Famous Architects Posters & Prints “K...-L...-”
for art, art history and social studies classrooms, home schoolers, and offices.

Albert Kahn
Louis Kahn
Kallikrates
Frederick Kiesler

Benjamin Latrobe
Claude Nicolas Ledoux
Pierre Charles L'Enfant
Jaime Lerner

Albert Kahn
b. 3-21-1869; Rhaunen, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany
d. 12-8-1942; Detroit, MI

Albert Kahn developed a new style of factory construction, replacing wood with reinforced concrete, which allowed of expansive space. Henry Ford's River Rouge Plant, a half mile long with a peak work force of 120,000, was an Albert Kahn design. Kahn buildings on the University of Michigan campus include Hill Auditorium, Angell Hall, and the Burton Memorial Tower.

• Albert Kahn: Architect of Ford

Louis Kahn
b. 2-20-1901; Russian Empire
d. 3-17-1974; NYC

Louis Kahn, who trained in the Beaux-Arts style and studied the ancient and medieval architecture like the walled city of Carcassonne, developed his own aesthetics. He was based in Philadelphia.

• My Architect: A Son's Journey (2003) DVD

Kallikrates (also spelled Callicrates)
fl. fifth century BCE.

Kallikrates and Iktinos were architects of the Parthenon.

• Architecture and Meaning on the Athenian Acropolis

Frederick Kiesler
b. 9-22-1890; Ukraine
d. 12-27-1965

Theater designer, artist, theoretician and architect Frederick Kiesler was considered both an oddball and a man far ahead of his time.

• Frederick J. Kiesler: Endless Space

Florence Knoll, née Schust
b. 5-24-1917; Saginaw, Michigan

Architect and furniture designer Florence Knoll studied under Mies van der Rohe and Eliel Saarinen, and worked briefly with Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Wallace K. Harrison.

Her philosophy was that architects should be involved in the design of furniture and her work is iconic of the 20th century. Knoll's most famous buildings are Connecticut General Life Insurance building in Bloomfield, Connecticut and the interior of the CBS Building in New York City.

Benjamin Latrobe
b. 5-1-1764; West Yorkshire, England
d. 9-3-1820: New Orleans, yellow fever

Labrobe has been called the “Father of American Architecture” for his work as Surveyor of the Public Buildings of the United States and as the second Architect of the Capitol. (The first was William Thornton, the third was Charles Bulfinch.)

• Benjamin Latrobe at Amazon

Claude Nicolas Ledoux
b. 3-21-1736; Dormans-sur-Marne, France
d. 11-18-1806; Paris

Architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux designed the theatre of Besacon, an innovation at the time as the first to have a ground floor amphitheatre furnished with seats for the ordinary paying public, and a screen to hide the orchestra.

Ledoux is also noted for his proposed ideal city for the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans, or Salines de Chaux. In addition to the city being built near the forest that would supply the fuel for the drying pans of saline water that flowed to the works by canal, the shape of the buildings would explain their identify and function, i.e. the hoop makers houses were shaped as barrels. His work was considered utopian.

• perspective posters

Pierre Charles L'Enfant
b. 8-9-1754; Anet, France
d. 6-14-1825; US, buried in Maryland

In 1791 George Washington appointed architect and civil engineer Pierre Charles L'Enfant to design the new capital city for the fledgling United States.

L'Enfant's plan specified that most streets would be laid out in a grid in an east-west direction and north-south direction. Diagonal avenues, later named after the states of the union crossed the grid. Circles and rectangular plazas that would later honor notable Americans and provide open space were designed for where diagonal avenues intersected with the north-south and east-west streets.

FYI - L'Enfant had come to the American colonies in 1777, serving with Major General Lafayette and on the staff of George Washington, during the Revolutionary War.

• Grand Avenues: The Story of Pierre Charles L'Enfant, the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C.

Jaime Lerner
b. 12-17-1937; Brazil

Jaime Lerner is a renowned architect and urban planner noted for his work in Curitiba, Brazil.

• A Convenient Truth: Urban Solutions from Curitiba, Brazil, DVD

Louis Le Vau
b. 1612; Paris
d. 10-11-1670; Paris

Louis Le Vau, with André Le Nôtre, was charged with making the chateau at Versailles suitable for the French court of Louis XIV.

He also redesigned Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte for Nicolas Fouquet and collaborated with Claude Perrault on the Palais du Louvre.

Maya Lin
b. 10-5-1959; Athens, OH

As an undergraduate architecture student at Yale, Maya Lin won the design competition for the Vietnam War Memorial. Her concept was to “create an opening or a wound in the earth to symbolize the gravity of the loss of the soldiers”. Other Lin works include the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, and “The Wave Field” on the campus of the University of Michigan.

• Maya Lin: Architect and Artist

Adolf Loos
b. 12-10-1870; Moravia
d. 8-23-1933; Vienna

Aldof Loos was one of the most influential architects and writer/critics of Modern architecture. In his essay “Ornament and Crime” he repudiated the florid style of the Vienna Secession, the Austrian version of Art Nouveau. In this, and many other essays, he contributed to the elaboration of a body of theory and criticism of Modernism in architecture.

• Adolf Loos: Works and Projects