Back to News

Louis Kahn Tour
October 14, 2006

Please join the Westchester-Mid Hudson Chapter of the AIA on Saturday, October 14 for an all day tour to 3 Louis Kahn buildings and other notable buildings on the Yale University Campus. Travel by Luxury Coach Bus leaving Chappaqua, NY at 9:30 AM to New Haven, CT to visit the Yale Center for British Art, the Yale University Art Center and the Yale School of Architecture (designed by Paul Rudolph). We will return to Temple Beth El of Northern Westchester at approximately 5 PM for a reception and tour. Enroute to New Haven, we will screen the award-winning documentary “My Architect,” Nathaniel Kahn’s passionate homage and exploration of his father’s personal and professional life. A box lunch will be served in New Haven.

Louis I. Kahn, (1901 – 1974) was one of the pre-eminent architects of the twentieth century. His work included such landmark buildings as the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and the National Assembly Building in Dacca, Bangladesh. Kahn taught at Yale University from 1947 to 1957. During this time he also traveled throughout Italy, Greece and Egypt, recording historic architecture in drawings and sketches. These travels reconciled his belief in modernism with his admiration for the enduring buildings of the past. Kahn’s architecture is most notable for its simple geometric forms and complex play between natural light and materials.

Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, 1977

This building, housing the most comprehensive collection of British Art outside the UK, was Kahn’s last major commission, completed in 1977 after his death. When the building received the AIA Honor Award in 1978, the jury noted, “This building is a gentle urbane masterpiece. It offers a quiet foil to its more demonstrative neighbors and, from the interior, frames and augments them. .

The small specialty shops tucked into its façade give vitality and continuity to the pedestrian character of the street.  The interior spaces are well planned for easy movement through the exhibits. They frequently reveal surprising glimpses of one another. A quiet feeling of delight grows within you with the discovery of each new space, and the manner in which the whole is subtly revealed has an ever-surprising complexity.”

What defines the building, shared with all of Kahn’s buildings, is the way that natural light fills virtually every space, flooding down from skylights and filtering through the glass façade. The exterior is clad in matte steel and glass, the interior with a formal palette of honey-colored oak and natural linen wall panels and travertine floors.

Yale University Art Center, New Haven, Connecticut, 1951-1954

Located directly across the street from the Yale Center for British Art, this building is Kahn’s first major commission. Designed to serve as both an art gallery and to house studio space, a tetrahedral waffle slab structural framework was created to provide large flexible open spaces. The building façade was Kahn’s signature combination of onsite cast in place concrete with infill curtain wall and brick.

Patricia Cummings Loud stated in her book, The Art Museums of Louis Kahn:”

“Thus the commission brought about Kahn’s discovery of structure,
materials, and, perhaps most important, the power of the forms he was capable of creating. The Yale Art Gallery served to catalyze many of his basic ideas and beliefs about architecture, both in words and in work.”

This building, completed in 1974, was Kahn’s only fully executed Jewish house of worship. Situated in a wooded suburban setting, its form was derived from the ancient wooden synagogues of Poland and Russia. The exterior is clad in a reinforced concrete frame with wood and glass infill panels. The three-story structure is capped by a “Baldachino,” a canopy over the altar. Clerestory windows surround the perimeter to provide natural light that shines down into the sanctuary space from sunrise to sunset.

Using a basic octagonal geometry, the internal spaces are comprised of a central worship space surrounded by classrooms and offices. The interior shares the visual clarity of simple form and material as the exterior: a reinforced concrete frame with wood panel infill.

Return to Top