Yale Center for British Art

The Yale Center for British Art was designed by Louis Kahn as his final architectural commission, completed in 1977, three years after Kahn's death in 1974, under the supervision of his associates Pellecchia and Meyers. The building was constructed to house the British art collection donated to Yale University by the philanthropist Paul Mellon, its concrete-framed structure infilled with stainless steel panels and glass, sitting directly across Chapel Street from Kahn's earlier Yale University Art Gallery of 1953. Kahn organized the galleries around two top-lit courts, admitting natural light through skylights and diffusing screens onto the paintings below, a lighting approach he refined across his career and brought to a mature expression here. The building's restrained, geometric exterior of steel and glass gives little external hint of the warm oak-paneled and daylit galleries within, a contrast characteristic of Kahn's late work. It is widely regarded, alongside the Salk Institute and the Phillips Exeter Academy Library, as one of the buildings that most fully realize Kahn's mature architectural principles.