YaleNews
This March, when you visit the newly reopened Yale Center for British Art on Chapel Street, I want you to meander for a while, and then I want you to find one room in one of the galleries and sit down. Settle in. You might be there for a while. When you are ready, I want you to observe not the paintings in the room or your fellow museumgoers or whatever else might grab your attention immediately. You can do that later. First, what I want you to observe is the light in your room. Notice the lines and shadows that it casts. Notice the quality of it. Sit with the light for a moment. That’s what the architect of the museum and the subject of an exhibit at the Haas Family Arts Library — People Look Up at Good Architecture; check it out! — would have wanted you to do.
Said architect, former School of Architecture professor Louis Isadore Kahn, was obsessed with light. When he was 3, he stuck his hands into a stove in an attempt to pick up a smoldering coal from the fire. He set his apron alight and burned his face, scarring him for the rest of his life. Kahn, even as a toddler, evidently wanted to know what it would be like if he could carry light. He wanted to hold it, touch it, feel it on his fingertips. His experiment with the coals failed, so he had to find another way to try to do so. Eventually, he became an architect…