Louis Kahn: The Museum That Hid the Sun Within Its Roof

A request for a quiet art museum in Fort Worth, Texas, sets Louis Kahn writing a question in his notebook in place of a façade: what does the museum want to be? That night he stands trial in an imagined Court of Shadows beneath the earth, where a judge made of concrete hears the angry Sun, a curved vaulted Roof with its narrow opening and metal reflector, and a painting that keeps its face covered because it fears museums that drown out the art they hold. Between these hearings the book follows Kahn from an immigrant childhood in Philadelphia through years of late success to the building of the Kimbell Art Museum, with its repeated vaults, courtyards, water and travertine. It then records his death alone in Pennsylvania Station in New York, and the morning light that kept entering the Kimbell after he was gone. The court's last verdict and a closing lesson ask the reader to draw a room by asking, before its shape, where morning will be born inside it.