Recently there has been a good deal of discussion about Louis Kahn, especially in consequence of the masterful documentary “My Architect” (2003), which his son Nathaniel put together four years ago. If Louis Kahn had passed away at the age of 50, he would scarcely have merited a footnote in the history of architecture in Philadelphia, where he grew up and spent most of his life. And yet, at his death less than 25 years later, he was, after Frank Lloyd Wright, the most famous American architect in history. It has taken until now, however, for an in-depth biography of the man to appear in print, and Carter Wiseman, who teaches at the Yale School of Architecture, has done us all a service by producing “Louis I. Kahn” (Norton, 268 pages, $60), a balanced and penetrating study of Kahn both as an architect and as a man.

In admirably clear prose, Mr. Wiseman gives us all the major details of Kahn’s career, from his birth in Russian-controlled Estonia in 1901 to his death of heart failure in a Grand Central bathroom in 1974. We learn of his early interest in drawing and music, his education in the Beaux-Arts tradition of architecture, his marriage and philandering, and the hundreds of humiliating failures he had to endure before his ultimate triumph. As might be expected in a book of this sort, sufficient space is devoted to Kahn’s private life, but most of it is devoted to his completed buildings: The Yale Art Gallery, his first major commission; the fabulous Salk Institute in La Jolla; the Phillips-Exeter Library; the Assembly building in Dhaka, Bangladesh; and, finally, the great Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and the Yale Center for British Art.

In the process of reading Mr. Wiseman’s narrative, we come to know Kahn as well as he can probably be known. This indeterminacy is the result of a certain indefeasible mystery that hedged the man, itself a direct consequence of a fundamental lack of self-knowledge. Intensely focused on and committed to the cause of architecture, Kahn surely knew how to get what he wanted — once he decided what that was. But within the context of his being — by most accounts — a generous and decent man, he appears in this biography as a rough manifold of emotions that swirled around him and existed in a state of uneasy equilibrium with his intellect.

Mr. Wiseman must have known that he had his work cut out for him when he chose his somewhat intractable subject. If Kahn appears inscrutable in the book, that is because he was inscrutable in life. Although he had three families going concurrently — and, you could argue, three wives — many people who knew him well never even knew that he was married at all. Surely he was able, in his gruff and clumsy way, to win people to his cause, but one has the impression that he existed at a different level from those fellow humans with whom he interacted. This expressed itself in the almost autistic intensity that characterized everything he did.

But it was that intensity that powered his unconquerable devotion to architecture. Often he wouldn’t even go home at night, but would sleep on a rug in his office. In one especially amusing episode, Mr. Wiseman relates how the recently widowed Jacqueline Kennedy came to Kahn’s Philadelphia office to interview him about designing the Kennedy Library. “The visit,” Mr. Wiseman writes, “was something of a disaster. Kahn had failed to do much to tidy up the shabby quarters, which were entered past a drywall partition covered with notes and numbers scrawled in haste. … Those members of the staff who were present for the visit remember Kahn taking an eraser to the drywall, but to little avail. In any case, the office was still littered with juice cans overflowing with cigarette and cigar ashes.”

That plum commission ultimately went to I.M. Pei. Fortunately for architecture, however, most of Kahn’s prospective clients were drawn to his lack of slickness. Indeed, such details as his devotion to cigars, his scarred face — from a childhood accident — and the Coca-Cola bottle glasses that he used to correct his poor eye-sight have transformed Kahn into an archetype of authenticity, even a hero among younger architects and the public at large.

Perhaps that unconquerable sense of incongruity, of not quite fitting into his circumstances, inspired him to raise his sights a little higher than most of the other architects of his time. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that he reintroduced spirit and poetry into the severe machinery of modernist architecture. Mr. Wiseman quotes a good friend of Kahn’s and a fellow architect, David Rinehart: “For Lou, every building was a temple. Salk was a temple for science. Dhaka was a temple for government. Exeter was a temple for learning.”

That seems to me to be one of the most perceptive things ever said about Louis Kahn. And if one has any doubts about its accuracy, the lavish illustrations that are included in Mr. Wiseman’s book will promptly dispel them.

jgardner@nysun.com