This March, when you visit the newly reopened Yale Center for British Art on Chapel Street, I want you to meander for a while, and then I want you to find one room in one of the galleries and sit down. Settle in. You might be there for a while. When you are ready, I want you to observe not the paintings in the room or your fellow museumgoers or whatever else might grab your attention immediately. You can do that later. First, what I want you to observe is the light in your room. Notice the lines and shadows that it casts. Notice the quality of it. Sit with the light for a moment. That's what the architect of the museum and the subject of an exhibit at the Haas Family Arts Library -- People Look Up at Good Architecture; check it out! -- would have wanted you to do.
Said architect, former School of Architecture professor Louis Isadore Kahn, was obsessed with light. When he was 3, he stuck his hands into a stove in an attempt to pick up a smoldering coal from the fire. He set his apron alight and burned his face, scarring him for the rest of his life. Kahn, even as a toddler, evidently wanted to know what it would be like if he could carry light. He wanted to hold it, touch it, feel it on his fingertips. His experiment with the coals failed, so he had to find another way to try to do so. Eventually, he became an architect.
Kahn studied modernism and functionalism in architecture and the International Style; he's been described as a philosopher and a poet of architecture. In designing the museum, he aimed to glorify -- or, perhaps, illuminate -- brick and concrete as a poet might glorify a sunset or a placid pond. His art assumed various mediums, as you might be able to tell from this ode he wrote to brick: "If you think of Brick, you say to Brick, 'What do you want, Brick?' And Brick says to you, 'I like an Arch.' ... And it's important, you see, that you honor the material that you use ... You can only do it if you honor the brick and glorify the brick instead of shortchanging it."
Many of Kahn's designs primarily feature two materials: concrete and light. He used light, which he described as "the maker of presences," in his designs like another architect might use wood or iron. Light was a material that he manipulated; his architecture is a study of light and a celebration of it. He once wrote, in a poem as part of a letter to two friends, "I wanted to illustrate Silence and Light."
One of my classes this semester is in the basement of Humanities Quadrangle. When my professor came into the room for the first seminar we had, she commented right away, "It's like perpetual night in here." It is gloomy in that basement. Reference to Directed Studies texts incoming -- forgive me. Socrates represented the ultimate "truth" or good as the sun, which he purported all knowledge disseminates from. Lux et Veritas, or better yet, Lux IS Veritas. Light is cheerful and no one wants perpetual night in their classroom, but even more than that, a room should be filled with light, because light is veritas and symbolizes enlightenment and truth, if you'll lend me some poetic license here. And please do, Kahn would have.
A museum is like a classroom. Kahn died before the YCBA was ready to open to the public. Since his death, the team at the YCBA will in March have completed two conservation projects with the aim of realizing his vision for the museum, while adapting to the needs of the University for the collection. Kahn was reticent of the various purposes the museum would serve. One famous architect in the International Style Kahn looked up to, Le Corbusier, once said "a house is a machine for living." Kahn's museum is a machine for living too, through art, and it's also a machine for teaching because its function as part of this University is to teach.
The reopening of the YCBA is something to celebrate, because art is something to celebrate, and light is too, especially in these dark and dreary winter months. Kahn saw something in light and shadow and nature that I don't know if I've ever thought to look for. For example, in these stanzas, he describes "spent light":
I sense Silence as the aura of the "desire to be to express"
(The mountains the streams the atmosphere and we are of spent light.)