Louis I. Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum Building | Smarthistory

We've come to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth Texas, to look at one of the great works of Louis Kahn.

The museum was completed in 1972 and ever since it has been a landmark in American architecture.

We're sitting outside of the main facade, and I find it to be such a quiet and contemplative space.

The neutral colors of the travertine and the concrete fountains in front of the museum.

I could sit here all day.

It's such an interesting contrast to the more assertive museum architecture of the subsequent decades.

Or even before.

We could think about the Beaux-Arts facades of the Brooklyn Museum or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with stairs that lead up and giant columns.

And here, so much quieter.

But Louis Kahn was still deeply indebted to the classical tradition.

His professor was a highly successful American architect that had been trained in the style of the École des Beaux-Arts and brought a kind of stripped-down classicism to works around the country.

But Louis Kahn filters those ideas through the lens of the mid 20th century.

This is a starkly modern building.

Most of what we're seeing is concrete, travertine, and lead-clad roofing.

But there are relationships with the history of art that are also very clear.

The horizontal fountains to either side of the main entry and then the use of the parterre, that is, these symmetrical rectangular platforms that one sees in European palace architecture.

But this building goes even further back in terms of its references back to ancient Greece, but especially back to ancient Rome.

The predominant form is a shape akin to an ancient Roman barrel vault, but squatter lower, more human scaled.

The arches are cycloid in shape and in fact, the arches themselves widen as they rise toward the top.

They're very graceful.

And they play an extremely important role when we go inside, as we will see.

But even on the outside, Kahn has expressed the versatility of these repeated forms.

And then Louis Kahn does something really interesting.

For the first set of these barrel vaulted units, he takes the wall away.

So they're open on three sides and they become a kind of porch or a kind of loggia, although all of the columns, except for those at the corners, have been removed.

And so there is something almost Brunelleschian, a kind of reference to the ospedale in Florence, the way in which That very famous structure is looking itself back to ancient Rome.

So Louis Kahn is placing this building in this longer historical continuum.

There's no question that this is reminiscent of Brunelleschi its sense of symmetry, its basis in measure, in mathematical harmonies and symmetry.

In fact, the ratio here of height to depth of each of these elongated units is a square that is 20 feet tall by 20 feet wide.

Then the total measures 100 feet.

Each of these units, whether or not they're covered or they become open loggia.

Expressing this kind of flexibility that Kahn brings to this mathematical ideal creates a sense of harmony, no matter where in the building you look, because every element is in accordance with every other.

Just like Brunelleschi creates this loggia, this public space in front of the ospidale, Kahn too creates this public space.

Even the facing travertine is a reference back to ancient Rome, a stone that was widely used by the Romans and then readopted during the Renaissance and during the Baroque era, and so another example of this continuity.

Also using the travertine as a facing for what is structurally a concrete building, similar to what the ancient Romans were doing.

But look at the concrete itself.

There are areas where it's incredibly smooth, but there are also areas where the natural pitting that takes place when concrete is poured is still exposed and is in that way, akin to the natural crevices that exist within the travertine which are the result of vegetation and other impurities, when that calcium carbonate set into stone.

And so as we sit here, we're noticing the subtle distinctions between the concrete and the stone.

Although it's very subtle, it's also very quieting.

Well, and I think it makes our eyes, over time, become more sensitive to those subtle gradations, just the way when one looks at a modern painting.

Over time, you start to understand the subtlety of the whites, of the colors, even if they're unnoticeable at first.

In a sense, it takes time for the subtle complexities to unfold.

Let's go around the side so we can really see the series of these vaulted spaces.

We've walked to the right side and there's this lovely sunken courtyard that has a sculpture by Isamu Noguchi called Constellation for Louis Kahn.

We begin to see these repeating arches and understand the building's logic.

The building is made of six units plus small areas that join each of those arched forms.

The first though, is completely open, the loggia, so the interior space is made of five, and here we see that relationship of the concrete as both structural but also as decorative framing for the travertine that is inset almost like enamel.

We've walked into the galleries and the quiet, serene sense continues here, but now more a result of the very beautiful, even light that is cast down from the vaulting above.

We know that Richard Brown, the director of the museum who commissioned Kahn, emphasized the importance of natural light, which was also very important to the architect.

The natural light enables us to see these paintings closer to the way that they were meant to be seen, but not unmediated natural light.

The brilliance of the sun in Fort Worth is overwhelming, and so Kahn has had to reduce the power of the sun to create an indirect illumination, and he's done that beautifully by slicing through the vaults at the center, allowing direct sunlight to enter but then to be interrupted by reflectors and a screen of aluminum that allows the light to move across this smooth concrete arc and then indirectly illuminate the room.

It is a very delicate, silvery sheen that constitutes the ceiling.

And we have to remind ourselves that we're looking at the heavy mass of concrete, because the vault, the ceiling itself feels light and almost sheer.

The silvery quality of a moth's wing has been evoked.

And I think it's actually extremely appropriate here.

And so the architecture becomes almost otherworldly.

And as we look at either end of the gallery, we notice the openings around the archway that we saw on the exterior, allowing even more light into the galleries.

But I'm also struck, as we look across the series of five arches, that the space is very rational, very coherent, understand where we are in relationship to the exterior of the building, to other spaces within the interior.

It unfolds in a very logical way.

But it is also a practical space because in the areas between each of the archways are low, flat ceilings that have runners that allow for temporary walls to be attached at right angles, and so the space can be organized in different ways as the exhibitions warrant.

I find that the serenity that is created here by the architecture is really conducive to looking at works of art.

It slows us down, it quiets us, it quiets our eyes and it allows us to look even more closely at the works of art.

And in that way, this is one of the most successful museums that I've ever visited.

I feel the same way.

[The Silent Harmony: Louis Kahn’s Architectural Masterpiece at the Kimbell Art Museum]-[Louis I. Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum Building]

📋 Summary

The Silent Harmony: Louis Kahn’s Architectural Masterpiece at the Kimbell Art Museum

A Dialogue with Classical Antiquity

The Materiality of Light and Stone

The Architecture of Illumination

Rationality and Serenity

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📖 Transcript