Louis I. Kahn was born in 1901 on the Isle of Osel in Estonia. Immigrating with his family to the United States in 1905, he lived in extreme poverty in Philadelphia and attended public schools. As a high school student he won first prize every year in the drawing and painting contests sponsored by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He won a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in architecture in 1924. After travel in Europe, he organized and directed in 1932 and 1933 the Architectural Research Group. His private practice began in 1935.
Between 1948 and 1957, he was professor of architecture at Yale, following which he became professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, a position he held until his death in 1974. In 1964 he was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He received two honorary degrees, one (Doctor of Architecture) from the Polytechnic Institute of Milan, Italy, the other (Doctor of Humanities) from the North Carolina School of Design, University of North Carolina. In 1965, Mr. Kahn received an honorary doctorate of Fine Arts from Yale University.
Although he struggled for several decades to define his architectural style and obtain commissions, Kahn began to have success after a trip to Egypt, Greece, and Rome, which energized him with the idea of instilling modern buildings with the monumental majesty and spiritual force found in ancient ruins. He obtained his first major commissions in the early 1950s, developing his style and approach with the Yale Art Gallery (1951-53), the Trenton Bathhouse (1954-59), the Richards Medical Towers in Philadelphia (1957-62), and the First Unitarian Church in Rochester, New York (1959-69). His first masterpiece, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California (1959-67) laid the groundwork for the buildings he would construct for the rest of his life.