Reconsidering Louis Kahn’s Boldness

The time is long past when it was possible to be bowled over by Louis Kahn’s Yale Art Gallery, which reopens this Sunday after a three-year overhaul. Restored to a pristine state it has not known in 50 years, this 1953 landmark of modern architecture was Kahn’s first important commission. Only a focused concentration on architectural history can restore to us some sense of the boldness of the building when it first opened.Consider the adjoining Swartwout building, due east of Kahn’s gallery, which housed Yale’s museum between 1926 and 1953. Like much, if not most of Yale’s campus, this structure, designed by Egerton Swartwout, sought to conjure the illusion of Oxford in the 14th century.But though it was reactionary even by the conservative standards of pre-World War II American museum architecture, it gives a good idea of what architects aspired to and what the public wanted at the time. And while something modern occurred in Stone and Goodwin’s Museum of Modern Art building of 1939, Kahn’s Yale Art Gallery was the first to realize the implications for museums of the International Style’s revolution in residential and commercial architecture.In the circumstances, a Modernist architect could have made history simply by showing up. Kahn’s building is not especially beautiful, though not entirely ugly either. Its four stories consist of a windowless wall of glazed brick along Chapel Street — the defining view of the building — along with curtain walls to the north and west. The interior has some claim to originality (in a museum of this date) due to the loose space from one end of the building to the other. Also noteworthy are the restrained brutalism of the poured concrete stairway and the pervasive tetrahedral patterning of the ceilings on each floor.But if the truth be told, the space is not as ideal for the display of art as we were bullied into believing by the pamphleteers of Modernism. Here as in most instances of free-flowing space (an idea pioneered by Le Corbusier and Aalto) the promiscuous visual collision of objects is more apt to dissipate than to enhance the aesthetic experience. The fine collection of old masters looks especially compromised and not for nothing will this part of the collection move back to the Swartwout building in the next few years.It should also be said that with this building, Kahn is not yet his own man. The Yale Art Gallery, with its curtain walls, free-flowing spaces, its poured concrete, and the modularity of its ceilings, is an effective composite of architectural ideas that others had developed in the previous generation. What is yet lacking is that touch of the poet that crops up so delightfully and so unexpectedly in the later Kahn works, distinguishing him from all the other engineers, not to say the machinists, of the Modern movement. There are, to be sure, a few glancing traces of what is to come. The central stairway, one of the emblems of the building, culminates in a simple triangular shape that, surrounded by glass blocks, appears to float in air. But even this trope, which looks back to Arab architecture through the prism of the Roman Baroque, is marred by the difficulty of seeing it before one reaches the top floor.In all, I cannot say that on a recent visit I felt fully happy to be in the Yale Art Gallery. Surely the art is wonderful and the architecture is good. But beyond that one sensed a principled austerity in the place that was more admirable than enjoyable. The extravagant, compromised, and meretricious faux Gothic of the Swartwout building seemed at the very least far more conducive to the inspection of art.The main reason for the three-year overhaul of Kahn’s building is that it was falling apart. And it was falling apart because it was rather badly built in the first place. And it was rather badly built in the first place because one of the rarely acknowledged failings of Modern architecture is that it had almost no sense of touch, no feeling for the resonances of its most material terms. There was no important distinction between the blueprint and the finished building, almost as if the actual materializing of the blueprint were an extraneous afterthought.Granted that, even here, Kahn has a more evolved notion of the sensuousness of his materials than Paul Rudolph exhibited in his Art and Architecture Building, directly across York Street. This Brutalist pile, by the way, is one of the most photogenic buildings in the world, in the sense that it appears appallingly worse when seen in the flesh: dank, dark, harsh, and inhumane are those uninflected pylons of corduroy concrete! By contrast, even in an early work like the Yale Art Gallery, there is a smoothness, a textured richness to Kahn’s use of concrete that presages his masterpiece, the Salk Center in La Jolla, Calif. Also, the curtain walls look especially fine, now that they have been so ably restored by Polshek Partnership.At the other side of Chapel Street lies the Yale Center for British Art (1974), which was Kahn’s final project. Here, at the end of his career as a builder, we can see what was only promised at the Yale Art Gallery, at the inception of his career. Though the blockish form of the building’s exterior seems a little too uninflected, the interior is a luxurious delight, as fabric mingles with concrete to create an experience as opulent as marble. The free flow of space is tastefully checked, and there is enough contextual detailing to qualify the Modernist severity from which Kahn had emerged one generation before.jgardner@nysun.com

Reconsidering Louis Kahn’s Boldness

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