How did Kahn look at cities?

To Kahn a city was a place of "assembled institutions." He made several unexecuted proposals for modifying and rebuilding his own Philadelphia. His greatest opportunity to build on a large scale was the Capital Complex for Dacca, Bangladesh (originally planned as a second capital for Pakistan), begun in 1962. The central assembly hall of this problem-laden commission was completed in 1984, a decade after Kahn's death. In his monumental use of basic geometric forms for this complex he approached the character of the ancient ruins he so admired. In the Third World he had begun to build works that truly appeared to be emerging from the very "beginnings" of architecture.