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Comment on this article The Gallery Goes Home
An ambitious $94 million renovation plan calls for the Art Gallery to take full possession of the three adjacent buildings that have housed its collection. Phase one—the renovation of the 1953 Louis Kahn wing—starts this summer.
May 2003
by Mark Alden Branch ’86 Over the last 136 years, Yale’s art collection—and its artists— have moved periodically down Chapel Street into a succession of new buildings that Sterling Professor Emeritus Vincent Scully calls “one of the most eloquent streetscapes of modern times.” From Street Hall (1867) to Egerton Swartwout’s Old Art Gallery (1928) to Louis Kahn’s New Art Gallery (1953), the procession has been consistently westward. But as part of a large-scale plan for the arts area, the art history department will in the next few years move into a new building by Richard Meier adjacent to the Art & Architecture Building, and the Art Gallery will commence a move backward in time, reclaiming the Swartwout building and Street Hall to form a greater whole that Gallery staff and architects Polshek Partnership are calling the KSS site (for Kahn, Swartwout, and Street). Also on the agenda is a new building to provide accessible “study storage” for the Gallery on a site to be determined. To accomplish this plan, the Gallery launched a $94 million capital campaign for the building this spring, soliciting art lovers and alumni who are sympathetic to the Gallery’s dual mission as a teaching museum and a community resource. The plan is designed to enhance both missions, with classrooms and teaching galleries accompanying expanded display space for the permanent collection. While the plans for the Swartwout and Street buildings are still preliminary, the Kahn building will close this summer for a two-year renovation project. Its window walls will be replaced, partitions removed, the roof repaired, and mechanical systems upgraded. During that time, a selection of the Gallery’s works will be installed in the Swartwout building, and the recently reinstalled American collections will remain on view. 
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