the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art the following year.

At Richards Kahn established himself as a master of up-to-the minute construction techniques to serve scientific purposes; this building would exert a major influence on Team X in Europe and Metabolism in Japan. 4 Louis I. Kahn, address delivered in United States District Court for the eastern district of Pennsy (...) 7Beyond aesthetic integrity and excellence, Kahn’s practice abroad was shaped by his commitment to providing what he termed “availabilities.” Kahn, who had benefitted as a poor immigrant from a variety of philanthropic organizations in his adopted city of Philadelphia, sought to nurture the societies in which he worked by giving their citizens access to the educational and political institutions that enabled individuals to make their own choices about their lives. In an emphatically patriotic address to new American citizens, Kahn once described South Asia as a region in which “98% of the people cannot dare to have any desires whatsoever as to what they might want to be. And it never crosses their mind because the sense of availability is not there.” 4 5 Susan G. Solomon, Louis I. Kahn’s Trenton Jewish Community Center, New York, NY: Princeton Architec (...) 6 Louis I.

Kahn, letter to James Keough, 6 August 1973, copy in “Rabat 2,” Box LIK 106, Kahn Collecti (...) 8Kahn’s point of view was that of a thankful Jew spared the Holocaust by his immigration to the United States. 5 The turbulent sixties failed to shake his commitment to an enlightened architecture of propaganda. In 1973 he wrote the United States Information Agency, “I have noticed that architecture is not included in the media services of the USIA . . . . Architecture, one of the strongest media of social expression, should be a part of the collaborative atmosphere... [It] could forward the image of America through the non-interests power of commonality inherent in Art. Our sense of liberty and democracy has made us the richest of all countries in the offering of availabilities to its people. The places of these availabilities present our way of life... The buildings we design in foreign cities must be our best. We may even learn from such special offerings to build better expressions of our own.” 6 7 Louis I. Kahn, “Remarks,” Perspecta, no. 9-10, 1965, p.

322. Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural (...) 8 William H. Seward, letter to Culver E. Giddon, 12 March 1965, copy in “C. E. V.,” Box LIK 58, Kahn (...) 9Although Kahn’s clients were foreign, American interests were clearly involved in commissions executed at the height of the Cold War. Based on the Harvard Business School, whose plan Kahn carefully studied, the Indian Institute of Management was intended by its American sponsor, the Ford Foundation, (often a conduit for CIA funding) and the local mill owners to foster Indian economic development by educating students in American-style capitalism. 7 This was a significant political statement in a country that, although officially nonaligned, still followed the Soviet model of state-sponsored economic planning. The prestige of having an American design the political infrastructure of Pakistan was even greater. The State Department, when granting a visa waiver for one of his staff, the Argentine Carles Valhonrat, acknowledged that “the successful completion of the Pakistan commission is considered to be of national importance” to the United States. 8 9 William J. R.

Curtis, Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms, New York, NY: Rizzoli, 1986, p. 200-12; for th (...) 10 The library at IIM is named after Sarabhai and the Management Development Centre after Lalbhai. 10Prestige was also important to Kahn’s Indian and Pakistani clients. Gujarati businessmen and economists, who were extraordinarily well informed about contemporary architecture internationally, founded IIM. Key member of this circle, including Gautam and his sister-in-law Manorama Sarabhai, had already commissioned four buildings from Le Corbusier, while Gautum and his sister Gita founded the National Institute of Design (NID) with the help of Charles and Ray Eames (fig. 3). 9 They were also certainly reacting against the socialist bias of Indian economic planning at the time by choosing Harvard’s Business School as a model. Kahn’s clients, who included Gautum’s brother Vikram Sarabhai, the scion of a local industrial dynasty, and Kasturbhai Lalbhai, were very involved in the early phases of the design.

10 Figure 3: Mill Owner’s Association Building, Le Corbusier, Ahmedabad, India, 1951-54. 11 The Sarabhai family remains involved in the running of Gandhi’s former ashram. See (...) 12 . Accessed 10 February 2013. 13 Sherrif Moloobhoy, “Offices and Stores for Calico Mills, Ahmedabad,” Marg, vol. 3, 1949, p. 14-6. 14 MARG [Modern Architecture Research Group], “Architecture and You,” Marg, vol. 1, October 1946, p. 4 (...) 11These men and women were enormously proud of the role that they and their families had played in supporting Mahatma Gandhi, whose base was from 1917 to 1930 an Ahmadabad ashram, in particular, and Indian independence in general. 11 They were well informed about and proud of their cultural heritage; Vikram’s wife Mrinalini was one of India’s leading classical dancers. 12 Nonetheless they were unreserved in their support of modern architects from abroad.

Gautum Sarabhai had even tried to get Frank Lloyd Wright to build for his family’s Calico Mills. 13 Understanding indigenous architecture to be compromised by the adept use the British had made of it, these scions of India’s first industrialists believed in visible symbols of economic and social as well as political progress. 14 Wealthy and sophisticated, they were committed to both modernity (Vikram Sarabhai was the father of India’s space program) and modernism as the path forward for their young nation. 15 Kathleen James-Chakraborty, “Architecture of the Cold War. Louis Kahn and Edward Durrell Stone in S (...) 12Kahn’s Pakistani clients were less informed about contemporary architecture; they hired Sir Robert Matthew to help them organize the planning of their new capital of Islamabad, to which Kahn was originally asked to contribute the presidential estate. Although he eventually lost this commission to Edward Durrell Stone, he was also asked to design the National Assembly, which was being offered as a sop to East Pakistan, the more populous half of the country.

For the government of Ayub Khan, the general who had seized power in 1959, turning to an American architect was undoubtedly intended in part to please the superpower with which Pakistan had unequivocally sided in the Cold War. 15 16 . Accessed 28 March 2014. 17 Kazi Khaleed Asraf, “Muzharul Islam, Kahn and Architecture in Bangladesh,” Mimar, vol. 31, 1989, p. (...) 13Kahn was hired to design both IIM and the National Assembly after the ambitious young local architects originally offered the commissions turned them down in favor of turning to an architect they expected to be able to integrate them and their students into the international architectural community. Balkrishna Doshi, who had been the project architect for Le Corbusier’s work in Ahmedabad, met Kahn on a visit to the University of Pennsylvania. Doshi, who was teaching architecture at NID, originally brought Kahn to serve as consultant on what was at the beginning an NID commission. He remained engaged with IIM throughout the life of the project; and also with teaching.

He spun CEPT, India’s most prestigious architecture school, off from NID in 1962. 16 Throughout the history of the commission, it was he, rather than the client, who provided the Indian architects who worked on the project in both Philadelphia and Ahmedabad. Mazural Islam, who had studied at Yale when Kahn was teaching there, had similar pedagogical aims, but was unable to operate personally as an interface between Kahn and the Pakistani Department of Public Works. Islam, like many Bengalis, was increasingly estranged from the Pakistani national government, whose engineers worked directly with the office, staffed by Americans, that Kahn established in Dhaka. 17 14Neither the professional architects nor the engineers charged with designing and supervising the construction of the two buildings recognized the construction workers as experts, but in fact the considerable skills of these men and women were integral to their completion. Kahn himself very much believed his responsibility to help train a new generation of South Asian architects extended as well to even those who labored manually setting bricks and crafting formwork.

18 Roy Vollmer, letter to Additional Chief Engineer, 30 June 1965, in “Pakcap – Correspondence to/from (...) 19 Kathleen James, “Indian Institute of Management,” in David Brownlee and David De Long (eds.), Louis (...) 20 According to J. B. MacAllister, letter to M. G. Siddiqui, 22 August 1966, in “MacAllister’s Visit t (...) 21 “Question Hour,” Dawn, 26 June 1965, p. 6. 22 Subrata Roy Chowdhury, The Genesis of Bangladesh, Bombay; New York, NY: Asia Publishing House, 1972 (...) 23 Neil Thompson, letter to Henry Wilcots, 17 October 1968, in “Pac Correspondence To/Fr Gus, Jun 1968 (...) 15The relationship between these diverse groups of experts with widely varying motivations was often fragile. Communication posed a particular problem, exacerbating economic challenges and cultural differences. Almost all information was sent by post, except when Kahn traveled in person to the site; telephone calls remained prohibitively expensive.

Customs officials could cause further delays, holding up the already slow speed at which drawings arrived from Philadelphia. 18 In 1969 Kahn nearly lost the commission for IIM, which was largely completed by Anant Raje. 19 Raje, a graduate of the J. J. School in Bombay, worked in Kahn’s Philadelphia office for several years, before returning to Ahmedabad, where he had earlier collaborated with Doshi, to take charge of the IIM campus. The Dhaka commission posed even greater challenges. Kahn worked for a pittance in Ahmedabad, but expected to be paid as an expert for Dhaka. Instead the Pakistani government was at least as late paying its bills as Kahn was in developing design details. 20 The cost to Pakistan proved even higher than it was to Kahn. The delays in constructing the National Assembly further inflamed the considerable tensions between East and West Pakistan, with easterners resenting the speed with which the new West Pakistani capital of Islamabad was being realized. 21 The army harshly repressed the growing unrest. In 1971 Bangladesh declared its independence. 22 Three years earlier a disgruntled PWD source had told Kahn's Dhaka office, “The selection of Louis I.

Kahn as the Architect has been the biggest mistake Pakistan has made since 1947.” 23 16Less fraught, yet the subject of considerable discussion with compromises on both sides, was the issue of how to construct the two projects. This was an area of complex negotiation between parties with competing agendas. Cognizant that its use would channel most of the construction costs into the pockets of day laborers, Kahn’s IIM clients insisted on as much brick as possible. This decision resonated as well in Dhaka. Although the National Assembly itself was constructed entirely of concrete, the Ayub Hospital and hostels for the legislators were built of brick. The basic outlines of Kahn’s approach to brick in Ahmedabad are well known. Kahn himself declared: 24 Kahn as quoted in Richard Saul Wurman (ed.), What will be has always been: The Words of Louis I. Ka (...) I had to learn to lay brickwork from scratch... Why hide the beauty of open brickwork? I asked the brick what it wanted and it said I want to be an arch, so I gave it an arch. But then I had to teach the bricklayers that an arch was really an arch and not just any curve between two points.

I wanted the first arches ever built to be left as they were, a little playground for children. 24 25 Amit Srivastava, “Encountering Materials in Architectural Production: The Case of Kahn and Brick at (...) 17Standard practice in both Ahmedabad and Dhaka was to cover both brick and concrete construction in a layer of stucco. This meant that the quality of brick and concrete finish did not need to be very high. Kahn instead focused on educating his workforce to expose finely detailed structural work. Amit Srivastava has recently unearthed many new details regarding the use of brick in Ahmedabad, not least by interviewing a number of the surviving masons, many of whom Kahn knew by name. 25 Less well known are the details of Kahn’s attempts to change the way concrete was used in Dhaka or the benefits it proved to have for laborers there. 26 Edward R. Ford, The Details of Modern Architecture: 1928-1988, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996, vol.

(...) 18Kahn’s focus on inculcating a theoretical approach to modern architecture that was at odds with local as well as international practice conflicted with the goals of his Pakistani clients. The constant tensions in Dhaka over the quality of finishes highlighted the gap between civil servants, trained as engineers and judged on their ability to get the job done and their architect, who believed he had a moral responsibility to develop alternatives to exactly the standard modern procedures they were hoping to import. 26 27 Maria Langford for Roy Vollmer, letter to David Wisdom, 30 June 1965, in “Pac Cap – Correspondence (...) 28 Report by F. A. Faruqui & Day, Superintending engineers, appended to Ahmed, letter to Louis Kahn, 1 (...) 29 Specifications, 2 April 1964, “Second Cap Pak,” LIK Box 19A, Kahn Collection. 30 Henry Wilcots to David Wisdom, letter of 8 June 1967, in “PAC – Correspondence to/from Gus, Hune 19 (...) 19Also at issue were the limited skills of the local labor force.

In 1965 an American working in Dhaka wrote home to the Philadelphia office, “Try to keep all the detailing simple. A workman uses no tools. Please make everything straight forward, simple, and unsophisticated. Most people here cannot read, let alone read drawings.” 27 Kahn initially proposed to use pre-stressed concrete, as he had at Richards, but this was entirely outside the capacity of the local construction industry. Modernity would, at least to some degree, have to be a matter of form rather than technology. In 1964 a local source informed him, “In East Pakistan concrete is one of the most expensive items in the building industry... Practically all the high rise buildings in Dhaka are made of [reinforced concrete] frame, having brick panel walls to get uniformity and smooth surface after plastering the walls... The outside walls and columns can be ornamentally treated with different types of finishing materials and ornamental brick facing... The idea of making reinforced concrete without any sort of rendering (plaster) should be abandoned.” 28 This was anathema to Kahn, who remained throughout his life a strict modernist when it came to the doctrine of truth to materials.

Instead he set out to transform the local construction industry, much as he had been asked to do in Ahmedabad. When in 1965, he finally abandoned the hope of using concrete for anything but the National Assembly building, he commented dryly, that the “brick is to be manufactured locally but is not necessarily the standard product of the locale.” 29 Nonetheless, one Dhaka contractor simply refused to believe that his concrete, too sloppy for Kahn's staff, would not eventually be covered in plaster, as it had always been before. 30 31 Nazimmudin Ahmed, “Architectural Development in Bangladesh,” in Robert Powell (ed.), Regionalism in (...) 20The impact of Kahn’s forcefully expressed opinions on local practice in both countries was nonetheless enormous. It was facilitated by the key role that his example played in training not only construction labor but also architects. The presence of Doshi, who became one of the leading Indian architects of his generation, and of CEPT, in Ahmedabad was invaluable.

In Bangladesh, which acquired its first professionally trained architect only in 1953, the influence of his brick vocabulary was and remains even more ubiquitous, although his treatment of concrete, with inset bands of marble to mark each pour apparently remains unique. 31 32 Louis I. Kahn, undated typescript of presentation to Pakistanis in “Pakistan Correspondence - Misc. (...) 33 “Minutes of a Meeting held on 19 Jan. 1970,” in “PAK PWD Correspondence 1969,” LIK 117, Kahn Collec (...) 21Nor did the impact flow in a single direction. The demands that his Pakistani clients made for specifically Islamic content forced Kahn to relate his work explicitly to monumental pre-colonial precedents. He respected his clients’ demand for “an Islamic touch,” without always being able to offer what they desired. “All along,” he once noted, “our effort has been to evolve the new architectural forms for a new civic order, within the framework to suit the personality of a great Islamic Culture with glorious traditions of Mughal Architecture.

This approach to the solution of the problem is an effort to link the promising future with the glorious past.” 32 The Islamic character of the National Assembly lies in the prominence Kahn assigned to the mosque, which he expanded to ten times the size required in the program. Its design was the focus of particular concern about identity. Kahn's clients feared that a proposed pyramidal roof would “give the impression of a church,” and requested a dome in its place. When Kahn declared in its defense, “after being covered with marble it will present a very pleasant appearance from the South Plaza,” a Pakistani official countered “the sentiments of those who will offer prayers inside the mosque were far more important than any aesthetic architectural consideration.” 33 34 Louis I. Kahn, “Interview,” Perspecta, no. 7, 1961, p. 9-18, and Kathleen James, “Form versus Funct (...) 35 Balkrishna Doshi in Richard Saul Wurman, What will be has always been, op. cit. (note 24), p. 271-3 (...) 22The demands that Kahn’s Indian and Pakistani clients placed upon him radically reoriented Kahn’s architecture.

Many of the characteristic features of his late work, including his fascination with layered compositions that shade interiors from intense light and the organization of institutions around central courtyards, were the direct result of his experiences in Africa and Asia. 34 Far from the Philadelphia setting of Richards, Kahn unhitched his architecture from the fascination with the mechanized movement of people and air that made him a forefather for the metabolists in Japan and the megastructural movement in Europe and the United States. Although usually attributed to his grounding in western classicism, the balance between formal clarity and flexible programming characteristic of Kahn's late work owed at least as much to his exposure to medieval and early modern architecture in South Asia. 35 Indeed after 1962 he spent far more time in the region than he did in Europe. 36 James Steele, The Complete Architecture of Balkrishna Doshi: Rethinking Modernism for the Developin (...) 23Nor did the benefits accrue to Kahn alone. The leadership of IIM may have wished to get their buildings up as quickly as possible, but in the long term the delays had no major ill effect as the school quickly emerged as one of the most outstanding in the region. Moreover architecture remained key to the IIM brand.

Raje, who also had a distinguished career teaching at CEPT, remained in charge of the Ahmedabad campus; Doshi designed its Bangalore counterpart (fig. 4). Indeed, few people gained more from Kahn’s presence in India than Doshi and his students. For much of the rest of his career Doshi has designed buildings that have had a clear relationship with Kahn’s work. 36 In fact Kahn helped integrate Doshi, who had worked with Le Corbusier, and his students into professional international networks, not least because so many people from abroad came to see the city’s modernist monuments. Figure 4: Indian Institute of Management, Balkrishna Doshi, Bangalore, India, 1983. Photo: Sanyam Bahga. Source: Wikipedia Commons: ​wikipedia/​commons/​thumb/​1/​11/​IIM-B_016.jpg/​1280px-IIM-B_016.jpg 37 The most complete publication of the building before its completion appears in Romaldo Giurgola and (...) 24While the work of Bangladeshi architects remains less known internationally, in the National Assembly the new nation of Bangladesh gained a powerful national symbol.

Completed in 1983, a dozen years after independence and nine after Kahn’s death, it has become a powerful stimulus for local desires for democracy, especially since its receipt of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1989 drew international attention to the completion of a project about which the international community had largely forgotten. 37 Moreover the fact that Kahn laid out large public spaces around the Assembly has provided Dhaka with some of its most significant open areas, used by large numbers of people from different social groups. 25The story of Kahn’s commissions in South Asia reminds us that buildings are never the work of a single figure, or even produced solely by an architectural firm. A large array of intersecting networks of people from various social backgrounds shares responsibility for commissioning, designing, and constructing them and thus deserves credit for their aesthetic successes and failures. Moreover the impact of a building encompasses not only the experiences of the users of the finished structure but also those who are familiar with it only through images.

It also includes, in the case of IMM and the National Assembly, the increased skillset they bestowed upon a diverse set of groups that includes the South Asian construction workers in the Gulf who got their initial training on these building sites, the graduates of CEPT teaching at major American universities, and the IIM alumni who share a familiarity with Kahn’s work with their counterparts from Exeter and Yale. IIM and the National Assembly empowered all of them even more than they did their architects. 12 . Accessed 10 February 2013. 13 Sherrif Moloobhoy, “Offices and Stores for Calico Mills, Ahmedabad,” Marg, vol. 3, 1949, p. 14-6. 14 MARG [Modern Architecture Research Group], “Architecture and You,” Marg, vol. 1, October 1946, p. 4-7. 15 Kathleen James-Chakraborty, “Architecture of the Cold War.

Louis Kahn and Edward Durrell Stone in South Asia,” in Anke Köth, Kai Krauskopf and Andreas Schwarting (eds.), Building America: Eine große Erzählung, Dresden: Thelem, 2008, vol. 3, p. 169-82. 16 . Accessed 28 March 2014. 17 Kazi Khaleed Asraf, “Muzharul Islam, Kahn and Architecture in Bangladesh,” Mimar, vol. 31, 1989, p. 55-63. 18 Roy Vollmer, letter to Additional Chief Engineer, 30 June 1965, in “Pakcap – Correspondence to/from Roy Gus, October 8, 1964 thru June 30, 1965,” LIK Box 117, Kahn Collection. 19 Kathleen James, “Indian Institute of Management,” in David Brownlee and David De Long (eds.), Louis I. Kahn, op. cit. (note 2), p. 368-72. 20 According to J. B. MacAllister, letter to M. G.

Siddiqui, 22 August 1966, in “MacAllister’s Visit to Dacca Aug 66 II,” LIK 116, Kahn Collection, Kahn’s office had run up $250,000 debt on the project by the middle of that year. 21 “Question Hour,” Dawn, 26 June 1965, p. 6. 22 Subrata Roy Chowdhury, The Genesis of Bangladesh, Bombay; New York, NY: Asia Publishing House, 1972, for a pro-Bangladeshi and Herbert Feldman, The End and the Beginning: Pakistan 1969-1971, London: Oxford University Press, 1975, for a pro-Pakistani interpretations. 23 Neil Thompson, letter to Henry Wilcots, 17 October 1968, in “Pac Correspondence To/Fr Gus, Jun 1968 thru Dec. 31, 1968,” Box LIK 117, Kahn Collection.

See also Roy Vollmer’s letters in “Pakcap – Correspondence to/from Roy Gus, October 8, 1964 thru June 30, 1965,” Box LIK 117, Kahn Collection. 24 Kahn as quoted in Richard Saul Wurman (ed.), What will be has always been: The Words of Louis I. Kahn, New York, NY: Accesspress; Rizzoli, 1986, p. 252. 25 Amit Srivastava, “Encountering Materials in Architectural Production: The Case of Kahn and Brick at IIM,” Ph.D. diss, University of Adelaide, 2009. 26 Edward R. Ford, The Details of Modern Architecture: 1928-1988, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996, vol. 2, p. 305-35, for the gap between Kahn’s construction and standard American practice. 27 Maria Langford for Roy Vollmer, letter to David Wisdom, 30 June 1965, in “Pac Cap – Correspondence to/from Roy/Gus, Oct. 8.

1964 thru June 30, 1965,” Box LIK 117, Kahn Collection. 28 Report by F. A. Faruqui & Day, Superintending engineers, appended to Ahmed, letter to Louis Kahn, 12 June 1964, in “Second Cap Pak,/Pak Pu Wk Dept/ Correspondence 1964,” LIK Box 117, Kahn Collection. 29 Specifications, 2 April 1964, “Second Cap Pak,” LIK Box 19A, Kahn Collection. 30 Henry Wilcots to David Wisdom, letter of 8 June 1967, in “PAC – Correspondence to/from Gus, Hune 1967 thru Dec 1967,” LIK Box 117, Kahn Collection. 31 Nazimmudin Ahmed, “Architectural Development in Bangladesh,” in Robert Powell (ed.), Regionalism in Architecture, Singapore: Concept Media, 1985, p. 27-39, for the history of Bangladeshi architecture.

For an example Kahn’s continuing influence there see the profile of Kashef Chowdhury in Catherine Slessor and Rob Gregory, “Emerging Architecture and Creative Resiliance,” Architectural Review, 23 November 2012, URL: . Accessed 11 February 2013. 32 Louis I. Kahn, undated typescript of presentation to Pakistanis in “Pakistan Correspondence - Misc.,” Box LIK 120, Kahn Collection. 33 “Minutes of a Meeting held on 19 Jan. 1970,” in “PAK PWD Correspondence 1969,” LIK 117, Kahn Collection. 34 Louis I. Kahn, “Interview,” Perspecta, no. 7, 1961, p. 9-18, and Kathleen James, “Form versus Function: The Importance of the Indian Institute of Management in the development of Louis Kahn's Courtyard Architecture,” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 49, 1995, p. 38-49. 35 Balkrishna Doshi in Richard Saul Wurman, What will be has always been, op. cit.

(note 24), p. 271-3; William J. R. Curtis, “Authenticity, Abstraction and the Ancient Sense: Le Corbusier's and Louis Kahn's Ideas of Parliament,” Perspecta, no. 20, 1983, p. 182-94, and his “Modern Architecture and the Excavation of the Past,” in Mateo Kries, Jochen Eisenbrand and Stanislaus von Moos (eds.), Louis I. Kahn: The Power of Architecture, op. cit. (note 2), p. 235-52. 36 James Steele, The Complete Architecture of Balkrishna Doshi: Rethinking Modernism for the Developing World, London: Thames and Hudson, 1998. 37 The most complete publication of the building before its completion appears in Romaldo Giurgola and Jaimini Mehta, Louis I. Kahn, Denver, Colo.: Westview Press, 1975, p. 130-49. The key American publication immediately afterwards was Bruno J.

Hubert, “Kahn’s Epilogue, National Capital, Dacca, Bangladesh,” Progressive Architecture, vol. 65, December 1984, p. 56-67. It received an Aga Khan award in the 1987-89 award cycles. Kazi Khaleed Asraf, “Muzharul Islam, Kahn and Architecture in Bangladesh,” op. cit. (note 17), and Kazi Khaleed Asraf and Saif Ul Haque, Sherebanglanagar: Louis I. Kahn and the Making of a Capital Complex, Exhibition Catalogue (Dhaka, Bangladesh National Museum, August 17-September 9, 2002), Dhaka: Loka Publications, 2002, p. 8, testify to the local pride in the final product.

Louis i kahn - Education Education Share Louis i kahn Embed <iframe src="" width="750" height="600" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no" style="border:1px solid #CCC; border-width:1px; margin-bottom:5px; max-width: 100%;" allowfullscreen> </iframe> <div style="margin-bottom:5px"> <strong> <a href="" title="Louis i kahn" target="_blank">Louis i kahn</a></div> size(px) Text 1. LOUIS KAHN DONE BY, ARJUN.M DIVYA.S GAVYA.S GAYATHRI.D 2. 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 designs Kahn 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. 3. 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) 4.

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 5. 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. 6. 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 ofarcheology.

• The woodwork used in the Fisher house creates the sense of warmth and tradition to an otherwise starkly modern design. 7. • 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. 8. 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 confera 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 througha 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. 9. • 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. 10. 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. 11. LOUIS KHAN WORKS IN INDIA & THEIR INFLUENCES ON EMPIRICISTS •Louis khan was steeped in classicism by his beaux arts education and his Experience 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 same Way as Lecorbusier but the time, volume , Location and size of his work Resulted 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 gandhinagar Gujarat’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 actually The architect. Doshi & Anant Raje were the liason architects. •In IIM he used local building skills and used brick , a common building Material 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 12. •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 and Tradition , 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 Architectural Work emerged in India. It is highly influenced by the Masters 13. Bibliography Sokol, David.

Louis Kahn-Designed House (Still) Up for Sale ahn.asp © 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Nov 8, 2008 Wikipedia, free encyclopedia. 4 October 2008. Nov 9, 2008. Cavern, Jackie. Louis Kahn, Modernist Architect. Nov 9, 2008.

Question: The architect Louis Kahn designed which Asian capital's Government Assembly complex in 1962?
Answer: DHAKA