Yale University Art Gallery

Louis Kahn – University Art Gallery, USA 1953

The Yale University School of Architecture was in the midst of an educational upheaval when Louis Kahn joined the faculty in 1947. With architect George Howe as principal and modernists such as Kahn, Philip Johnson and Josef Albers as lecturers, the years of the postwar Yale away from the lineage of the Beaux-Arts school towards the avant-gardes. And so, when the consolidation of the university departments of art, architecture and art history in 1950 required a new building, a modernist structure was the natural choice to realize an instructive and stylistic departure from historicism. Completed in 1953, Louis Kahn's Yale University Art Gallery building would have provided a flexible gallery, a classroom and an office space for the changing school; at the same time, Kahn's first significant commission marked a turning point in his architectural career, a career now among the most celebrated of the second half of the 20th century.