KIMBELL ART MUSEUM: LOUIS KAHN
Michael Brawne
Michael Brawne: KIMBELL ART MUSEUM: LOUIS KAHN. London: Phaidon Press, 1992. First edition. A very good soft cover book with thick printed french folded wrappers and minor shelf wear including small stains on the back cover. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Photography by Michael Bodycomb.
11.5 x 11.75 soft cover unpaginated [60-page] book with 35 illustrations, 8 in color and 34 text illustrations: Each sixty-page volume contains a lucid text by a respected author; a sequence of large-format, high-quality colour and black-and-white photographs; a comprehensive set of technical drawings and working details; and a complete bibliography and chronology, thus making these books the definitive work on the subject.
From the website for The Kimbell: The Kimbell Art Museum’s original building, designed by Louis Kahn and opened to the public for the first time in 1972, has become a mecca of modern architecture. The Board of Directors of the Kimbell Art Foundation commissioned Louis Kahn as the Museum’s architect in 1966. Working closely with the Kimbell's first director, Richard F. (Ric) Brown, who enthusiastically supported his appointment, Kahn designed a building in which “light is the theme.” Natural light enters through narrow plexiglass skylights along the top of cycloid barrel vaults and is diffused by wing-shaped pierced-aluminum reflectors that hang below, giving a silvery gleam to the smooth concrete of the vault surfaces and providing a perfect, subtly fluctuating illumination for the works of art.