The Restored Yale Center for British Art

摘要

By the time Louis Kahn designed the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Conn., the 69-year-old architect was already legendary. His priestly pronouncements ("What does a brick want to be?"), often delivered to his rapt students at the University of Pennsylvania, mystified his career, and virtually tattooed his late buildings with oracular certainty. When the 114,000-square-foot center was completed, posthumously, on Chapel and High Streets in 1976, an aura of wisdom surrounded the structure. Faced with pewter-colored, matte steel panels set in the gridded, four-story concrete-frame structure, the building was serene, a timeless classic of understatement. The facades, with their muted, patinated surfaces, deferred to the tall Gothic arches of the Old Yale Art Gallery (1928) on the opposite side of Chapel, and the building's serenity spoke to Kahn's own brick-walled Art Gallery (1953), a quiet, considerate extension of the old museum.