美國(guó)之音2007標(biāo)準(zhǔn)下半年BRestoring a Gem of Architectural Modernism

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Restoring a Gem of Architectural Modernism

By Carolyn Weaver
New Haven, Connecticut
11 June 2007

Erected in 1953, the Yale University Art Gallery was American architect Louis Kahn's first major commission, Gallery director Jock Reynolds says it was also a departure for Yale. “It was something entirely new for Yale,” Reynolds said in an interview at the gallery. “It was the first modern bit of architecture in all of New Haven. And this building itself had some of the very first breakthroughs [in architectural design]. It was the first building to have track lighting, one of the first curtain-wall buildings, one of the first buildings with double-paned glass, one of the first buildings, in particular, with this unique, tetrahedral cast-concrete ceiling that you see above us."

The gallery, which is free and open to the public, displays some masterpieces of Western art, including paintings by Manet and Van Gogh, as well as ceramics from Asian countries, screens and paintings . It is also home to a major collection of African art, mainly sculptures and masks used in religious rituals. The building housed Yale's architecture school for many years, as well.

Kahn, a University of Pennsylvania professor, taught at Yale part-time -- when he wasn't designing other icons of modernism, such as the Kimbell Museum of Art in Texas, the Indian Institute of Management, and Bangladesh's parliament building -- as well as another museum for Yale, the Center for British Art.

But over the years, the Yale University Art Gallery building grew shabby and cluttered with partitions. So, beginning in 2004, Reynolds oversaw a two-year restoration, re-opening the spaces to match Kahn's vision. "It has a warmth and an organic quality and a massiveness to it that you don't associate with some of the other modernist buildings,” “and, frankly, a sensitivity to human scale. So, you get massiveness and you get delicacy.

Louis Kahn died in 1974, but his influence can be seen everywhere in contemporary architecture. Yet Reynolds notes that unlike the sharp-lined buildings of many other modernists, Kahn's designs had an air of spirituality, like ancient monuments. "It was very much a reaching back into time, even to Egypt, and the pyramids and that kind of geometry and form that inspired Kahn,” Reynolds says. “Really, the ancients spoke to him, Greek, Roman and Egyptian."

Polshek Partnership Architects, a New York-based firm, oversaw the restoration of the Yale University Art Gallery. A show of contemporary sculpture chosen by a group of Yale students to celebrate the re-opening, Responding to Kahn: A Sculptural Conversation, includes works by Alexander Calder, Annette Lemiuex, Duane Hansen, Sol Lewitt, and Alison Saar, among others.