THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE KIMBELL ART MUSEUM
Louis I. Kahn, Bruno Monguzzi and Alberto Bianda [Designers]
Louis I. Kahn: THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE KIMBELL ART MUSEUM. Milano: Skira, 1999. First edition [from the series I cataloghi dell'Accademia di architettura; 2]. Text in English. Square quarto. Photo illustrated thick French folded wrappers. 167 pp. Fully illustrated in color and black and white. Pages 125-148 fold out to display plans. Elaborate graphic design on a variety of paper stocks byBruno Monguzzi and Alberto Bianda. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Trivial wear to wrappers, thus a nearly fine copy.
From the Library of the Kimbell Art Museum Curator of Architecture Doctor Patricia Cummings Loud, with her neat ink signature to fron free endpaper.
9.5 x 9.5 softcover book issued on the occasion of an exhibition organized by the Academy of Architecture of the Italian Language Swiss University at the Art Museum of Mendrisio, 1997. Bruno Monguzzi and Alberto Bianda designed the catalog; Luca Bellinelli supervised the design and organization of the exhibition and catalog; translation by Patricia Ranzi-Gedey; photography by Michael Bodycomb.
Isamu Noguchi called Kahn "a philosopher among architects." The Kimbell Art Museum is a living testament to that belief.
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.
Doctor Patricia Cummings Loud (Beaumont, TX 1930 – 2021) served as Curator of Architecture at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas from 1981 until her retirement. As Curator and Archivist, Doctor Loud presented the public face of the Kimbell to the Architectural pilgrims who trekked from around the globe to Fort Worth to experience the magic of Louis Kahn’s temple of light.
She wrote “One visitor recently told me that she had merely stopped by to “bathe” in Louis Kahn’s luminous spaces; she would come back another time to see the special exhibition currently on view. She seemed to be saying that the building’s environment was enough for a spiritual lift even when there was not enough time to look thoughtfully at art. The art of architecture was fulfilling its role.”
Doctor Loud received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University Texas, Austin, in 1951; Master of Arts, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1954; Master of Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1954; and her Doctorate of Philosophy in Fine Arts, again from Harvard University, 1990.
During her teaching career, she served as a Ford fellow in Art History, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, 1956—1960; a Senior Resident Cabot Hall Radcliffe College, 1964—1968; a Lecturer University of Connecticut, Groton, Connecticut, 1971—1972; and an Instructor at Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, 1972—1976. She then moved into Arts administration as the Executive Assistant at the Van Cliburn Foundation, 1980—1981.
She was an honorary Member of the American Institute of Architects, and a Member of the Dallas Architect Association, the Society Architect Historians, the College Art Association, and the 1998 recipient of the honorary John G. Flowers award from the Texas Society Architects.
“The museum does provide what many find to be a profound, if unusual, architectural experience as a setting for a small, remarkable collection of fine art. It has become a pilgrimage destination for people from throughout the world. What these visitors seek may differ for individuals, but from what I have heard many say, it appears they find rewards within what Louis Kahn would call “a great treasury.” He said in a discussion shortly before the Kimbell Art Museum opened that “A museum seems like a secondary thing, unless it is a great treasury. A treasury, a guarded love of your source.”
Louis Isadore Kahn (born Itze-Leib Schmuilowsky) (1901 – 1974) was born into a poor Jewish Estonian family and achieved much fame and noriety as an American architect and major-league player based in Philadelphia. After working in various capacities for several firms in Philadelphia, he founded his own atelier in 1935. While continuing his private practice, he served as a design critic and professor of architecture at Yale School of Architecture from 1947 to 1957.
From 1957 until his death, he was a professor of architecture at the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Kahn created a style that was monumental and monolithic; his heavy buildings for the most part do not hide their weight, their materials, or the way they are assembled. Louis Kahn's works are considered as monumental beyond modernism. Famous for his meticulously built works, his provocative proposals that remained unbuilt, and his teaching, Kahn was one of the most influential architects of the twentieth century. He was awarded the AIA Gold Medal and the RIBA Gold Medal. At the time of his death he was considered by some as "America's foremost living architect."
Kahn trained at the University of Pennsylvania in a rigorous Beaux-Arts tradition, with its emphasis on drawing. After completing his Bachelor of Architecture in 1924, Kahn worked as senior draftsman in the office of the city architect, John Molitor. He worked on the designs for the 1926 Sesquicentennial Exposition. In 1928, Kahn made a European tour. He was interested particularly in the medieval walled city of Carcassonne, France, and the castles of Scotland, rather than any of the strongholds of classicism or modernism. After returning to the United States in 1929, Kahn worked in the offices of Paul Philippe Cret, his former studio critic at the University of Pennsylvania, and then with Zantzinger, Borie and Medary in Philadelphia.
In 1932, Kahn and Dominique Berninger founded the Architectural Research Group, whose members were interested in the populist social agenda and new aesthetics of the European avant-gardes. Among the projects Kahn worked on during this collaboration are schemes for public housing that he had presented to the Public Works Administration, which supported some similar projects during the Great Depression. They remained unbuilt.
Among the more important of Kahn's early collaborations was one with George Howe. Kahn worked with Howe in the late 1930s on projects for the Philadelphia Housing Authority and again in 1940, along with German-born architect Oscar Stonorov, for the design of housing developments in other parts of Pennsylvania. A formal architectural office partnership between Kahn and Oscar Stonorov began in February 1942 and ended in March 1947, which produced fifty-four documented projects and buildings.
Kahn did not arrive at his distinctive architectural style until he was in his fifties. Initially working in a fairly orthodox version of the International Style, he was influenced vitally by a stay as Architect in Residence at the American Academy in Rome during 1950, which marked a turning point in his career. After visiting the ruins of ancient buildings in Italy, Greece, and Egypt, he adopted a back-to-the-basics approach. He developed his own style as influenced by earlier modern movements, but not limited by their sometimes-dogmatic ideologies.
Kahn's teaching career began at Yale University in 1947. He eventually was named as the Albert F. Bemis Professor of Architecture and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956. Kahn then returned to Philadelphia to teach at the University of Pennsylvania from 1957 until his death, becoming the Paul Philippe Cret Professor of Architecture. He also was a visiting lecturer at Princeton University from 1961 to 1967.
Kahn was elected a Fellow in the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1953. He was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1964. He was awarded the Frank P. Brown Medal in 1964. In 1965 he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician. He was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1968 and awarded the AIA Gold Medal, the highest award given by the AIA, in 1971, and the Royal Gold Medal by the RIBA, in 1972.
In 1974, Kahn died of a heart attack in a men's restroom at Penn Station in Manhattan. He had just returned from a work trip to India. Owing to police miscommunications in both New York City and Philadelphia, his wife and his office were not notified until two days after his death. After his long career, he was in debt when he died.
Kahn had three children with three women. With his wife, Esther, whom he married in 1930, he had a daughter, Sue Ann. With Anne Tyng, who began her working collaboration and personal relationship with Kahn in 1945, he also had a daughter, Alexandra Tyng. When Tyng became pregnant in 1953, to mitigate the scandal, she went to Rome, Italy, for the birth of their daughter. With Harriet Pattison, he had a son, Nathaniel Kahn.
Kahn's obituary in the New York Times, written by Paul Goldberger, mentions only Esther and his daughter by her as survivors. All of his children and their mothers attended the funeral. In 2003 Nathaniel Kahn released a documentary about his father, entitled, My Architect: A Son's Journey. The Oscar-nominated film provides views and insights into the architecture of Kahn while exploring him personally through people who knew him: family, friends, and colleagues. It also provides insights into Kahn's unusual and complicated family arrangements.
Louis Kahn's work infused the International style with a fastidious, highly personal taste, a poetry of light. His few projects reflect his deep personal involvement with each. Isamu Noguchi called him "a philosopher among architects." He was known for his ability to create monumental architecture that responded to the human scale. He also was concerned with creating strong formal distinctions between served spaces and servant spaces. What he meant by servant spaces was not spaces for servants, but rather spaces that serve other spaces, such as stairwells, corridors, restrooms, or any other back-of-house function such as storage space or mechanical rooms. His palette of materials tended toward heavily textured brick and bare concrete, the textures often reinforced by juxtaposition to highly refined surfaces such as travertine marble. He is often well remembered for his deliberation about the use of brick, on how it can be more than the basic building material:
“If you think of Brick, you say to Brick, ‘What do you want, Brick?’ And Brick says to you, ‘I like an Arch.’ And if you say to Brick, ‘Look, arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete lintel over you. What do you think of that, Brick?’ Brick says, ‘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.”
Bruno Monguzzi (Swiss, b. 1941) studied Graphic Design in Geneva, then Typography, Photography and Gestalt Psychology in London.
“I left for London where I selected a few courses: Romek Marber’s at St Martin’s, Dennis Bailey’s at Central, photography at the London School of Printing. Thanks to Ken Briggs, whom I had also met at St Martin’s and who tried to answer my many questions, I discovered Gestalt psychology and became very involved in the study of visual perception. It is at that point, in 1961, that I started to believe in graphic design as a problem-solving profession rather than a problem-making one and that I slowly began to push away my hidden dream to became another Werner Bischof. It was also at the time that I began to understand and to love the American school: Gene Federico, Herb Lubalin, Lou Dorfsman, Lou Danziger, Charles and Ray Eames.”
“In the second issue of Neue Grafik I discovered the Milanese pioneers – Studio Boggeri, Max Huber, Franco Grignani – and I decided to fly to Milan to meet Antonio Boggeri. I still remember the tiny elevator of 3 Piazza Duse. On the slow, shaky journey up to the sixth floor I felt uneasy. And I felt uneasy for the following two years, having fallen in love with the man, his ideas, the designs of Aldo Calabresi and the office with the balcony overlooking the Giardini. After a few weeks of desperate struggle to be good enough to stay there, I was called for. Lifting his lean, long hands – the most beautiful hands I have ever seen – Boggeri shared with me his theory about the spider’s web. Like the spider’s web, he said, Swiss graphic design was perfect, but often of a useless perfection. The web, he stated, was only useful when harmed by the entangled fly. It was then that my vocabulary began to increase. And it was then that my use of type and pictures began to grow towards more expressive solutions.” Monguzzi started as an assistant at Studio Boggeri in 1961, became Antonio Boggeri’s son-law in 1974, and curated and designed the Studio Boggeri retrospective at the Milan Triennale in 1981. In 1971, Monguzzi received the Bodoni prize for his contribution to Italian graphic design and he became a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale in 1979. In 1983, in association with Visuel Design Jean Widmer, he won the competition for the signage system and identity for the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
“When the results of the competition to design the poster for the opening of the new Musee d’Orsay proved to be a failure I was called to Paris. Most projects were showing works of art, or details from works of art. Others were showing the building, or details from the building. The director did not want to see the building. The chief curator did not want to see works of art. So, from a “picture followed by words” poster, we arrived at a “words followed by no picture” concept. The logo and date were all that was needed.”
“It seemed to be the perfect brief, but after I had played around with these elements for quite some time I realised that a metaphor was missing. I walked over to my bookcase, picked out a book on Lartigue, slowly turned the pages, and when I came to an image of a plane taking off I knew this was the answer.”
“. . . I think that having designed the logo myself, it was probably easier for me to accept it fully and to use it with the right emphasis. As for the cropping, the possibility of using it in fragments was established from the start. I had already used it with a similar trimming in the C6/5 envelope and on the cards.”
Monguzzi was Art Consultant for Abitare magazine from 1986 to 1991. He was the sole designer for Museo Cantonale d’Arte, Lugano from 1987 to 2004. He lives and works in Meride, Switzerland.