Yale University Art Gallery

Louis Kahn – Yale University Art Gallery, USA 1953

Yale University's School of Architecture was in the midst of a pedagogical upheaval when Louis Kahn joined the faculty in 1947. With architect George Howe as dean and modernists such as Kahn, Philip Johnson, and Josef Albers on the faculty, the postwar years at Yale moved away from the school's Beaux-Arts lineage toward the avant-garde. Thus, when the consolidation of the university's art, architecture, and art history departments in 1950 required a new building, a modernist structure was the natural choice to embody an educational and stylistic shift from historicism.
Completed in 1953, Louis Kahn's Yale University Art Gallery building would provide a flexible gallery, classroom, and office space for the evolving school; at the same time, Kahn's first significant commission marked a turning point in his architectural career, now among the most celebrated of the second half of the 20th century.