Kahn was born in New York, the only son of a prosperous Austrian and French-American Jewish family. His sister
Rena Rosenthal brought design wares from Europe to sell in New York, perhaps providing his earliest introduction to design. Ely Jacques Kahn traveled to Europe where he was aware of the work of architect
Josef Hoffmann. He graduated from
Columbia University in 1903 and later was a professor at
Cornell University. Kahn was the father of noted
New Yorker magazine writer
Ely Jacques Kahn, Jr., and great-grandfather of Ely Jacques Kahn IV, former Director of Cybersecurity Policy at the White House. Kahn's partnership with
Albert Buchman lasted from 1917 until 1930. In this period his work alternated
Beaux-Arts with
cubism,
modernism, and
art deco, of which examples are
2 Park Avenue (1927), using
architectural terracotta in jazzy facets and primary colors; the
Film Center Building in
Hell's Kitchen (1928–29); and the
Squibb Building (1930), which Kahn considered among his best work. In what has become an iconic photograph, Kahn masqueraded as his own Squibb Building with other architects
dressed as buildings for the
Beaux Arts Ball of 1931. The building moved decisively away from the decorative modernity of the Art Deco 20s:
Lewis Mumford praised it in 1931 as "a great relief after the fireworks, the Coney Island barking, the theatrical geegaws that have been masquerading as le style moderne around Manhattan during the last few years." As research for
The Fountainhead, author
Ayn Rand worked in Kahn's office, where Kahn arranged for her to meet
Frank Lloyd Wright. Kahn, who had taken full control of the practice of Kahn & Buchman in 1930, as Ely Jacques Kahn Architects, produced some commercial skyscrapers that combined traditional massing with a skin pared of all details, such as the 42-story Continental Building (1931) at Broadway and West 41st Street. In 1940, he formed a partnership with
Robert Allan Jacobs, the son of architect
Harry Allan Jacobs. An exemplary work of this period is the Universal Pictures Building of 1947 which was used by
Reyner Banham to illustrate air conditioning. Another is 100 Park Avenue; the firm later assisted on the
Seagram Building. In 1944, Kahn and Jacobs rendered a prosaic program, the
Municipal Asphalt Plant, at
FDR Drive between 90th and 91st Street, as a free-standing concrete structure with four
parabolic steel arches. For the
New York Stock Exchange Building annex into
20 Broad Street, Kahn & Jacobs created additional facilities in 1956 designed with their characteristic zig-zag of setbacks in the upper stories. Kahn's work just after
World War II had direct relevance to
Judaism. In 1946, he began a renovation of Manhattan's
Central Synagogue. In 1947, he wrote on the subject of design principles for synagogues in an article entitled, "Creating a Modern Synagogue Style: No More Copying." In 1948, with sculptor
Jo Davidson, Kahn made the first public plan for a
Holocaust memorial in the United States. The chosen site for this project in
Riverside Park later bore other projects for memorials by
Percival Goodman, and
Erich Mendelsohn. Although Kahn retired some years earlier, the firm of Kahn & Jacobs lasted until 1973, the year after Kahn's death. Kahn's extensive architectural drawings and papers, including materials from the firms Buchman & Kahn and Kahn & Jacobs, are held in the Department of Drawings & Archives at the
Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at
Columbia University. ==References==