The Kimbell was the last of his own completed projects that Kahn would have a chance to experience. The pour of the first 100-foot-long vault of the Kimbell Art Museum, January 26, 1971. 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an earlier proposed expansion, designed by the firm Mitchell Giurgola, which prompted such outrage that it had to be withdrawn.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 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. 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. 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 only interruptions are three square courtyards.

The pavilion dimensions are standard: 100 feet long, 23 feet wide, 20 feet high at their apex. 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 building is made up of 16 long pavilions arranged in three parallel rows. The clarity of Kahn’s plan is best appreciated from the air, from which the museum almost looks like a quilt. 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. Kahn, seen here circa 1972, was selected to design the Kimbell Art Museum thanks to his unique ability to control natural light.

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.” Architect Louis I. 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. 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. It all looks so simple, but of course it is not.

Timeless body arts