Writer and architect Peter Jost Blach was sent by his parents to school in England after the Nazis came to power and in 1939 became a student at the Regent Street Polytechnic School of Architecture. He moved to the US around 1940, where he enrolled in the architecture school at the University of Pennsylvania and studied with and worked briefly for Louis Kahn. He became a citizen in 1944 and changed his name to Blake. In his long career, he would become much more famous for his writing than his 50 buildings.
