Museum Sprawl in Texas I: The Kimbell @ 40

We took a weekend in central Texas to make a long-imagined architectural pilgrimage to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. Designed by Louis Kahn, it was completed in 1972. We took lots of pictures, and even did some sketching. Over a three day weekend we went four times - the lighting was different each time: cloudy day, sunny day, magic hour, night time.

The Kimbell Museum is one of the last great works of modern architecture, both heroic and modest, designed by a man with the same characteristics, Louis I. Kahn. Kahn was an accomplished architect and teacher, of local renown, before 50. And yet we remember him for nothing he did before 50. After 50, he had a prolific 2 decades, designing some of the world's greatest buildings, and getting many, but not all, built.

I've seen most of Kahn's major mature work in the United States - the Salk Institute, the Richards Lab, the Yale buildings, the Bryn Mawr dorm. Exeter Library is the jewel, the ideal city. But the Kimbell requires a special trip, located in the center of Texas and off my natural and familial travel itineraries. One does not casually, accidentally visit the Kimbell while in the neighborhood.

Kahn is teachable, I think that's part of his staying power and enduring appeal to educators and eager young students. Kahn brough tthe discipline of his his beaux-arts education to the modern, majestic expression concrete and masonry space and form. Kahn's work, like Corbu's, can loosely be separated into wall buildings and column buildings, and some hybrids. The Kimbell is a column building, square columns in fact, with infill walls. The most carefully detailed building I have ever seen, with precision and material awareness. As my old boss Robert Frear would say, its "clocked". It has grids and systems and violations.

The Kimbell is monumental on the outside and almost intimately small on the inside. Like Exeter Library, the building is built of almost entirely real, natural materials. The only drywall used was on the planar walls holding up the paintings. Otherwise it was lots and lots of concrete, sheet steel, and limestone. And not much else. The museum is very small, with not all that much gallery space! But an exquisite collection. Beautiful, fine works, limited in number but exceptionally high in quality. Recent acquisitions include paintings by Michelangelo and Caravaggio and a building by Renzo Piano. A small, busy cafe, three exquisite courtyards, and no donor wall at all. Also a very good bookstore and lots of parking.

Here are some pictures:
(Note: you can scroll through the slideshow below, on this website; or click below to see them bigger at Shutterfly.)

Click here to view these pictures larger

I read Deconstructing the Kimbell in about 1998, at a time when I yearned to connect contemporary architectural theory with a building that was designed following considerations of site, program, space, light, and tectonics. Over the next few years I learned that not all theories are operational, and analysis and synthesis are not necessarily complementary endeavours.

The Kimbell is stunning, rigid, austere, cold, and spacious. But in the end it is forever serene and sublime.

It was a great to finally experience the Kimbell @ 40.