Brilliant buildings
Louis Isadore Kahn and a luminous modernist language

Louis Isadore Kahn (1901 1974) treated each building like a temple. Across the United States, in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Israel, his designs combined the sleek, utilitarian surfaces of modernism with a devotion to geometric forms and a reverence for natural light that suffused his structures with a monumental and breathtaking spirituality.

Kahn was born in Estonia in 1901 but emigrated with his family to Philadelphia,...