In 1901, when a young Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky was born to Jewish parents on the Estonian island of Saaremaa, few could have imagined the international fame in the boy’s future. But after a 1906 move across the Atlantic, a change of surname (to sound more German and less Russian), an education at the Philadelphia public schools and the University of Pennsylvania, and years of struggle as a young practitioner, Louis Isadore Kahn at last emerged in the 1950s as one of the most important architects of the modern era.
Now, for the first time, visitors to Kahn’s birthplace on Saaremaa in the Baltic Sea can find a large blue marker signaling the importance of the site. In raised yellow lettering, in English on one side and Estonian on the other, it quotes Kahn: “I was born on an island with a castle on it…”
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