Louis Isadore Kahn (1901–1974): The Poet of Concrete Louis Isadore Kahn (Leiser-itze Schmuilowsky), born February 20, 1901, in Kuressaare, Estonia—a town nestled on the Baltic Sea island of Saaremaa—was an Estonian-born American architect whose singular vision profoundly shaped the landscape of modern architecture. His life’s trajectory was marked by a formative encounter with light and fire as a young boy, experiences that would indelibly imprint upon his artistic sensibility and inform his lifelong preoccupation with materiality and form. Despite facing considerable hardship during his ear…