When Louis Kahn suffered a heart attack and died in 1974 The New York Times declared in its Page One obituary that he was “America’s foremost living architect.” Kahn built that estimable resume entirely from his base in Philadelphia, a city which his Estonian parents brought him to as a young child in 1906. In 1912 young Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky became Louis Isadore Kahn and he sailed through his studies at Philadelphia’s Central High School and the Public Industrial Art School. He received a degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania after working under master designer Paul Philippe Cret.

After graduation Kahn worked in several Philadelphia-based architecture shops, including Cret’s. He was appointed chief of design for the buildings erected for the city’s Sesquicentennial celebration in 1926. After several years traveling abroad, Kahn hung out his own shingle in 1935. Always a social progressive, much of Kahn’s early work was public projects completed for the Philadelphia Housing Authority.

Kahn turned to teaching in 1947 at Yale University. He did not come to modernist architecture until after he was 50 years old – and a trip to study the classical structures of Greece and Egypt. Kahn saw in the ancient ruins a solidity of form and he applied their ageless principles to modern techniques. Kahn’s vision for powerful but simple geometric shapes rendered in durable materials such as brick and concrete first manifested itself in the Yale Art Gallery in 1952.