Yale Center for British Art

New Haven, Connecticut. USA
Louis I. Kahn, architect

Location

The building is situated on the corner of two city streets in New Haven just off the Yale Campus. Economic necessity and the need to retain the commercial nature of the street also dictated that most of the first floor of the structure be given over to r etail space. The first floor of the museum is actually the second floor of the building.

History

The Center for British Art at Yale University was a gift from Paul Melon along the the art and rare books it contains. The building was one of Louis Kahn's last works, completed in 1974. The center's design was originally developed as a much larger work of 150,000 square feet, but escalating building costs and the construction of a new library on the Yale campus to house some of the books allowed the programmed space to be scaled back to about 61,000 square feet.

Physical Description

The exterior of the building is clad in an imposing black acid etched stainless steel facade. Panels of this steel and glass are set into the exposed concrete frame. This cool exterior is in contrast to the wormth and lightness of the interior. The flo or plans are organized around two covered three story courts. Daylight fills the courts through great acrylic skylights in the roof. The galleries are organized around these courts, with the top floor galleries also daylit from above. As with the exter ior, the structural concrete frame is exposed. Here however, Kahn has used blond wood panels as infill, beautifully contrasting the coolness of the concrete with the warmth of the wood. Though the interior is not ornate, Kahn has achieved a very rich at mosphere with the contrasting materials and through his careful ordering and proportioning of the spaces. Kahn has allowed the artworks that fill the museum to be the ornament.

The structure of the building is a reinforced concrete frame, based on a twenty by twenty foot grid. It has four floors and a basement which houses an auditorium. A typical bay has columns that measure approximately two feet by two feet at the first flo or and fourteen inches square at the fourth. The floor slabs measure approximately ten inches in depth. The V-beams which support the roof and skylight system have a depth of about six feet. The transfer beams at the ground level are at least three fee t deep.

Building Process

Structural Descripton/Aspects

The building must resist typical loads -- its own weight which is considerable due to the concrete construction, books in the rare book library, furniture and artwork. These are the dead loads. The live loads include wind, snow, changing exhibits and ma sses of people which vary according to the museum's schedule.

Vertical Forces
One of the hallmards of Kahn's work is his clear articulation of structure in the definition of the building's form. The structure is essentially a frame of poured in place reinforced concrete, with hollow structural slabs for the floors above street lev el and precast "V" beams at the roof level. These elegent V-beams create the coffers in the ceiling which house the skylights which give the building much of its character.

These skylights create a good portion of the roof load. This load is distributed to the ground via the concrete frame, which is laid out on a 20 x 20 foot grid. The beams are crate-framed, reinforced concrete, pre-cast into their distinctive shape. Spe cifically, the vertical loads from these elements are transferred to the "V" beams which form the plane of the roof. These beams are hollow and enclose much of the ductwork for the HVAC system. They also add to the quality of light and space in the main gallery-- the most important room. Kahn is reknown for this ability to marry structure, mechanics and aesthetic form.

The columns which carry the roof and floor loads down the foundation are also made of reinforced concrete, but unlike the V-beams, they are not precast. As he did in the Exeter Library, Kahn describes the axial load within the columns themselves, by prog ressively increasing the cross section of the column as it nears the foundation. This architectural effect is enhanced in elevation, where the columns seem to recede behind the envelope as they ascend.

At the level of the street, shops and the entry to the museum are pulled back under the mass of the building by about ten feet. Yet, in order to leave the arcade open to the street, Kahn placed columns every 40 feet instead of every 20. To accomplish th is structurally, it was necessary to use a transfer beam, or girder. This beam is clearly deeper than the other horizontal members of the structrue, giving evidence of the increased stress created by the longer span. The transfer beam takes a point load at midspan and distributes it to the two columns of the forty foot bay. this concrete beam becomes an important architectrual element in the articulation of the facade, indicating the transition between the commercial first floor and the museum above. The columns of the forty foot bay are also significantly greater in cross sectional area than the columns of the twenty foot bays above, indicating their greater load bearing capacity.

Lateral Loads
Lateral loads are most likely to come from the wind. (Significant seismic activity-- the most devastating type of lateral load-- has not been recorded in the area since the colonial era.) Though this is a fairly low building in a dense urban environment , each of its facades present a wide planar face to the elements. Wind loading on the windward face of the building will also create a negative pressure on the back side of the building.

The building makes use of its frame to resist this type of lateral loading. The frame is a system that uses a system of columns and beams for rigidity. This type of system can fail in one of two ways from lateral loading: it can either overturn, or it c an fail in shear. The form and mass of the building will keep it from overturning in the case of a strong lateral load. That leaves shear as the sole mode of failure. Resistance can result from either moment connections within the frame itself or throu gh shear walls.

It seems as though the primary system is that of moment connections in the beams and columns. This is our guess, due to the relative absence of continuous walls in the building's interior. We suspect that the lightweight steel and glass infill panels of the skin cannot be counted on as the primary shear support. There are structures within the building, such as the service core and a concrete stairwell that may provide additional shear support. Kahn's deliberate design of the slick exterior, along wit h his sophisticated and clear articulation of structure, seem to indicate this type of structural organization. Always "true" to the materials, it would also follow that the concrete frame would be particularly suited for these type of connections. The building is complex, however, and this conclusion is called into question by the clear joints that can be seen in photographs of the posts and floors on the exterior and at the intersections of the V-beams in the ceiling.

Conclusions

Bibliography

Associated Buildings

Peter King and Kenny Chavinson
ARCH 461/561 Spring 1995

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