The Kimbell Art Museum’s groundbreaking exhibition leaves a profound appreciation for its architect, Louis Kahn

There is an architectural hajj, and now it is burdened with a time imperative. It is a journey all architects feel compelled to make at least once in their lifetime — to see the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. Until June 25, the Kimbell is hosting “Louis Kahn: The Power of Architecture.”

For its three-month run, expect to see even more architects and their associates circling the Kimbell in silent reverence because inside are Kahn’s drawings, models, videos, and photographs. It is an architectural rarity, a museum display of an architect’s preparatory work housed in one of the greatest buildings designed by the artist.

Filling half of the Kimbell’s Kahn-designed building is a collection of his work organized by the Vitra Design Museum of Weil am Rhein, Germany.

The exhibit opens with a 12-foot model of City Tower, a proposed project for Philadelphia, Kahn’s hometown. It was never built. Its large twisting helix shape influenced younger architects to imagine high rises as more than rectangular boxes. So the model was saved, and with an enormous photograph of the craggy-faced Kahn behind it, it sets the scene for the coming story about a man of small stature who left a huge imprint on his profession.

The galleries are filled with Kahn-related ephemera — his calendars that show constant travel broken only by his teaching commitments. There are letters, telegrams, his box of well-traveled pastels, as well as the expected framed architectural renderings and photographs.

It would be a mass of monochromatic pages from his life and practice were it not for his brilliant pastel sketches of landscapes and the occasional video screens that broadcast interviews with his contemporaries. This could not have been an easy exhibit to mount, yet Kimbell curator Jennifer Casler Price has done an excellent job staging the disparate objects around the models, which stand in for the completed projects.

The models vary in size and materials, and this accentuates the lack of cohesive style, but Kahn didn’t have a signature style. His structures are large and imposing with a solidity that defies the interiors that are washed with a transcendent light.

The light play that is evident in his built environments is written about — and obvious in the cycloid vaults in the Kimbell — but is missing in the architectural drawings and models. Without it there is no magic. The way Kahn infused his buildings with light is what made them come alive.

His infatuation with how light played on architecture can be seen in the companion show, “The Color of Light, The Treasury of Shadows: Pastels by Louis I. Kahn From the Collections of His Children.” In the last gallery are fewer than a dozen small pastel sketches Kahn made when he was the architect in residence at the American Academy in Rome, 1950-51. During three months of travel, he became fascinated with the ancient sites in Italy, Greece and Egypt, and his sensitive drawings of massive columns, pyramids and facades washed in shadows informed the direction his practice would take.

He rendered the shadows in vermillion and green. In one of the first galleries, his box of pastels is on display; most of the sticks of colors are still perfectly intact — reds, ochers, and greens though are worn to little more than nubs.

These pastel sketches, loaned by his children, are the second most interesting things in the exhibit; the models are in the top spot. Especially striking are the two landscape designs he created with sculptor and landscape architect Isamu Noguchi. Originally the garden and playground models were sculpted in plasticine. To ensure their longevity, they were subsequently cast in bronze, and they are things of beauty.

Over the course of his career, Kahn designed hundreds of buildings, yet fewer than 70 were built. His oeuvre is scant. What he did accomplish, though, has had a resounding influence.

“Three or four masterpieces are more important than 50 or 60 buildings,” said his contemporary I.M. Pei in the film “My Architect,” directed by Kahn’s son Nathaniel Kahn.

Film footage and outtakes from “My Architect” also includes interviews with Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano, which run in several of the galleries to animate an otherwise static experience.

Kahn’s greatest successes were the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif., 1959-65, and the Kimbell, 1966-72. His early work includes the Yale University Art Gallery, 1951-53, and the Jewish Community Center Ewing Township, N.J., 1954-59. An enormous project was underway when he died in 1974: the National Assembly building in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It was begun in 1962 and completed in 1983. Built by laborers who used bamboo ladders and handmade bricks, it is a marvel of patience and purpose.

Kahn’s reputation grew exponentially after his death, so much so that one of his designs didn’t make it to fruition until after he had achieved fame. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park on New York City’ Roosevelt Island, the last project he designed, languished for years. But because it was designed by Kahn, the funds and will to build it were finally found, and it was dedicated in 2012.

Architectural exhibits are always difficult. Models don’t do justice to the finished product. Drawings are pale; preliminary sketches rarely resemble the final building. Reading treatises or correspondences, especially handwritten ones, is laborious. This is a text-heavy exhibition that requires reading the gallery signage, so while not quite heavy lifting, neither is it a stroll through the park.

But for greater appreciation of the Kimbell Art Museum, it is a lovely valentine. Richard Brown, the first director of the Kimbell, wrote that the museum-going experience should offer education and personal enrichment, and “Visitors to an art museum ought to be charmed.”

Over the past 45 years, visitors to the Kimbell have definitely been charmed; most have been dazzled. This exhibit illustrates the subtle machinations of humble materials that have left them with such a profound appreciation for the work of Louis Kahn.

This story was originally published March 28, 2017 at 4:00 PM with the headline "The Kimbell Art Museum’s groundbreaking exhibition leaves a profound appreciation for its architect, Louis Kahn."