The Beginning of the Beginning: Kahn and Architectural Education in Philadelphia

Abstract

Paul Philippe Cret was one of Penn’s greatest teachers and one of the city’s greatest architects. Louis I. Kahn, the University’s most well–known teacher, was one of Cret’s students. Holmes Perkins, educated at Harvard under Walter Gropius, reshaped the School and changed its orientation. The key task of the three architects was to articulate a new understanding of what is specific to the discipline, recreating its professional and intellectual center and orientation. This would not require the replacement or elimination of what had been developed in the preceding years; instead the task was to augment it with a more focused sense of what architecture itself is all about.