The Kimbell Art Museum is celebrating its 50th anniversary this week, but if you told me it was 3,000 years old I might just believe it. Yes, it is a modern building — arguably the greatest modern building in the United States, and certainly in Texas — but in its elemental forms and materiality, it is deliberately and irrefutably timeless.
The idea of an archaic architecture appealed to architect Louis I. Kahn, a mystic with a penchant for gnomic aphorism and musing on phenomenology. It is why he preferred the ancient temple at Paestum, in its enduring gravity, to the more refined Parthenon, which came later. “It presents a beginning within which is contained all the wonder that may follow in its wake,” he said.
To stand beneath one of the Kimbell’s barrel-vaulted porticos, with the gentle sound of cascading water emanating from its reflecting pools, is to grasp that sense of pregnant agelessness. It is an ever-changing experience, dependent on the time of day, the weather and the season, but also, somehow, immutable.
And this is before one even enters the museum, where one is confronted with another contradiction: The Kimbell is at once gravely monumental and warmly humane. The scale is practically domestic, and the details and furnishings — railings, seating, tables — attentive to the human body.
It all looks so simple, but of course it is not. The vaults appear to be straightforward hemispheres, but in fact they are a complex geometrical form known as a cycloid, and their construction required all the ingenuity of contractor Thomas Byrne. The museum’s diaphanous light filters down through slits in those vaults, only to be bounced back up off their curved concrete forms by V-shaped reflectors made of perforated aluminum. As Kahn himself noted, the idea was to give a “glow of silver to the room without touching the objects directly, yet give the comforting feeling of knowing the time of day.”
That unique ability to control natural light was what, in 1966, prompted Richard Brown, then the Kimbell’s director, to select Kahn for the commission over a distinguished group of competitors.
The clarity of Kahn’s plan is best appreciated from the air, from which the museum almost looks like a quilt. The building is made up of 16 long pavilions arranged in three parallel rows. The end rows have six pavilions, and the center just four, so that the whole forms a backward C shape, with a court of gridded yaupon trees in the void. The pavilion dimensions are standard: 100 feet long, 23 feet wide, 20 feet high at their apex. The only interruptions are three square courtyards.
That arrangement was purposefully fixed in plan and proportion, and yet flexible enough to accommodate curatorial needs. Works were to be displayed on fabric-covered panels. The floors were of a comfortable oak. The walls were of white travertine. Kahn created rooms of ethereal grace, and the idea, from the outset, was that the collection would respond to those spaces.
If there was a flaw in the design, it was in the placement of the parking lot to the rear of the building. Kahn envisioned a procession from that point of arrival, with visitors going around the landscaped building and then in through the front, thereby experiencing the building through movement and time. That was the plan. The reality was that the back became the front.
One of the goals of Renzo Piano’s 2013 addition to the museum was to mitigate that problem by sticking a large parking garage under the Kimbell’s front lawn, such that visitors would emerge from below with Kahn’s building before them. The relative success of Piano’s intervention in this regard is a matter of debate (most people I know still park behind), as is the overall merit of his design. The best thing that can be said is that Piano, who worked briefly for Kahn at the beginning of his career, treated his mentor’s masterwork with extreme deference. This was not the case with an earlier proposed expansion, designed by the firm Mitchell Giurgola, which prompted such outrage that it had to be withdrawn.
The Kimbell was the last of his own completed projects that Kahn would have a chance to experience. He died in 1974 at the age of 73. In a tribute, New York Times critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote that he “loved buildings with a passion most men reserve for women,” which was true but somewhat ironic given that we now know he had children with three women. Huxtable also extolled the seemingly ageless wonder of his architecture, how his buildings “suggest all that has gone before, and worlds still to come.”
That surely describes the Kimbell, a building that was ancient even when it was new, and remains so today.
