ABSTRACT
Louis Kahn is a key figure in the account of the architectural environment in the twentieth century. When, in 1964, he drew the crucial distinction between ‘served’ and servant’ spaces he acknowledged for the first time that the ever-increasing environmental services of modern buildings placed an obligation on architects to ‘give them their place’. Alongside this engagement with the physical organisation of buildings, Kahn was, by general agreement, one of the great architectural ‘poets’ of his time. The basis of this may be found in his lifelong devotion to daylight as the basis of the poetics of architecture. This essay examines the relation between these contrasted, but complementary, strands of Kahn’s work by studies of a sequence of building from his ‘late’ period, beginning with the Yale Art Gallery (1951–1953) and concluding with its neighbour, the Yale Center for British Art (1969–1974).
