Kahn Tour: Illumination. J. Tobias

Despite his pronouncements on "silence and light," in his 1931 sketching article Kahn is surprisingly silent about light.

The works we visited, however, speak volumes. Compare, for example, a modest early building and two major, later works: the Trenton Bath House (1954-1959), Yale University Art Gallery (1951-1953), and the Yale Center for British Art (1974-1977).

The bath house was designed for summer use, and the strong, high light of July emphasizes the structure's mini-monumentality. Here one can imagine the legendary light of Greece, recalled by the bath house's cruciform plan, open promenade, and central fountain (now lost).

It should be noted here that Anne Tyng played a significant and under-appreciated role in the bath house design, contributing among other things geometry and the elegant corner entries to each changing room, all of which underpin the light effects. An associate recalls that "...Kahn was having trouble with the design [and] Tyng was heard calling...that she 'had something." Kahn walked over and...'immediately saw that Anne's design was it." (See Carter Weisman. Louis I. Kahn: Beyond Time and Style, p. 93.)

Entering the changing room at Trenton, Tyng's corner entries transition beautifully to the shade and cool of the changing area (while eliminating need for doors and their maintenance). Yet the skylight brings in a soft light (eliminating the need for fixtures, too). In contrast, sharp slivers of light pierce the rough concrete walls, stabbing through the gap between walls and floating roof.

How different from Kahn's museums at Yale, especially the diffuse glow in the galleries of the Yale Center for British Art. Natural lighting was a shared goal with the clients. In fact, it was a requirement for the painting galleries. The desire for a domestic scale was also a factor (presumably the corresponding light effects were desired as well). In the preliminary phase of the design, Kahn visited homes of patron and collector Paul Mellon, as well as the Phillips Collection, a house-museum in Washington, DC. The YCBA glow is the product of the large-span skylights and their deep pyramidal wells. The 20-foot spans help to break the spaces up into room-sized galleries, but moveable, floating partitions and louvered windows keep the feeling open and of course, light. The skylights illuminate the top galleries and atrium. In turn, atrium overlooks allow light to enter galleries on lower floors. White oak panels and smooth concrete complete the effect.

In this rendering I tried to capture the glow and minimal shadows. Watercolor is an excellent medium for exploring light effects, for its luminous quality comes from the paper's reflectiveness. Watercolor filters this light like stained glass, unlike opaque media.

Kahn's sketching article features mostly pastels and charcoals (all reproductions are in black and white, unfortunately). His European pastels express the feel of light on rough materials, and they seem a particularly appropriate choice for eroded stone and sandy landscape. (An aside: these sketches are striking for areas of vibrant color. Less well known is that in later life, cataracts affected his color vision. After treatment, Kahn declared, "I haven't seen colors in years!" (Weisman, p. 86)).

The raw concrete of the Yale Art Gallery evokes the feeling of ancient stone, but without the bright light of their sites. The somber feeling is much different from the YCBA. At the Gallery the low, heavy concrete ceiling grid (innovative though not structural) and peripheral windows strongly absorb light. Here material spends light, leaving little for art. (Apparently there was enough light to spend some of the art materials, however--several works have been damaged over the years). The one exception is the well-known barrel stairwell, with its side-lit skylight. Here the light is diffused by glass block and curving walls. The light penetrates down several floors, giving a sense of ascent and descent.

As a student of museum history, i wonder if Kahn knew of historical precedents in natural lighting for museum galleries. Certainly he experienced the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (Frank Furness, 1876). Did he visit Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park, the glass-domed remainder of the Centennial Exhibition (H.J. Schwarzmann, 1876)?

One wonders in particular if he was aware of John Soane's inventive use of indirect light, in his wonderful house-museum (1792-1824) or at the Dulwich Picture Gallery (1814), known as the first purpose-built art gallery. Probably not. His influences tended to be ancient and his guidance internal. According to several sources Kahn said, "I am an interesting kind of scholar because I don't read and I don't write."

One imagines that Kahn would have appreciated Soane. Both architects were intuitive and idiosyncratic. Both sought the sublime. Both appreciated but transcended ancient precedents. Both were influential teachers. And they both developed unprecedented techniques for indirect natural illumination.

Someday I hope to visit the Kimbell (1966-1972), known as Kahn's greatest achievement with light. What is the combined effect of Texas sun, barrel vaulting, and Kahn's ingenious skylights? How does this change our perception of the works on view? And can I sketch in the galleries?

On this note I end these posts on "The Value and Aim of Sketching." I hope they've conveyed some of the value of the SAH Kahn Tour.

Image (top): Jennifer Tobias. Trenton Bath House.

Image (second from top): Jennifer Tobias. Yale Center for British Art.

Image (third from top): Jennifer Tobias. Yale University Art Gallery.

Image (fourth from top): Memorial Hall, 1875 (H. J. Schwartzman, 1876).
Image (bottom): Dulwich Picture Gallery (John Soane, 1814).

See Louis Kahn. "The Value and Aim in Sketching." T-Square Club Journal of Philadelphia. May 1931, 18-21.

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Kahn Tour: Narrow Views. J. Tobias

No object is entirely apart from its surroundings and therefore cannot be represented convincingly as a thing in itself...

What about when the object surrounds you so tightly you can't represent it convincingly as anything?

Kahn's Richards Medical Building at Penn (1957-1965) is a hard building to love. It's also a hard interior to draw. Why? The interior is so tight that it lacks vantage points. And forty years on, it's even more crowded, with mystery machines lining the halls.

This helps to explain why most published images are exteriors (see the 1991 Kahn exhibition catalog and the documentary My Architect, for example.) One exception is the view looking out from a floor-to-ceiling hall window and into a cantilevered lab space. It was the only interior published in an entire issue of the MoMA Bulletin devoted to the building (most other images concern structure). The same image is reprinted in the 1991 book, also the only interior view.

This made the behind-the-facade tour a rare and intriguing opportunity, And the interior is fascinating, especially the labs. Such as a "vintage" model, decommissioned to redirect the building's limited air supply to working labs, such as a lively one we visited. It would be fun to return and sketch the ghostly abandoned lab, its notoriously inefficient windows looking out on to a rusticated pile nearby. A modern ruin.

A hard building to love--but its caretakers seem to. The way one might love an Edsel. Maureen Ward, Director of Facilities Planning and Space Management at the Medical School, even jokes with her counterpart at the Salk Institute (1959-1965), Richards' well-behaved younger brother: there Kahn had a chance to work out all the kinks.

Image: [Malcolm Smith or George Barrows]. Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art. v. 28, n. 1, 1961, p. 22.

Quotes from Louis Kahn. "The Value and Aim in Sketching." T-Square Club Journal of Philadelphia. May 1931, 18-21

Kahn Tour: Deep Structure. J. Tobias

While Kahn understood that "Drawing is a mode of representation," he saw photography as a means of "imitating exactly:" "Photographs will serve you best of all, if that is your aim."

Today we tend to think more critically about photography as an imitator of reality. We're more likely to see it as just another mode of representation, a "truth effect." We intuitively understand drawings as representations, but most of us learn about architecture through photographs, and it's easy to forget that they, too, are interpretive. As a librarian, scholar, and sketcher, visiting the sites of iconic photographs allows me to compare representations with subjective reality. Visiting Robert Venturi's "Mother's House" (1959-1965) was a chance to experience a much-photographed work that directly engages the notion of architecture as image and sign.

Bill mentioned that Venturi's design drawings tend toward fully-formed elevations, rendered quickly and in rapid succession (so unlike Kahn's searching, mutable charcoals). True to form, the Vanna Venturi House facade is at first glance a flat image, an iconic gabled house. And its published imagery responds in kind, invariably represented by a frontal photograph. (Notably, several in the tour group had themselves photographed straight-on in front of the house).

Published photographs of the Venturi facade are often juxtaposed with an oblique view of the rear, which of course complicates and contradicts the facade. Ironically, the complexity of the back makes it hard to illustrate frontally. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to draw it. The challenge would have been to communicate its volumes within the limits of a frontal view, making a joke of his joke. I like to think the architect would appreciate it.

I approached the facade from a literally different angle--the sharpest I could find. The diagonal lines of the result remind me of Ed Ruscha's gas station prints, as in Standard Station (1966). Ruscha is contemporary of Venturi and similarly interested in popular imagery. In this series Ruscha exaggerates the machine aesthetic and corporate symbolism of the American gas station (think Walter Dorwin Teague), stretching it into the hard-edged Pop of strip culture. The artist and architect remind us that three dimensional buildings are always/already also two-dimensional signifiers.

A particularly complex space I'd like to have taken more time to untangle is the front window/overhang/ledge. Is there even an architectural term to describe it? It sneaks up on you, hidden behind the broken pediment and cross beam. Yet it heralds the spiral vortex around which the house spins, bringing you up the stairs in a dance with the chimney. Here's my take from second floor, heading up to the stair to nowhere.

Unlike most of the works we visited, in person I found the experience had a sort of photographic quality, as if I could only see it through the filter of published imagery. Perhaps this is because one tends to stand at photogenic vantage points, as if the building was designed for (or through) them. Living there might feel different, but as a guest I couldn't kick back in front of the fireplace.

In their works Venturi and Ruscha (as well as cultural studies theorists) ask, To what degree is subjectivity influenced by culture, specifically media culture? Am I me or mediated? The architect and artist most likely believe in mediated individuality. Kahn no doubt believed in pure subjectivity, especially as expressed through sketching, where "...the presence of our own individuality causes [things] to appear differently than it would to others."

Image (top): Rollin LaFrance. Robert Venturi. Vanna Venturi House (1959-1964).

Image (middle): Jennifer Tobias. Robert Venturi. Vanna Venturi House (1959-1965).

Image: (bottom): Jennifer Tobias. Robert Venturi. Vanna Venturi House (1959-1965).


Quotes from Louis Kahn. "The Value and Aim in Sketching." T-Square Club Journal of Philadelphia. May 1931, 18-21.

Kahn Tour: Rowhouses and Estates. J. Tobias

...not only pompous estates but the monotonous repetitions of the row house, should arrest our attention.

Kahn grew up in such Philadelphia row houses, moving seventeen times in two years (usually due to trouble paying rent). Kahn's moving personal story is well known, but class-oriented analysis of his oeuvre arrests little attention from the scholarly community. Perhaps this is because many of us (self included) speak from its upper end.

Kahn may not have built "pompous estates," but private houses are a significant part of his legacy. (His work in south Asia also involves social stratification, but on a scale I'm ill-qualified to address.)

In these terms, one sees striking differences between an early public project and several private homes we visited. The former is a product of the Depression era, when public housing was one of few opportunities for first wave modernists to test their ideas on a large scale. Many of Kahn's later, private houses reflect post-war prosperity and the luxuries it afforded.

In the public realm, Kahn assisted Alfred Kastner with the Jersey Homesteads in Roosevelt, New Jersey (1935-1936) and his Architectural Research Group proposed a garden city development to replace a South Philadelphia slum (1933), one perhaps not so different from the Northern Liberties of his childhood.

Public projects were ideal testing grounds for "machine housing," ostensibly efficient, low-cost, construction based on industrial principles. Machine housing, however, is different from a machine aesthetic, its much-criticized assimilation into upper-class lifestyles.

Both housing types are a function of class. From this perspective, one can analyze how modernist precepts are applied differently for different social strata. While Kahn is considered primarily an expressionist, his expressions draw upon the "deep structure" of the modernist language. Analyzing the relative application of machine production and machine aesthetic is one way to see this in play. In spareness, for example.

All Kahns works lack ornamentation, of course. But where is this driven by efficiency and where by aesthetics? In the Homesteads, spareness reflected the goal of making homes affordable for textile workers. They could choose between twelve models, but those models were chosen for them.

On the other hand, the spareness of the Margaret Esherick House (1959-1961), especially its interior, evokes the rigorous spareness of traditional Japanese architecture. Esherick could choose any form (and architect, for that matter). She chose and underwrote the craftsmanship required for Kahn's design.

Another manifestation is scale and its expression in program (functional spaces and their spatial arrangement). Quite simply, the Homesteads are small and private houses large. As a result, program was scaled accordingly. In one of the Homesteads we visited, the entry, living room and dining room are "open plan," the modernist way of saying "no walls."

On the one hand, Modern materials enabled larger spans and the elimination of interior bearing walls, so the open plan offered light, air, and flexibility unknown in traditional construction. But in the Homesteads, this meant an entryway separated from the living room by only a change in flooring material. In Kahn's private houses, including Esherick's, entries take many elegant forms sensitive to transition from exterior to interior.

In his 1931 article on sketching, Kahn states that

The simplest form, be it but a moulding, is only part of a creative process. It is the interwoven relation of that moulding to the rest of the creation which makes it significant.

In modernist terms, each element of a work is correctly considered in relation to the material and metaphysics of "the rest of the creation," or in Kahn terms, to its "will." As a whole, his works certainly reflect these notions. What the child of North Philly row houses could not have seen then, and perhaps never saw, is that the expression of will (both spirit and clients') is partially determined by socioeconomic factors.

Image (top): Alonzo D. Biggard. Frankford Elevated, Site of Bent 68, West Side of Front Street [Department of City Transit-1598-0], (1915). This and other excellent historic photos of Philadelphia are found at PhillyHistory.org.

Image: (second from top): Jennifer Tobias. Esherick House (1959-1961).

Image (middle): Arthur Rothstein. New Jersey homesteader in her living room. Hightstown, New Jersey. (1936).
Image (bottom): Russell Lee. Nathan Katz's apartment, East 168th Street, Bronx, New York. Mr. Nathan Katz is an accepted applicant to Jersey Homesteads (1936).

Quotes from Louis Kahn. "The Value and Aim in Sketching." T-Square Club Journal of Philadelphia. May 1931, 18-21.

Kahn Tour: Scumbling the Small Stuff. J. Tobias

To make a sketch...requires...the making of many impressions and notes 'on the job.' You must then get away from it all to work over and crystallize your thoughts in order to develop the picture in the form of a readable design.

On a study tour, time really is of the essence. The pace forces one to both slow down (observe) yet speed up (get impressions). Here are two takes on Kahn's Jesse Oser House (1940-1942). The first is "on the job" (With tour manager Kathy Sturm in the foreground, keeping us on schedule). The second follows "get[ting]away from it all" and developing the drawing into a "readable design."

There is no value in trying to imitate exactly...We should not imitate when our intention is to create--to improvise...I have learned to regard it as no physical impossibility to move mountains and trees, or change cupolas and towers to suit my tastes. 

In this spirit I can exaggerate perspective, manipulate shadows, and literally furnish the mise en scene. Scholarship requires getting the facts exactly right. Drawing requires no footnotes. But Kahn knew that interpretive drawing must, in the end, respect the subject:

I try in my sketching not to be entirely subservient to my subject, but I have respect for it...

Any study tour shifts, like a drawing, between the "big picture" and telling details. It would have been a pleasure to linger on the idiosyncratic details of the Furness library at Penn--its crockets, wedge mouldings, and patterned brickwork. But the situation called for the big picture, with the rest improvised later, if the drawing "wanted" it. Furness invented a formal grammar all his own, so can't I riff on it a bit?

I try to evolve a composition, and make every sketch count for as much value to me as may be gotten out of a design problem.

Site visits are an excellent way to study details. Archtiecture may start with a room, as Kahn would say, but it ends with building codes, HVAC, and electrical outlets. Consider the air vent detailing in the cupola of Temple Beth El (1966-1972). Two practicing architects in the tour group were disappointed by the execution: surely Kahn wasn't responsible! Based on their observations, I indicated the vents but downplayed them. Or should they be drawn as they appear?

Images (top): Jennifer Tobias. Jesse Oser House (1940-1942)

Image (middle): Jennifer Tobias. Frank Furness. Fisher Fine Arts Library, University of Pennsylvania (1888-1891).

Image (bottom): Jennifer Tobias. Temple Beth El (1966-1972).

All images .

Quotes from Louis Kahn. "The Value and Aim in Sketching." T-Square Club Journal of Philadelphia. May 1931, 18-21.

Kahn Tour: Time and Materials. J. Tobias

As is well known, Kahn suffered facial burns as an infant, transfixed by the glowing embers of a coal fire. According to family accounts, the three-year-old scooped embers into his apron and they burst into flames.

In his oracular style, Kahn said that "material is spent light." I think of the glowing coals as the reverse: light is spent material. Or rather, the glow is the material in the process of being spent. The word "transfix" incorporates this moment of transformation: trans (motion) plus fix (stasis).

Did I learn that as a child, Kahn used this coal for drawing, for lack of other material? (Paging a volunteer fact checker--I think it's in My Architect). His use of soft charcoal (and carpenter pencil) is also well known. With this ever mutable powder, he could explore an idea and wipe it away in an instant, or push it around with his fingers like a sculptor with clay. See, for example, his perspective of the unbuilt Mikveh Israel Synagogue (1961).

Perhaps it's no accident that Rodin is a recurring theme in Kahn's biography and article. He writes, "The drawings this great sculptor made took form with his eye on the final results in stone."

In situ drawing, on the other hand, deals with the final results, the (literally) concrete. Here materials spend light on actual mass and volume. The hard lines and colored washes of my tour sketches try to reflect this.

During the tour someone quoted...someone...who said that Kahn worked on a project until he got fired. In this spirit, his drawings are not so much unfinished as transfixed.

Image: Jennifer Tobias. Trenton Bath House (1954-1959).

Rodin quote from Louis Kahn. "The Value and Aim in Sketching." T-Square Club Journal of Philadelphia. May 1931, 18-21.

Kahn Tour: "The Value and Aim in Sketching." J. Tobias

In 1931 the young Louis Kahn published his thoughts on "The Value and Aim in Sketching." (T-Square Club Journal of Philadelphia. May, 1931. p. 18-21.) Sketching my way through the SAH Louis Kahn tour presented an opportunity to reflect upon these Values and Aims.

In his article Kahn states, "The capacity to see comes from persistently analysing our reactions to what we look at..." My entries here analyze some of my reactions in words and images. The process has helped me to "see" Kahn better. Perhaps blog readers will see something new in Kahn, too, or have reactions of their own.

Image: Jennifer Tobias. Center City, Philadelphia. near Kahn's office. PSFS Building in background. August 2008.

LOUIS I. KAHN STUDY TOUR: CONTEMPORARIES: Photos and Text by Amber Wiley

While on the Kahn tour we had the pleasure of visiting architectural works by persons associated with Kahn, either by virtue of collaboration, education, or simply overlapping periods of significant work in Philadelphia and its suburbs. We looked at the work of many of his contemporaries including Robert Venturi, I.M. Pei, Mitchell/Giurgola, Joel Levinson, and GBQC.

Main entrance to the Cooper House

The Cooper House (1961) by architecture firm GBQC was particularly impressive because of the intense geometry and radial symmetry that ruled the plan of the house. Spaces intertwined and flowed into each other, leaving the visitor guessing at each turn. The tour group was treated very warmly by the owners, who provided refreshments and a chance for the group to utilize and admire the backyard landscaping and beautiful wooded scenery.

Robert Venturi discussing his design for the Vanna Venturi House

Equally gracious was Pritzker Prize winning architect, teacher, and theorist Robert Venturi at the Vanna Venturi House (Venturi & Short, 1959-64). Venturi greeted the tour group by speaking about his inspirations for the house and design details, and how the house related to the development of some of his theoretical paradigms in the polemic Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966). We toured the exterior as well as the rarely seen interior of the house.

Front elevation of Vanna Venturi House

Row of townhouses designed by Pei

Society Hill Towers

Two of the first projects we viewed on the tour were the Bingham Court Townhouses (1962- 67) and Society Hill Towers (1964), both by I. M. Pei. The group was provided a private tour of a type “A” Bingham Court Townhouse (1962-67) and a brief overview of the Society Hill Towers (1964) which were built as part of an urban renewal design aimed at increasing and improving residential occupancy of the surrounding area.

Kurtz House

Joel Levinson outlining his design for the Kurtz House

The Kurtz House (1969-71) (also known as Arbor House) by Joel Levinson was a palace of surprise. Nestled in the Latham Park community just outside Philadelphia, Levinson designed an unconventional house for the Kurtz’, inspired by a variety influences, including Quaker meeting houses, Japanese shrines, and Alvar Alto’s country estate. Architect Joel Levinson lead the tour of the house, and explained his design process which resulted in the seamless integration of interior and exterior spaces by creating a trellis structure that wrapped around the whole house, screening yet not crowding nor suffocating it.

The "Red Room" seen from the exterior

Finally, we stopped briefly at the Penn Mutual Life Insurance building (1970-75) by the firm of Mitchell/Giurgola. The Penn Mutual building was a particularly interesting example of façadism, where the architecture firm not only added to the 1913 neoclassical office tower designed by Edgar Seeler (later expanded by Ernest Matthewson in 1931), they also kept a pre-existing façade intact. The scale of the Penn Mutual tower dwarfs the previous façade, however the inclusion of the façade in the final design reminds one of the scale and architectural vocabulary of early Philadelphia.

Excellent example of façadism at the Penn Mutual Tower

LOUIS I. KAHN STUDY TOUR: INSTITUTIONAL WORK: Photos and Text by Amber Wiley

Institutional, Community, and Religious Work

Kahn drawing of the Yale Center British for Art with context of Paul Rudolph's Art and Architecture Building (1963)

During the tour we traveled to New Haven to view some of Kahn’s most famous institutional work. Carter Wiseman led us on tours of the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art, with a quick trip to the archives of Sterling Memorial Library to view original drawings by Kahn and Paul Rudolph.

Interior perspective of the Art and Architecture Building

Main entrance to the Yale University Art Gallery with "T" shape motif appearing in fenestration

The Yale University Art Gallery (with Douglass Orr, 1951-53) is considered by many to be Kahn’s earliest substantial commission. The Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) was the first of three art museums that Kahn would design, and was dramatically different from the context of buildings on the Yale campus, many of which were designed by James Gamble Rogers in a neo-Gothic vocabulary. The main façade of the YUAG is highly simplistic, with string coursework that runs the length of the building, slightly mimicking the levels of articulation in the adjacent original 1928 “Tuscan Romanesque” building by architect Edgerton Swartwout.

Tracery detail of Swartwout building

One of Kahn’s major innovations in the YUAG was the use of the tetrahedron ceiling design that housed the electric and ventilation systems. The YUAG originally included art and architecture studios as part of its building program.

Study tour participant and Yale architecture alumnus Marc Goldstein discussing his memories of working within the space of his former studio, now the gallery archives

The building underwent extensive renovation by Polshek Partnership, LLP, which was completed in 2006 and brought the building closer to Kahn’s original vision.

Detail of Richard Serra’s "Stacks" (1990) sculpture in a courtyard re-opened for the renovation

Stair detail in the YUAG

Jewish Community Center Bath House

We also visited the Jewish Community Center Bath House and Day Camp (1954-59) outside Trenton, New Jersey. A guided tour of the site revealed extensive neglect as evidenced by the water damage, deterioration, and patina on the exposed concrete surfaces of the building. Immediate plans for restoration of the building were outlined on the tour. This icon of modernism was simple and elegant, with a cruciform plan, a central atrium, and four square concrete block rooms. Each room was topped with a pyramidal roof. This building displayed ingenuity in its simplicity, and was the point where Kahn crystallized his ideas about “served spaces” and “spaces that serve.”

Detail of exterior conditions of Trenton Bath House

I discovered myself after designing that little concrete block bathhouse in Trenton.

Richards Medical Building main façade

It was the Richards Medical Building (1957-61) on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania that was a true breakthrough for Kahn in the form of critical acclaim in and outside of the architectural sphere. Some of the major themes that characterized Kahn’s work were evident in our guided tour: heavy external massing that clearly demarcated “served” and “servant” spaces, rigid geometrical structural systems, refinement of exposed materials, and the dissolution of the corner. Kahn’s use of concrete cantilever technology in the medical labs allowed for the creation of a space that did not depend on structural support at the corner, hence the ability to leave large expanses of glass meeting at a point on the far end of the lab.

Lab ceiling structural system of interlocking concrete beams

Erdman Hall main entrance

Erdman Hall (1960-65) at Bryn Mawr College is a dormitory on the women’s liberal arts campus. Here Kahn created the major spaces by designing a plan of intersecting diamonds, putting the service areas in the middle, and stringing the student rooms around the periphery of the building. Kahn used slate on the exterior, a choice that made the building fit with the rest of the campus' color palette, while setting a direct precedent in contrast to the medieval Gothic aesthetic that pervaded the campus.

Central pavilion in Erdman Hall

Temple Beth-El Synagogue

The Temple Beth-El Synagogue (1966-72) in Chappaqua, New York is clad almost completely in wood with concrete framing, a testament to its design inspiration- the wooden synagogues in Europe that were destroyed during the Holocaust. Kahn abstracted the shape of the typical wooden synagogue to geometric simplicity, literally resting the elevated square roof and walls of the sanctuary on massive concrete pillars, creating a dialogue of light, weight, and gravity between the upper and lower parts of the sanctuary.

Detail of interior sanctuary beam

Yale Center for British Art

The Yale Center for British Art (Kahn, 1969-74; Pellechia & Meyers 1974-1977) was completed after Kahn’s untimely death. It is very much a jewel of a building that not only speaks to its surroundings with street level shops that invite pedestrians in, but also creates the soft ambiance of an old English country house on the interior. Kahn delivered his signature flood of natural light in the form of two major interior courtyards, one at the entrance and one that is located deep within the museum and is flanked by archival and research centers.

View of interior courtyard and exterior of stairwell

View across interior courtyard

Contrasted with the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Center for British Art had a softer palette of materials. The YUAG was constructed of brick, concrete, glass, and steel, while the Yale Center for British Art utilized marble, white oak, and Belgian linen.

Galleries in the Yale Center for British Art