Under the harsh Texas light, Louis Kahn's building is exactly what it seems:
a tour de force of explicitness. The subject of the building is twofold: art, and what makes art manifest—light.
Seen from outside, Kimbell Art Museum looks like a group of barrel vaults running horizontally across the flat terrain of Fort Worth. Five of the vaults are closed at the ends to form galleries, offices and storage space; their roofs, sheathed unexpectedly in lead, glisten like old pewter in the sun. The sixth is open, a portico opening generously toward the street (below, opposite). Inside the museum, this conversation of silvery tones resumes as the sun spills through a long slit in the roof where the halves of the vaults meet, and is diffused by a perforated deflector slung on yokes. The light washes the plain concrete surface of the cycloids, gently blending warmer reflections from a white oak floor. Curve answers to curve, vault to channel. There is no glare on the pictures. Yet as the sun moves, the light, and by implication the space, changes subtly, like reflections in a pond.
The museum is probably Louis Kahn's most publicized building. But it is a bench mark in an extraordinary career that has seen Kahn rise from obscurity to an almost unchallenged eminence in world architecture. Kahn did not put up a major building until he was 50, in 1951.
In the past 20 years he has brought forth a series of buildings that every intelligent architect must reckon with. Among the most recent are the Salk Institute at La Jolla, Calif. (1965), the lately opened Phillips Exeter Library, the Kimbell Museum and two unfinished complexes in Asia—the capitol for Dacca in Bangladesh and the Institute of Management at Ahmedabad, India.
Meanwhile, Kahn has been professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania for the past 15 years. As he puts it: "I think teaching is essential to me. I feel it is my chapel." Kahn's office, two loft floors on Walnut Street in Philadelphia, is more like the messy drawing studio of an architecture school than the luxurious corporate hives of other leading U.S. architects. Done in raw wood and plasterboard, it is defended by only one secretary. The 71-year-old Kahn can be found in a small room (stacked with battered tomes on architectural history), tossing his thatch of white hair and discoursing in a high, cryptic, unstoppable flow on the principles of his craft. There is probably no serious architecture student in the U.S.
who would not jump at the chance of working in Kahn's 20-man office, but he keeps his staff small. "During the times of thinking about a project and realizing its nature, I don't need so many people," he explains. "It can be harmful if you employ too many. What I look for is a man who really wants to develop himself, not serve me so much.
Many come who try to show me how I should think that day. That way always fails, because the next day isn't the way I thought the day before."