How much do you know about the life and work of architect Louis Kahn?

Louis Kahn: The Estonian-American Architect (1901-1974)

• Kahn was a Philadelphia-based American architect, born in Estonia and originally named Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky.
• He founded his own design firm in 1935, but also worked as a professor of architecture at Yale School of Architecture and the University of Pennsylvania.
• Kahn's style was characterised by heavy, monolithic buildings that did not conceal their weight or materials.
• He was awarded the AIA Gold Medal and the RIBA Gold Medal.
• Kahn was considered by some "America's foremost living architect" at the time of his death.
• Kahn was born into a poor Jewish family in Estonia, and emigrated to the US in 1906.
• He excelled in art as a child, and eventually studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania School of Fine Arts.
• Kahn worked on the designs for the 1926 Sesquicentennial Exposition as a senior draftsman, and later worked with architects Paul Philippe Cret and Zantzinger, Borie and Medary in Philadelphia.
• He founded the Architectural Research Group in 1932, which produced unbuilt schemes for public housing.
• Kahn's distinctive architectural style developed later in life, after he was influenced by his stay at the American Academy in Rome.
• He taught at Yale University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology before returning to Philadelphia to teach at the University of Pennsylvania.
• Kahn was awarded the Frank P. Brown Medal, made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and elected a Fellow in the American Institute of Architects.
• He had three children with three women, and died of a heart attack in Penn Station in Manhattan in 1974.
• Kahn's work continues to influence contemporary architects and provoke controversy.