Editing Louis Kahn (section)

== Early Life ==

Louis Isadore Kahn was born on the island of Saaremaa in Estonia in 1901 and immigrated with his family to Philadelphia in 1906. Growing up in poverty in North Philadelphia, Kahn showed artistic talent that led to training at Philadelphia's public school industrial arts program and eventually to the University of Pennsylvania's architecture school, where he graduated in 1924. The Penn curriculum emphasized Beaux-Arts principles under Paul Philippe Cret, providing foundation in classical composition that would inform Kahn's later work, however transformed by modern influences.<ref name="wiseman">{{cite book |last=Wiseman |first=Carter |title=Louis I. Kahn: Beyond Time and Style |year=2007 |publisher=W. W. Norton |location=New York}}</ref>

Kahn's early career brought work in various offices and a struggle for independent commissions. The Depression limited opportunities, and Kahn spent years on public housing studies and planning projects that provided experience but few built works. Travel to Europe, Egypt, and Greece exposed him to ancient architecture whose monumentality and material expression would later emerge in his mature designs. Through the 1940s and into the 1950s, Kahn sought the distinctive voice that would come only with the Richards Medical Research Laboratories.<ref name="brownlee"/>