by Wendy Lesser
Once you are inside the Kimbell, the feeling of symmetry quickly disappears, for the vaults are all divided up in different ways, giving each side of the building, and each story of it, an entirely different feeling. Downstairs lie the practical features of the museum: a loading dock to the north, curatorial offices and a conservation studio to the south, and a second entrance hall at the center. Each of these has its own size and shape, and each possesses its own unexpected facets. For instance, the conservation lab is a double-height room that looks out on its own double-height courtyard—a secret court extending up through the gallery level, where it is enclosed on all four sides and therefore invisible. A separate light-well, the size and length of the space between vaults, backs onto the curatorial offices and is disguised at the upper level by the portico wall. In both cases, an abundance of natural light is one of the special benefits Kahn conferred on the Kimbell’s backstage workers. “It’s just a concrete wall, but I always say it’s the best view in North Texas: it’s amazing watching the light changing, it’s like a painting out there,” Eric Lee remarks about the view out his back window. Claire Barry, the head of conservation, considers her double-height courtyard just one aspect of the building’s brilliant design. “One thing I always notice: there’s the same attention to detail in the behind-the-scenes places as there is in the public space,” observes Barry. “It’s not like that in other museums.”
Up in the public galleries, too, there are a series of small eccentricities that break up the overall pattern. Each wing of the museum has an accessible interior courtyard, but they are not mirror images of each other. The grandest courtyard, centered in the North Wing, showcases one of the eight bronze and lead casts of Maillol’s voluptuous figure L’ Air, a sculpture Kahn had treasured ever since encountering the Yale Art Gallery’s version. (He was apparently so fixated on its presence in Fort Worth that he even included the floating womanly shape in some of his earliest sketches for the Kimbell.) In the South Wing, the small “Penelope Courtyard,” nicknamed after a sculpture in its midst, lurks between two galleries, accessible from either but gauzily curtained off from both. And to the east of this smallest courtyard, on the other side of the museum’s central corridor, lies the walled-off middle-sized interior square leading down to the conservation studio. It is a feature that takes up space but is not, as a courtyard, present or even visible from the galleries. One doesn’t miss it; one doesn’t even know it is there. Deceptions like this are possible not only because the galleries all have different shapes (most of the walls, with the exception of the travertine end walls, are movable), but also because most visitors will be focused on something other than the building. After all, if you have come to the Kimbell Art Museum, it is probably to see the art.
The paintings come alive in this place. According to the experts, the color temperature created by the Kimbell’s precise combination of artificial and natural light is in the 3500K to 3800K range, the “sweet spot” for viewing color. But you don’t need to have any scientific tools at your disposal to perceive that something special is going on in this museum.
Here, landscapes have the feel of being actually outdoors. Interiors and portraits glow. Pastel colors gain an added strength, and white highlights leap forward. Even a monochrome sketch like Degas’s After the Bath, done in charcoal on yellow tracing paper, has a depth and intensity one wouldn’t see elsewhere. And when paint comes into play, the specificity of color is remarkable. In Caillebotte’s On the Pont de l’Europe, for instance, the gray-blue of the metal bridge is pocked by round metal studs in a slightly darker gray, while the men passing along the bridge wear coats and hats in other shades ranging from blue-gray through black-gray—all these different grays distinctly visible, as if for the first time, in the Kimbell’s splendid illumination.
Because the paintings are for the most part small, or at any rate human-sized, they are fully graspable when viewed straight on from a couple of feet away. They allow you to form an intimate, one-on-one connection with them. The portraits, too, are hung so that the faces are just about at face height (if you are roughly five foot six, which was Kahn’s height), and this increases the intimacy of the encounter. You may even get the feeling that some of these faces are leaning toward you, and that is not an optical illusion, for the paintings hanging on the travertine walls are actually suspended by nearly invisible threads that descend from above, causing the upper edge of each frame to jut out slightly while the bottom edge rests against the wall. This not only has the effect of making the image loom gently forward; it also makes the whole painting seem as if it were floating in air. And the travertine wall itself—which is set forward from the concrete ceiling above it, so that it again seems to bring the painting toward you—noticeably enriches the images placed against it. The warm, textured stone never competes with or distracts you from the pictures; on the contrary, it lends them added life.
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That is the Kimbell on a normal, sunny day. On a few evenings a month, though, visitors are allowed to remain in the galleries at night, and if you happen to be there then, you will witness a startling transformation. As the sun sinks below the horizon, the galleries darken unevenly, so that one side of the long vault briefly seems to be a slightly different color from the other. That last light coming through the reflectors onto the concrete ceiling appears almost blue in tone, compared to the silvery gray it was at midday, and the metal reflectors themselves—which are such a noticeable, winglike presence in the day—dull out and become much less visible against the ceiling. The concrete retains its texture, but more vaguely, more recessively. And the strong arcs of the clerestory windows, those subtly curved shapes which lent the vaults their church-like appearance, are now muted to near-invisibility.
As evening approaches, the spotlights on the paintings and the shadows behind the frames become stronger and more noticeable. In place of the even, overall light of daytime, you now have a lot of smaller, more focused lights. The walls, fading into darkened areas around the paintings, have less of a forward presence. All the color and texture distinctions in the structure itself, so visible in the day—the transition from wood to travertine on the floor, say, or from concrete to metal on the ceiling—become much more blurred at sunset. The building seems more uniform in color, a mere background container for the spotlit art. And the paintings themselves are more like what you are used to in ordinary museums—less alive, more pointedly on display, not actively coming toward you. Color suffers, naturally, but monochrome suffers even more: the Degas nude has gone dead, so that it now looks more like a clinical analysis, a mere prep for a painting rather than an artwork in itself.
The twilight period at the Kimbell is all about loss—the disappearance of the natural light, the effacing of once-clear distinctions, the magical turning ordinary. But then, once darkness has fallen, the museum’s other qualities take over. You become more aware of the intimacy of the small, linked galleries, the warm, inviting coziness of rooms glimpsed through other rooms. At the same time, you have a sense of something grand and monumental hanging overhead, a feeling of quiet awe that finds reinforcement in the shadows cast by the sculptures and the spotlit beauty of individual paintings. The courtyards, too, acquire a new kind of allure, with the Penelope Courtyard darkened and only the Maillol lit up in the larger North Court; the museum’s interior is now brighter than the enclosed exterior, and that produces its own kind of spell.
It is a different and a lesser place, the Kimbell viewed at night, but it is still a beautiful one, and if you had never seen the museum by daylight, you would take deep pleasure from your evening encounter with it. One imagines that to see it first by night, with its mysterious vaults above, and then to come back in the day, with sunlight diffusing through those vaults, would affect one as powerfully as the grandest of musical revelations. It would be like hearing the all-male King’s College Choir first with its adult voices only, and only later with the unearthly sopranos of its boy choristers added in.
Light, in Kahn’s hands, becomes something almost audible—something that touches one through senses other than sight.
In the end, what is most special about the Kimbell is not only the light itself, but the way light enters and defines the room in which you are standing. That is not just an architectural experience. It also gets at the essence of art, where the visual becomes something tangible—where light itself becomes tangible. As the art critic T. J. Clark put it, alluding to the paintings of Vermeer and Pieter de Hooch: “It is no mean feat for painting to put objects in a room, and describe the room, and have light enter it … And it is even rarer to have light in the picture enter a room not as a mysterious effulgence but as an object among objects, attaching itself to things, vying with them for priority.” In the same book, Picasso and Truth, he goes on to point out that
there is one thing painting finds indispensable: namely, space—the making of an imaginatively habitable three dimensions, one having a specific character, offering itself as a surrounding whose shape and extent we can enter into … Being, for human beings—and how deep is the pathos of that recursive noun—seems to have as its very precondition being “in”: reaching out, really or imaginatively, and feeling the limits of a place.
Clark is talking specifically about Picasso here, that great modernist who was so much admired by his near-contemporary, Louis Kahn. But he could just as easily be speaking about the Kimbell Art Museum, where the experiences of “being” and “being in” are brought so forcibly together, and where the light cast within the paintings joins with the light cast upon them to give rise to a new kind of contemplation.
New, and yet always there; created, but also retrieved. When he finished the Kimbell Art Museum in 1972, Kahn said at the dedication ceremony, “This building feels—and it’s a good feeling—as though I had nothing to do with it, that some other hand did it. Because it is a premise constructed.” And what he meant by that curious remark is connected to another of his comments about the architectural process. “There’s something that pulls on you,” he said, “as though you were reaching out to something primordial, something that existed much before yourself. You realize when you are in the realm of architecture that you are touching the basic feelings of man and that architecture would never have been part of humanity if it weren’t the truth to begin with.”
BECOMING
At home, he was surrounded by females. Esther’s mother, Annie, did all the cooking and cleaning and sewing and laundry, including ironing Lou’s shirts, about which he was very particular. Shortly after the baby’s birth, Esther had returned to her job with Dr. Alpers (who had become her sole employer after Dr. Frazier died in 1936), and she remained the steady breadwinner in the family, the only source of a regular paycheck. Another bit of household income came from their lodger, the widowed Catherine McMichael, whose honorary family title of “Aunt Katie” now gained additional meaning with her occasional babysitting responsibilities. And even the baby herself was a girl. Sue Ann, born on March 30, 1940, had become the main focus of attention for all the adults in the house; she too was part of the all-female atmosphere in which he comfortably dwelt.
But despite its comforts, it was not a complete life. Painting the door panels of the house with fanciful designs was hardly an occupation for a grown man. Neither was working on his landscapes and portraits, which he did upstairs in the bedroom he and Esther shared, the only room that got good enough light. Being a part-time painter, though he took it seriously enough, was a hobby, not a job. He was meant to be an architect, of that he was certain, and he just needed a chance to prove it to others. The occasional commissions he had received throughout the 1930s, his time-consuming entries into various competitions, all the consulting and volunteer organizing he had done in the field of architecture and urban planning—these were important, but they did not add up to real employment. He needed to get out of the house, to an office where other men worked too.
His wish was granted mainly because of changing conditions in the wider world. The Depression that had blighted most of his adult life was now nearing its close; the war in Europe, into which America would soon be drawn, had started to stimulate the economy, offering vastly expanded opportunities for new building. Responding to this, his friend George Howe, who had excellent connections in Washington, asked Lou to help him start an architecture practice specializing in government-sponsored housing construction. And so it was that in April of 1941, with two major commissions from the Federal Works Agency already in hand, the partnership of Howe & Kahn opened its offices on the ninth floor of the old Evening Bulletin building, just across the street from Philadelphia’s City Hall. By the fall of 1941, when it became clear that Howe’s increasing government consulting would prevent him from doing much work on the firm’s projects, Oscar Stonorov was brought into the practice, and the name of the firm changed to Howe, Stonorov & Kahn.
Kahn’s two partners could not have been more different. Howe was a Philadelphia aristocrat, born into the kind of wealthy Main Line family that prided itself on its connection to European culture. Like a figure out of Henry James, George had first been taken to the Paris Opera by his grandmother and his aunt when he was just six years old—a story that particularly appealed to Lou, and that seemed to him to define the kind of man Howe was. Tall and handsome, George Howe exuded a calm, easygoing self-assurance. He was also a thoughtful and intelligent man, and though he had access to old-money clients who could have supplied him with a lifetime of big, expensive housing commissions, he believed in architecture as a force for social change. As Esther Kahn observed, “Lou felt that Howe was one of the most civilized men he knew because he had an intellect as well as brilliancy and knowledge … He really adored him.”
Oscar Stonorov also had European connections, but of a rather different sort. Born in 1905 in Frankfurt, Germany, Stonorov studied architecture in Florence and Zurich, then moved to Paris, where he helped edit the first volume of Le Corbusier’s Oeuvre complète and briefly apprenticed himself to the sculptor Aristide Maillol. He came to America in 1929 and met Kahn sometime in the 1930s, when they worked together on a few competition designs, all of which ultimately went unbuilt. In contrast to the elegant, good-looking Howe and the slender, shy Kahn, Stonorov was bald, a bit pudgy, and extremely outgoing. Certain of his colleagues referred to him as “The Prince,” in large part because of his pronounced Mitteleuropean accent but also, perhaps, because he had married an American heiress. Some people found him charming; others thought it a hollow charm. Peter Arfaa, a prominent Philadelphia architect who was himself an immigrant, and who briefly worked for Stonorov on his way up, confided, “Oscar was the rudest man I’ve ever met. He was a licker—what do you call it?—a kisser, a kiss-up. Lou,” he added, “was not a kisser.”
All three partners were interested in designing low-income housing, and each had been involved in such work already: Howe and Kahn through a redevelopment plan they submitted to the Philadelphia Housing Authority in 1938 (though that project came to nothing in the end); Stonorov through the Carl Mackley Houses, a Philadelphia-area housing complex for hosiery workers which he and Alfred Kastner designed in the early 1930s; and Kahn through his Jersey Homesteads. Among the earliest commissions secured by their firm was the design of Carver Court, a hundred-unit cluster of steelworker dwellings, specifically earmarked for black workers, that was located just outside Coatesville, Pennsylvania. This project was to receive a great deal of attention from other architects, especially after its inclusion in a 1944 show at the Museum of Modern Art called Built in the USA. The structure was noteworthy mainly for the way the housing units were lifted up to the second story, leaving the ground-floor spaces free for parking, storage, and other functions—perhaps Kahn’s earliest version of the “interstitial floors” or “servant spaces” that were later to become so useful to him.
When Howe left for Washington in 1942 to become the supervising architect at the Public Buildings Administration, the partnership was ren
amed Stonorov & Kahn, but its focus remained worker housing. Over the course of their six years in business together, Louis Kahn and Oscar Stonorov designed seven worker communities, of which five were ultimately built, yielding more than two thousand units of new housing. They also did an innovative if unbuilt hotel design for a project called “194X,” a series sponsored by Architectural Forum that put them in excellent company and brought them substantial attention. By all accounts, Oscar did the bulk of the promotion and client-getting while Lou concentrated on the actual designs. Despite their personality differences and the fact that, as Esther put it, “they were both too much of a primadonna,” this arrangement worked for a time, because each was clearly better than the other at his assigned task. It was only when Kahn began to chafe under Stonorov’s dubious approach to shared credit that the partnership finally broke up.
In design terms, the period with Stonorov did not lead to any spectacular work on Kahn’s part. Though some of the projects received significant attention from within the architecture profession, none of the completed structures were more appealing or interesting than the wood-and-stone house Kahn had designed for his friends Jesse and Ruth Oser or the Jersey Homesteads housing he had done under Alfred Kastner. But the founding of the new partnership did allow him to bring in a real income for the first time since his Resettlement Administration job had ended. In 1941, the gross receipts of Howe, Stonorov & Kahn were $33,449.99, of which Kahn’s equal partnership share (after $26,206.23 in expenses had been deducted) was $2,281.58. When added to the additional $2,020.84 he had made through Howe & Kahn, that year’s income from his architecture practice was $4,302.42—a substantial addition to the annual $1,650 to $1,800 that Esther was regularly pulling in from Jefferson Medical College. Lou and Esther filed separate tax returns that year, as they generally did throughout the early 1940s, and he took Sue Ann as his dependent because he could better use the deduction. (In 1944, by contrast, they filed jointly, with Esther I. Kahn named as the primary taxpayer on the basis of her $1,800 salary, and with both Sue Ann and Lou listed as her dependents, since he had no partnership income at all that year. Apparently even the war-fueled construction of worker housing could be an up-and-down affair, with no guarantee of regular payment.)
