From the RECORD Archives: ‘Yale Center for British Art’

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On March 29, the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) reopened its doors following a two-year closure in which the Louis Kahn–designed museum—home to the largest collection of British art outside the United Kingdom—underwent a full reinstallation of its fourth-floor galleries and a roughly $16.5 million conservation effort. The second of two major conservation initiatives in recent years springing from Peter Inskip and Stephen Gee’s Louis Kahn and the Yale Center for British Art: A Conservation Plan (2011), the project, led by Knight Architecture working with various collaborators, focused almost exclusively on lighting upgrades, both artificial and natural (it is a Kahn building, after all). Key efforts included the replacement of 224 yellowing acrylic skylights—with more resilient polycarbonate facsimiles—on the building’s roof (also replaced). Positioned beneath the domed skylights are new diffusing laylight cassettes faithfully fabricated to match the original design. The museum’s antiquated halogen illumination system also received an energy-efficient LED revamp. In total, more than 6,500 linear feet of electrified track was replaced and 600 fixtures retrofitted. Benefitting from the new lighting scheme are a pair of blockbuster special exhibitions showcasing work by two British “celebrity” artists of their respective eras: Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner and contemporary artist Tracey Emin, in what is the latter’s first major museum exhibition in the United States.

View of new entrance court skylights at the Yale Center for British Art. Photo by Richard Caspole, courtesy YCBA

The unveiling of the conservation project marks a new chapter for one of New Haven’s most beloved cultural institutions and a landmark project for Kahn, which was also his last. It opened in 1977, three years after the architect’s death at the age of 73. His first major commission, 1953’s Yale University Art Gallery, sits directly across Chapel Street, a major commercial strip that forms one of the campus’s town/gown divides.

In celebration of the YCBA’s reopening, below is a lengthy assessment of the museum, published in Architectural Record’s June 1977 issue. The author is Vincent Scully, famed Yale professor of art history and a tireless advocate of Kahn, who championed the architect’s vision in—and outside—the lecture hall.

Editor’s note: This article has been condensed for ease of online reading but reflects the original text.

Yale Center for British Art
By Vincent Scully, Jr.
Architectural Record, June 1977

© Architectural Record, June 1977 

Louis I. Kahn’s Yale Center for British Art was an unexpected culmination of his career. Two decades earlier, Kahn set out to free himself from the volumetric envelope of Mies van der Rohe’s design. He had also done his best from that date onward to eliminate glass, or its visual expression, from his work. But in the British Art Center, effectively his last constructed building, he not only went straight back to the volume and the bay system of Mies but also brought glass forward to operate at its maximum capacity for visual magic in translucency and reflection. The British Center’s special site and function surely had something to do with these surprising developments. Directly across the street from it stands the earliest of Kahn’s mature buildings: the first in his great sequence of inventive designs. It is Yale’s Art Gallery of 1953. There Kahn had employed the Miesian envelope and had also fought it, as something inherited and unwanted, with every resource at his command. In it he had thrown out Mies’ gently scaled bay system in favor of an enormous semi-space frame in concrete, awesome in scale and permitting (how Kahn was later to regret this fact) the utmost flexibility in interior arrangement. He had also rigorously banished all glass from the major plane of his facade on Chapel Street, while at the west, on York Street, he had left glass, concrete piers, and steel mullions in an unresolved mix along a single plane. Only on Weir Court to the north were the central service core and the wide-spanned gallery spaces made visible on the exterior. Stirred, even infuriated, by all these compromises, Kahn had then gone on, like Wright before him, to break out of the classicizing box and the ubiquitous classic bay. He had done much, by the time of the Richards Laboratories of 1960, to bring the last phase of the International Style to a close by connecting architecture once again with its more material nineteenth-century traditions and by breaking an agonized path toward new, apparently more varied, certainly physically more convincing forms.

But now, in his last urbanistic dialogue—this time in large part with himself—he turned around and went back to Mies, as if he were saying, all right, let’s do it right this time. He produced a perfect box, its long side pressed flat to the street and stretched along it. The bay system, very moderately scaled, reappeared and was released to act as the major visual determinant of all the facades. The box was thus made pure, like one of Mies’ at IIT redone in concrete. On the street the impatient masonry plane of the Art Gallery on the other side was eliminated. The concrete skeleton was exposed there as everywhere else, and it and its drip molds and its panels of gray stainless steel and (in this context) dark glass were joined with precise shadow lines to create a poetry of connection more than worthy of Mies. Gone were the hollow mountains, pierced by glassless voids, of Dacca and Ahmedabad; gone even, here on the outside, the lucidly cast concrete walls of Salk. The whole became taut and linear; the columns thinned as they rose, the steel between them very matte (“pewter,” Kahn called it) looking surprisingly like his gray slate at Bryn Mawr. Most of all, the enormous panes of glass were set tightly up to the wall surface and were minimally framed without reveals, so that the light, dying on the dull steel, explodes as it slides across them, lighting up reflections of blue sky and streaming clouds which are reminiscent of the reflecting pools of classic French gardens. Big elements of tan masonry cornices from the Beaux-Arts Art Gallery across the street also swim into place at this scale; and so magically fragmented, they recall Piranesi’s Rome, which Kahn had always loved. The panes of glass vary in size and somewhat in placement, so that their reflections play that added counterpoint to otherwise inflexible order of skeleton and plane. On the roof the metal casings of the skylights gleam like shiny mansards, and they somewhat offset the reflections on the surface glass below them with the muted flood of overhead light they admit to the top floor. But in general the building envelope is everywhere impenetrable and, except for three bays where the slab of the second floor is suppressed for a two-storied library within, it is wholly without opening or gesture, eloquently cold and remote as the studied aristocrat it is. Aristocrat indeed: because it is surely the best at what it is doing, perfect in its closed form and exquisite details, entirely self-sufficient and self-contained, scorning rhetoric, persuasion, or movement of any kind. At its west flank, along the street, a rather unconvincing set of broad stairs, large in scale and complex in landing planes, plunges one level downward to a sunken restaurant-terrace perhaps not appropriate to the building, which really can have no intermediary terracing between it and the rest of things. There are no integral connections possible between it and anything else. Like some of Kahn’s early work, but now with a truly magisterial finality, it wraps itself in itself, a sarcophagus at architectural scale, a somber, precious container. At night the surface embodies various states of velvety blackness; the facade merges with the dark sky, and the white skeleton is drawn upon the night.

© Architectural Record, June 1977, photos by Lionel Freedman

Down in the restaurant-terrace, none of these qualities are felt; the building looks papery and rather irrelevant on its high concrete base above that depression. From it, though, the facade of Kahn’s Art Gallery across the street leaps into unexpected prominence, seen in dramatic perspective against the sky. The Gallery’s always problematical connection with the ground is now well masked, so that it surges forward, filling the view and looking, for the first time in its existence, utterly right and triumphant. Can Kahn have plotted this?

There is, effectively, no integral way into the new building except, it seems to say, for the bold. They may burst in at the northeastern corner, passing under a massive lintel which is no thicker there than elsewhere on the facade but which has no eye-catching surface play of shops below it. The shops (one of them fortunately a good book store) were the result, perhaps the only permanent one, of the demands of the revolutionary students of the late sixties: a gesture to the town and, eventually, to Yale’s perennial problem of tax base with New Haven. And they are probably the best visual base the building could have, utterly irrelevant to the rest and lighting up the pedestrian street a little. Kahn must have thought so or he would certainly have found some way around them. Instead he exploited them by building up their lintel to its impressive scale, spanning two bays across each of them. But in the last two bays on the northeast the shops disappear, and an enormous void opens under the lintel. Far back in that hollow the column of the normal bay system, previously visible only on the upper floors, now appears at the pedestrian level, ominously stressing the absence of a similar column under the lintel of the facade and indeed rising itself past lintel height to disappear into the flat ceiling slab. So the lintel, however thick, seems to hang: the eye insists that it must deflect. (Kahn clearly intended some such effect; in his perspective of the entrance when it was to have been twice as deep he drew the beams deflecting. The present installation of lights radiating like steel beams from the central column seems to blunt this effect.)

© Architectural Record, June 1977, photos by Paul David Birnbaum, Thomas Brown, John Ebstel

We pass beyond the tense, somewhat threatened space so formed to find beyond it an inside-outside court, framed with oaken panels set in the naked concrete frame. Again we push in at a corner, but now the opening rises up four floors with a scrawny lead figure of William III posturing previously in it. The sequence of passage from a low, broad, dark volume of space to a high, bright court is in fact between areas of the same square footage and is a surrealist demonstration of ceiling manipulation, a weirdly frozen version of that Jungian “death-and-resurrection” archetype which Wright exploited so rhythmically: in right angles at the Larkin Building, in curves at Johnson Wax. Kahn, characteristically, joins the two spaces harshly at their corners; it is all shock, much surprise.

The blond oak of the court was intended as a gesture to the Englishness of the program, as suggestive of old paneling, ducal libraries, and so on. Indeed, Kahn liked to refer to this court as a Hall. But its effect is at first of positive disorientation. Are we in the building or outside again? Upon what do the windows up there in the paneling open? Who looks down upon us from them? Are we in positive danger down here with what looks like enormous concrete beams poised on thin columns high above our heads? All this must reflect some deep response in Kahn to the program itself, which has certain ambiguities and tensions in it, being for a building at once public and private, a public museum but a monument (so labeled in the court) to a private collection and thus slightly menacing to outsiders.

© Architectural Record, June 1977, photos by Thomas Brown, John Ebstel

Still, the court is clearly noble and austere. It is only later we realize that it has in fact brought us into the very heart of the building and that the major gallery spaces are lighted by the windows above us. Now, however, we are led forward under another lowering lintel into the compressed receptacle of the entrance hall. This is clad in gray planes of Salk concrete, familiar and even soft in a visual-tactile sense because it is so beautifully poured and so sympathetically shaped into panels by the gentle ridges between its wooden forms. Magnificent doors of stainless steel are fitted into it. Those of the cylindrical stair tower open directly on axis ahead. But we are led to move first around the tower, because another challenging void opens before us there. The steps of the auditorium plunge straight down below our feet at a steep angle, and they bring the concrete face of the wall behind the stage close to our eyes. Everything here testifies to the intelligent care with which Marshall Meyers and Anthony Pellecchia completed the detailing of the building after Kahn’s death. Gray acoustic mats, grandly proportioned, are spaced on the lateral walls, and the tracks of lights on the ceiling, designed by Kahn and Richard Kelly, slant in as they approach the end wall of the otherwise strictly rectangular room. This device also helps to bring the end wall forward, and when slides or movies are projected on it their scale and imminence quite blow the mind. The walls are still of Kahn’s elegant Salk concrete; no skeleton here but all planar container. The carpeting, as everywhere else in the building, is quiet beige; the seats, amply proportioned and spaces, are dark wood with deep maroon cushions. The effect of the room is harsh and grand, not gentle but stern and demanding. As such it cannot help but be contrasted with an underground auditorium which has recently been opened across the street under Weir Court. That not unsuccessful example of the genre is generally described as Cinema 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 because of its carpeted walls, vermilion seats, and shiny accessories. Still, teaching and learning, at their most demanding and best, must require some rigor and a certain bite. Kahn’s auditorium suggests those qualities and invests them with a kind of primitive dignity, awe, and terror as well. It provides a tragic setting, worthy of the heroic dimensions of knowledge. When one listens or lectures in Kahn’s space one begins to understand the permanent value in what might be called the “primitive classicism” his later work generally came to embody and which is especially tense and cogent in this building. Its meticulous austerity is French; its rigor recalls that of Francois Mansart and Nicolas Poussin. Its particular modern ancestor is Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Ste.-Genevieve, of 1843–50, with its Neo-Grec articulation of structural skeleton and space-containing planes. The mediating element was the kind of architectural publication upon which Kahn was brought up in his Beaux-Arts training, in particular the books of Auguste Choisy. But Kahn’s work is always more archaic, less humanistic than that of his predecessors. There is something dark and savage in it which may in part reflect its Italian dimension, recalling the rudeness of great palazzi, the fundamental rough physicality of almost all Italian form. It is also a modern dimension, befitting a culture where individual craftsmanship, like many other personal accomplishments, is largely lost. There is a level of detailing no architect can count on. Kahn learned how to control his own details through the building process: a major achievement shared by very few architects. And his clear, dry, precise distinction of part from part can be seen everywhere throughout the building. Viollet-le-Duc, Kahn’s great structural progenitor of the Gothic Revival, would, I think, have loved that technologically simplified, rational assemblage; Ruskin, tormented by his vision of a humanity enslaved by capitalism, would have loathed those taut connections as evidence of a pact with a devilish industrial reality. Whatever the case, the bareness, spareness, and sternness of the building, and of the auditorium in particular, is modern also in being decently stoic. Given Kahn’s humorless Idealism in design, which separated him from the ironic Realism of his most important students, such stoicism seems the best and strongest stance one can hope for, at least nothing to be ashamed of and reasonable enough in terms of contemporary realities.

© Architectural Record, June 1977, photos by Paul David Birnbaum, John Ebstel

Pondering these questions (or others wholly unrelated to them) the visitor must then climb the considerable slope of the auditorium to make his way back to the stair tower, where (unless he shamelessly takes the elevator) he enters the cylinder and, starting up the stairs, finds himself seriously involved with Pellecchia and Meyers’s stainless steel railings. These, though apparently not far from Kahn’s original conception, might be called Bauhaus’ Revenge on Kahn, since they are of a planar complexity worthy of Vantongerloo or the early Breuer. There is surely enough material in them to build several important bridges somewhere. They are also very big in scale for the pinched, tightly designed stairs, rectangular in flight rather than diagonal like their mighty ancestors in the Art Gallery across the street. One level up they let us out at the first of the gallery floors, arranged around the entrance court and opened to it through the oak window panels we saw from below. But at this level the dominant feature of the building is another court, opening west of the tower. In this ethnic context, this one seems much more like a Grand Hall than the other. It leaps up, oak-paneled too, three floors to the roof. There, as above the entrance court, the enormous V-beams of the skylights seem perilously poised on slender columns and provide a Mannerist expansion and complication in the ceiling, like those common in English late Medieval and Renaissance practice. The columns are here, as on the exterior, kept flush with the slabs, so that we are in one sense more monumentally “outside” in the Hall than we were in the paneled entrance court where the columns were set back and the slabs forward, emphasizing space levels over structural support. In the Hall the mass of the stair tower rises like the Nutcracker giant, chopped off just under the ceiling to avoid getting fouled up with the skylight system of the top floor, and lighted through its own glass-blocked grill just above the head height on the uppermost landing. Here Kahn must be regarded as having exploited an impasse in design for visually melodramatic effect. And the Hall as a whole is indeed an outrageous melodrama. Great paintings by the utterly English (fey, wedded to blood sports, friend of elves) George Stubbs are hung high up in it. Wild-maned horses, snorting, start back in terror. Lions leap upon their backs; their roarings and stampings shake the Hall where, one supposes, tea will one day inevitably be served. So far the building still seems exactly tight in some weirdly semiotic way. It passes along the information (to employ the fleshless figures of linguistic analysis) that Olde England, and New England too for that matter, may legitimately be interpreted as all aristocratic frost on the surface with plenty of kinky shenanigans going on within.

But the libraries which open north and south off the floor level of the Hall offer a charming release from its rather savage swagger. There the bay system is seen at its best in defining a calm and articulated spread of space, and the sun pours in through the big windows to light the blond oak of the fittings and the warm bindings of the books on the shelves. It is an English library right enough, with all the sheltered, sunbeam-moted peace of the originals, evoked by very simple means. Yale has not seen anything like it since James Gamble Rogers, even though its space is also notable by the passage through it of enormous, silvery, cylindrical ducts, worthy of High Tech’s shiniest fantasies.

© Architectural Record, June 1977, photos by various

The window openings to the galleries are less sympathetically proportioned in the Hall than in the entrance court. They occur only at the upper level and are more horizontal than the others, which, on the top floor, are big near-squares flanking the columns. Again, the more classical modes, shapes, and proportions seem the most satisfactory in this building, and Kahn clearly used the more voluminous window shapes to draw our eye up the height of the court’s facade and to culminate it. We are, at any rate, finally drawn to the galleries, and especially to those we first saw from the court.

Once again we wrestle Laocoön-like with the stair rails in the confines of the cylinder. One level up we emerge at the second gallery floor, which is without windows on the court. It feels confined and dark, though appropriately scaled for the smaller works of British art it contains. The pictures, mainly watercolors at the moment, are hung with an intimacy appropriate to their moderate pretensions and in a profusion convenient for the scholar—although it is about this time that the average art historian will begin to regret that Mellon did not direct more of his attention across the Channel and beyond the Alps. On the top floor, however, many of these rather ungrateful qualifications pass away. Some of the big pictures exhibited there would hold their own anywhere, but they are especially at home in their gallery, grandly dominating its carefully restricted bays of space. The light floods gently in upon them from the windows around the court and, most of all, from the nests of skylights in the roof. These bear special witness to Marshall Meyers’s and Anthony Pellecchia’s understanding of Kahn’s intentions, since they completed the design of the skylights after his death. We are now close up to them; their great slanted slabs nobly shape each bay, and they distribute, on dark days as on bright, an adequate, even, and glare-free illumination under which the paintings take on a special, airy glow. A couple of Van Dyck milords flank a marble bust at the entrance and emphasize the ample but controlled proportions of the space. To the left, Stubbs deploys in a room mostly his own. His crazy thoroughbreds under their obsessed jockeys pace across the landscape like what they were—no creatures ever seen before on earth, awaiting Degas; and the mild, round-faced Englishman, the gamekeeper, crouches and faces us out of the dark wood, holding up the head of the dying deer, the soft sheen slowly draining from its eyes.

The galleries around the court are, where necessary, divided at column line by new versions of the “pogo panels” that Kahn and George Howe had designed for the Art Gallery. Now the whole system, though flexible, is still tight enough with its bays to preclude too much redesigning later—something Kahn vowed he would do after later directorships destroyed his original spatial concept in the first gallery. Here tiny but momentous decisions in design come into play. Should the panels be placed so as to touch the columns? I think yes; Kahn, the gallery people, and Pellecchia and Meyers decided no. The flat battens he projected to mask the edges of his cloth-clad panels which are set for hanging purposes between the columns of the exterior walls may also be questionable. It doesn’t matter much perhaps, although everything matters some in this honed-down, rationalized articulation of elements. But the over-all space of flanking bays and open court seems one of Kahn’s ultimate triumphs. The effect is of absolute peace and silence. Now it is we who stand high up and look out the windows. The views are releasing and mysterious. We look deep down to the entrance and across the lighted volume of the court to where the far gallery walls are bathed in their special overhead light deep behind the windows. We think of the lighted rooms behind rooms of seventeenth-century Dutch interiors with their pictures on the walls.

© Architectural Record, June 1977, photos by Paul David Birnbaum, Joseph Molitor

The climax, and I think there is one, occurs at the northeast corner, high above the entrance void. There Turner’s great yellow shining view of the Dort packet-boat, his homage to Cuyp, is hung. Its skylights bathes it, the slanting slabs canopy it, and one of the panes of facade glass flanks it too, just about at its own majestic scale. In the room before it some late golden Turners shimmer, and a vast wild Constable glooms and glitters on the wall of the bay-space beside it. But the light off the great Dort draws us and, reciprocally, directs our attention to the enormous window beside it. Outside, across Chapel Street, the tawny mass of Addison Swartwout’s Art Gallery of 1928 was never so well seen, weirdly framed as in some giant cartographer’s lens. Next to it, to the right across an arching bridge, stands Peter Wight’s Street Hall of 1866–69, and to the left Kahn’s own Art Gallery diminishes in in impeccable perspective with, beyond it, the lifting piers of Paul Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building, of 1963, culminating the sequence and closing the diagonal of the street. It is a view of all of Kahn’s predecessors in the building programs for the arts at Yale, himself in middle age among them. And sitting in front of the great Turner with its fat boat becalmed (where the directorship has indeed most thoughtfully placed a seat) one thinks once again about how Kahn chose to confront that range of buildings on the street. His original proposal, when the scheme was intended to be much larger than it eventually became, was for what amounted to two concrete-framed buildings side by side, facing Chapel Street and divided only by an expansion joint between their contiguous end columns. Entrance was to have been around those central barriers; from the very beginning, access to this museum seems to have been regarded as physically difficult, to be somehow impeded. (Furness had somewhat similar intentions in his Pennsylvania Academy.) Various service spaces were articulated as subsidiary massing elements, and great play was made with arched Vierendeel trusses spanning the long way along the street and lifting the building in two big spasms. This certainly constituted a gesture on Kahn’s part, and a spectacular one, demonstrating a rather knock-your-eye-out approach to the problem of the street and of the massed predecessors across it. The colors were to have been warm, as of white concrete and rosy brick, and the effect seemed generally ebullient, bright, and aggressive. Slowly, and in part (but only in part) as the projected budget dwindled, Kahn disciplined all those gestures and all that color out. In a way, one cannot help but regret their loss, even though nobody regarded them with much enthusiasm when they were first unveiled in presentation drawings. In the end Kahn came to their opposite, the strictly volumetric block, the rationalized bay with its skylights, the cold gray panels of stainless steel, the flat closed surface wrapped pridefully around. One feels a diminution, a dwindling, but the longer one looks at the building the more one feels its power as well. It has a solemn force that is compacted and distilled out of its integral process of construction, out of that careful assemblage of beautifully shaped materials and that clarity of joining we have had occasion to note all along. The effect is of an intelligence and a dignity which may well resist many challenges by taste and time. Again one recalls Mies, but there is even more thought and body here. Avoiding the signs, symbols, and above all the gestures of his greatest successors, ignoring the “linguistic” virtuosity of so much recent architecture and criticism, which may well have challenged, perhaps even annoyed him somewhat, Kahn builds. There is no way to avoid that impact. It convinces us of the building’s permeance, makes it “classic,” and does indeed reflect that “primitive classicism” to which I referred earlier. With it, like Poussin late in life, Kahn clearly hoped to defeat mortality and—always a human dream—to pass beyond shifting choices to an eternal system. Long before, in the nineteen-forties, he had prowled between the drafting tables in Weir Hall and, having as yet built almost nothing himself, had talked passionately about what he called “order.” What he meant by this nobody knew, nor did he himself at the time. Since then he had turned up many kinds of order, some of them approaching the concept of The Orders themselves, like the “Brick Order” of Dacca and Ahmedabad, itself directly derived from Rome. Most of all, over the years, he had painstakingly learned how to put things together, as if his intrinsic passion for order was really there.

In the British Art Center he finally arrived at a kind of building order which was itself not far from the old classicizing mode: static, trabeated, laconic—but far indeed from the indulgent mysticism into which his own verbal “philosophy” sometimes rambled. So to the edgy cubes of Gothic Revival Street Hall, the expansive gestures of the American Beaux-Arts Art Galley, and the rather operatic thunders of Rudolph’s A and A, Kahn presented, smothering the street, Silence: column, lintel, panel, concrete, steel, and glass. All movement, all voices, all color, are outside and around the British Center, like the reflections in its windowpanes. Avoiding speech, it is the wordless image of Kahn’s deep constructor’s soul, his incomparable memorial and his classic tomb.