Salk Institute for Biological Studies

The Salk Institute for Biological Studies occupies a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean in La Jolla, California, designed by Louis Kahn for the polio vaccine researcher Jonas Salk, with the complex's laboratory buildings completed in 1965. Kahn arranged the institute as two mirrored blocks of laboratory space flanking a wide open travertine plaza, deliberately left free of plantings on the advice of the architect Luis Barragan, whom Kahn consulted on the plaza's design, with a narrow channel of water running down its center toward the ocean. Each laboratory building separates its served research space from its servant spaces, the pipes, ducts and stairways that support the labs, by routing mechanical services through independent vertical towers set between the study rooms, a spatial idea Kahn had already begun developing at the Yale University Art Gallery. The complex's board-formed concrete, left exposed and unpainted throughout, and its precise travertine paving have made the institute one of the most widely photographed and studied works of twentieth century architecture. It remains an active scientific research institution as well as an architectural landmark; this entry describes the complex specifically for its architecture and construction.