Louis Kahn

Louis I. Kahn, an Estonian-born architect, believed architecture should fulfill both practical and aesthetic needs while also meeting the human needs of the communities it served. Selected in 1973 as the architect of the Roosevelt memorial, he spent more than a year crafting a design he defined in a lecture at the Pratt Institute as a space of commemoration and remembrance, simply "a room and a garden" for inspired use. Among his other notable buildings are the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, the National Assembly Building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth, Texas. FDR Four Freedoms State Park was the last project he designed before his untimely death in March 1974. New York City and State remained committed to building it, but political change and lack of funding prevented construction that year and the project stalled. Almost forty years later, the memorial was revived and opened to the public in October 2012.

New York, New York · United States