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Louis Kahn died in toilets at New York Penn station in 1974. He returned from India, but the address of his passport had been mysteriously striped and his body remained unidentified for three days. It was an ignominious end for the man that the New York Times called “the architect above all American”.
At the time, he worked on designs for the Yale Center for British Art, which opened to the public three years after his death and became his last museum building. Its first museum is just above the road in New Haven, the Yale University Art Gallery in 1953. When it opened, it caused a scandal; His fiercely reducing brick wall was considered an insult to the rich decoration of the elaborate building which he extended (surprisingly 25 years earlier, but historic complete).
As the Yale Center opened up to the public in 1977, Kahn had become a little uncontrollable, his monumental work seeming weighted and solemn compared to, let's say, the flamboyant Glass and Steel Center Pompidou, who had opened a few months earlier in Paris. But now, almost half a century later, the Pompidou must undergo a huge renovation at the cost of hundreds of millions of euros. The YCBA is, it has just seen its lamps and wells of light updated for $ 16.5 million.
I underestimate, of course. As always, with the conservation of modernist structures, there is a lot of complexity and invisible work as well as previous restoration in 2016 which did a lot of heavy lifting, but nevertheless the building of the Kahn museum, I would say, as contemporary as everything that you could be able to build today. Walking and taking notes resembles a revision of a brand new building, although strangely familiar.
One of its most striking facets is the contrast between the richness in white oak of its interior and the gray coldness of its outer face. Dressed in stainless steel panels and almost entirely rinse with glass and the shop, it is a cool contemporary urban planning work that disguises the precision of works inside, the best collection of British art outside the United Kingdom, accumulated by the American philanthropic Paul Mellon. It is also an extremely unusual exterior. Most museums revel in their own status in the street, jostling to be the main attraction. But here, Yale was doing something new; With this building, they crossed the rue Chapel, the historic border between the University and the City. Consequently, Kahn tried to integrate this new building into the urban landscape, not only as a monument, but as a functional part of the commercial street.
The window and the fascias, like the interiors, were beautifully restored by the architect George Knight, without hassle and almost complete invisibility. All 224 acrylic light wells of the building have been replaced by more robust polycarbonate domes and light seems to have changed; Clealer, cooler. This is accentuated by updating the museum's lights, whose forms and containers have been mainly preserved, with the old halogen lights replaced by LEDs, creating a more neutral and colder light (and a 60% increase in energy efficiency).
The top floor is, as it has always been bright. Huge concrete chests are the subject of decline, but each level is imbued with natural light thanks to Kahn's unusual decision to design the galleries around a pair of Attria. This means that light runs rather than floods, but it also creates a rare spatial consciousness in museums, the visitor always aware of their position in relation to these spaces. It is extremely easy to navigate and to do even more by the imminent presence of the charismatic concrete staircase, a castle tower of a cylinder which is a sculptural presence in one of the atria.
If the building seems to have barely changed, art has subtly moved. The museum opens with a pair of shows that strangely collided in Margate: Tracey Emin (who grew up in the coastal city) and JMW Turner (who spent much of his childhood). For Emin, it is, rather remarkably, his first museum show in the United States and that is exactly what you could expect: deeply personal, revealing, transported by sex, illness and emotion, striking graphic works displayed with their full effect. For Turner, there must always be a problem of selecting nearly 3,000 works from the collection, but the conservatives succeed well, kissing everything, sea landscapes and epic Rowling oceans with beautiful registered lines of engravings and imprints that have made its work so popular. A small exhibition sketch book offers an amazing burst of light and color. Like Kahn, Turner was an artist concerned about the light and the two balanced in perfect balance.
An effort to counterbalance an image of the imperial power and the portrait of an elite arrives in the form of works by Cecily Brown and Yinka Shonibare, as well as existing and restored works of the collection which throw light on female artists (notably Mary Beale, 1633-99) and paintings illuminating the aspects of British colonialism from tea to sugar plantations Himalayas via the car; landscapes as cards of conquest and presence.
The Kahn building is so good that it has become a little fetishized. You feel that the conservatives are almost frustrated that art is neglected by those who worship the frame. But it is a curious situation where architecture is so successful precisely because it allows you to admire art, as well as to see it in a wider context. Kahn was undoubtedly the first major American architect to reject the objectivity and modular rigidity of modernism in favor of something more archetypal and monumental, an architecture which was ferociously contemporary and yet which created spaces which were human and often even familiar.
Here, he used a Renaissance palazzo as a model, referring to the entry atrium as a “cortile”. Now cleaned and more free of things, these ideas become clearer. As in an Italian palace, it is a building at the street, without any of the stages of the Museum of Traditional Art, but in the place adjoining the sidewalk. Free to enter and open to everyone, it's really a public palace. And if there was never a doubt about the nature of a building that seems to melt in the street with its windows and its unpretentious Cup, which has now been sent by the Canari yellow neon work commission by Tracey Emin: “I loved you until morning”, scribbled in a script of familiar anxiety transmuted in the light. He crosses rue Chapel, intriguing and inviting. Love that has become light seems a fairly magnificent metaphor for one of the most attractive museums in the modern era.
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