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Coming to Light
A great architect’s first great work is restored.
January/February 2007
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
Photo tour by Richard Barnes
If you made it through your time at Yale without
figuring out that the building Louis Kahn designed for the Yale University Art
Gallery is a masterpiece of modern architecture, here’s some good news: it’s
not your fault.
Within a few years of its completion in 1953, Kahn's
seminal building underwent a series of alterations that hid its essence behind
drywall partitions. This process continued for decades as offices, classrooms,
and storage space ate up more and more square footage, making the building
unrecognizable as the light-filled, free-flowing space Kahn had designed.
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The restoration is more than an aesthetic
improvement. |
Which brings us to more good news: after a
three-year, $44 million renovation, the Art Gallery and a team of architects
have brought the building back to something like its original condition. Its
glass exterior walls, which were plagued with condensation from the beginning,
have been re-engineered so that they will stay dry and clear. Its interior
spaces have been opened up to more closely resemble Kahn’s loftlike originals.
And the concrete cylinder that houses the building’s main staircase—once
hidden behind partitions in an effort to create extra storage space—is
now exposed. “What you see now is a more open floor plan than the building
enjoyed even in its 1953 debut,” says Jock Reynolds, the Art Gallery's
director.
The restoration is more than an aesthetic
improvement. It is also the fulfillment of a responsibility to architectural
history. The building is the first important work by Kahn (1901-1974), a
revered architect who is known for combining the abstract language of modernism
with the weight and gravity of the ancient ruins he admired. Kahn built more
resolved and mature works around the world in the two decades after he
completed the gallery—among them the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas;
the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California; the National Assembly building in
Bangladesh; and Yale’s own Center for British Art—but the gallery was his
first major commission at the late-blooming age of 50.
Kahn had practiced on his own in Philadelphia since
1935, but his built work consisted mostly of houses and small renovation
projects. It was while teaching architecture at Yale that he was selected, in
1951, to design an addition to the Art Gallery’s 1928 building by Egerton
Swartwout (now referred to as the Old Art Gallery or, more commonly, the
Swartwout building). The addition would provide new exhibit space for the Art
Gallery and studios for the School of Art’s city planning, architecture, and
graphic design programs. His response—Yale’s first foray into modern
architecture—was a series of open spaces interrupted by a cylindrical
concrete stairwell and a rectangular core housing the elevator and mechanical
equipment. The ceilings, which became the signature feature of the building,
were concrete tetrahedra with openings for the placement of lighting for
artworks (the first use of track lighting in a museum setting). For the display
of art, Kahn’s friend and colleague George Howe, chair of the architecture
department, devised a system of movable partitions called “pogo panels” because
of the spring-loaded poles that held them in place.
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The architects and museum staff sought to undo decades of
alterations. |
For all the innovation in the display of art, the
building’s materials—concrete blocks, glazed bricks, window walls, and
poured concrete—were just as forward-looking for their time. “It
represented a new direction in modernism,” says Duncan Hazard '71, the lead
architect for the renovation and a partner at the Polshek Partnership. “It was
a kind of modernism that was more deeply connected with materials, structure,
and the art of building.”
In renovating the building, says Reynolds, “we
decided very early on that this building deserved to be treated as one of our
greatest artworks.” The architects and museum staff sought to undo decades of
alterations, including the roofing-over of a sunken courtyard at the corner of
York and Chapel. (The restored courtyard proved just the right size for Richard
Serra’s sculpture Stacks, which had dominated the sculpture hall of the Swartwout building
since 1990.) A museum store and other intrusions on the first floor were
removed so that visitors could take in the building’s elemental features—the
stair cylinder, the window walls, and the ceiling—immediately upon
entering. Much of the first floor is devoted to a generous lobby that Reynolds
describes as a “living room” where students, faculty, and the public can “cool
down and linger with art.”
Upstairs, curators have had the opportunity to
rethink the display of their collections from scratch, and in some cases (Asian
and African art in particular) more space. But the current arrangement will be
relatively short-lived. After an addition to the Art and Architecture Building
is completed, renovation work will begin on the Swartwout building and Street
Hall. By 2010, the gallery will have exhibit space stretching across all three
structures. “As happy as people are now about the Kahn building,” says
Reynolds, “wait until 2010 if you want to really see this place in full bloom.”  |
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What They Said
The project represents incredible flexibility while
paying homage to its surroundings. … I’m impressed with the pure respect
and humility of the building.
Hugh Newell Jacobsen '55MArch, on bestowing the
American Institute of Architects 25-Year Award on the building, 1979
The existing gallery, built just 25 years earlier,
was an Italian Romanesque palazzo designed by Egerton Swartwout, a Yale
architect, and paid for by [Edward] Harkness. It had massive cornices and a
heavy pitched slate roof. On the Chapel Street side, it featured large windows
framed in compound arches of stone.
Kahn’s addition was … a box … of glass,
steel, concrete, and tiny beige bricks. … In the eyes of a man from Mars or
your standard Yale man, the building could scarcely have been distinguished
from a Woolco department store in a shopping center. In the gallery’s main
public space the ceiling was made of gray concrete tetrahedra, fully exposed.
This gave the interior the look of an underground parking garage.
Tom Wolfe '57PhD, From Bauhaus to Our House, 1981
This building has many virtues. … It also has
many questionable aspects, such as the awkward and perverse arrangement of a
triangular staircase in a “silo,” which is both esthetically and physiologically
uncomfortable and, as in the elevator hallways, an exposure of ducts which
reminds one of Wright’s phrase, “indecent exposure.”
Aline B. Louchheim, the New York Times, November 29, 1953
On Chapel Street, [the Kahn building's] undecorated
brick façade meets the Italianate Gothic Swartwout building, a part of the
museum complex, and defers to its elegant arches. … A stairway up to an
entrance between two planes of the bronze-colored brick cleanses the visual
palate, and prepares the visitor for the nearly devotional space within.
Joseph Giovannini '67, The Architect’s Newspaper, February 15, 2006
The great concrete frame looms over the gallery
spaces, enforcing a sense of heavy physical pressure which had generally been
absent from earlier modern architecture but which was coming into its own at
that time in Le Corbusier’s late work. Kahn’s slab has therefore been described
in part in terms of Le Corbusier’s “Brutalism,” which had a savagely
primitivizing effect on buildings in cities during the following years. … But Kahn’s slab was not really that; it was more mathematical than animal,
structural rather than sculptural.
Vincent Scully '40, '49PhD, Yale in New Haven:
Architecture and Urbanism, 2004
The true revelation occurs when you step into the
galleries. Every museum director and curator embarking on a new building
project should be required to tour these rooms. The potent thrust of the
concrete-beam ceiling draws you into them as if you were being lured into a
sacred tomb. You gaze up in awe, and then turn to the paintings. … The
stunning variety of the light and the tension between the forms and materials—the
delicacy of the partitions, say, versus the brute weight of the concrete—keep
us alert. Everything here feels warmly alive.
Nicolai Ouroussoff, the New York Times, December 11, 2006 |
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