Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Louis Kahn died in a lavatory at New York\u2019s Penn Station in 1974. He was returning from India but the address in his passport had been mysteriously scratched out and his body remained unidentified for three days. It was an ignominious end\u00a0for the man the New York Times called \u201cAmerica\u2019s foremost living architect\u201d.At the time he was working on designs for the Yale Center for British Art, which opened to the public three years after he died and became his final museum building.\u00a0His first museum stands just over the road in New Haven, the 1953 Yale University Art Gallery. When that opened it caused a scandal; its fiercely reductive brick wall was seen as an insult to the rich decoration of the elaborate building that it extended (surprisingly dating from only 25 years earlier yet full-on historical). By the time the Yale Center opened to the public in 1977, Kahn had gone a little out of fashion, his monumental work looking ponderous and solemn compared to, say, the flamboyant glass and steel Centre Pompidou, which had opened a couple of months earlier in Paris. But now, almost half a century later, the Pompidou is having to undergo a huge refurbishment at the cost of hundreds of millions of euros.\u00a0The YCBA meanwhile has just had its lamps and skylights updated for $16.5mn.I\u2019m underplaying, of course.\u00a0As always with the conservation of modernist structures there is much complexity and unseen labour as well as an earlier restoration in 2016 that did a good deal of heavy lifting, but nevertheless Kahn\u2019s museum building looks, I would argue, as contemporary as anything you might be able to build today.\u00a0Walking around it and taking notes feels like reviewing a brand-new building, albeit an oddly familiar one.The light appears to have changed; cleaner, cooler.\u00a0The top floor is, as it always was, luminousOne of its most striking facets is the contrast between the white oak-encased richness of its interior and the grey, steely coldness of its outside face.\u00a0Clad in stainless steel panels and almost entirely flush with the glass and the shopfronts, it is a cool piece of contemporary urbanism that disguises the preciousness of the works inside, the finest collection of British art outside the UK, accumulated by American philanthropist Paul Mellon.\u00a0It is also an extremely unusual exterior.\u00a0Most museums revel in their own status in the street, jostling to be the main attraction.\u00a0But here Yale was doing something new; with this building they crossed over Chapel Street, the historic border between the university and the town.\u00a0As a result Kahn attempted to integrate this new building into the cityscape, not only as monument but as a functioning part of the commercial street.The storefront and fascias, like the interiors, have been beautifully restored by architect George Knight, with no fuss and almost complete invisibility. All the building\u2019s 224 acrylic skylights have been replaced with more robust polycarbonate domes and the light appears to have changed; cleaner, cooler.\u00a0That\u2019s accentuated\u00a0by the updating of the museum\u2019s lighting fixtures, the shapes and containers of which have been mostly retained, with the old halogen lights replaced by LEDs, creating a more neutral, albeit colder light (and a 60 per cent increase in energy efficiency).The top floor is, as it always was, luminous.\u00a0Huge concrete coffers funnel toplight in but every level is permeated by natural light thanks to Kahn\u2019s unusual decision to design the galleries around a pair of atria.\u00a0This means light trickles rather than floods in but it also creates a spatial awareness rare in museums, with the visitor always aware of their position in relation to those spaces.\u00a0It is extremely easy to navigate and made even more so by the looming presence of the charismatic concrete stair core, a castle tower of a cylinder that stands as a sculptural presence in one of the atria.\u00a0If the building appears to have changed barely at all, the art has subtly shifted.\u00a0The museum is opening with a pair of shows that oddly collide in Margate: Tracey Emin (who grew up in the coastal town) and JMW Turner (who spent much of his childhood there).\u00a0For Emin this is, rather remarkably, her first museum show in the US and it is exactly what you might expect: profoundly personal, revealing, freighted with sex, sickness and emotion, striking graphic works displayed to their full effect.\u00a0For Turner there must always be a problem of selecting from the nearly 3,000 works in the collection but the curators do well, embracing everything from early seascapes and epic roiling oceans to the fine inscribed lines of the engravings and prints that made his work so popular.\u00a0A small sketchbook on display provides an astonishing burst of light and colour.\u00a0Like Kahn, Turner was an artist preoccupied by light and the two square up in perfect balance.\u00a0An effort to counterbalance a picture of imperial power and elite portraiture arrives in the form of works by Cecily Brown and Yinka Shonibare, along with existing and restored works from the collection that throw new light on women artists (notably Mary Beale, 1633-99) and paintings illuminating aspects of British colonialism from tea to sugar plantations, from the Himalayas to the Caribbean; landscapes as maps of conquest and presence.Kahn\u2019s building is so good that it has become a little fetishised. You sense that the curators are almost frustrated at the art being overlooked by those who revere the setting. But it is a curious situation where the architecture is so successful precisely because it allows you to admire the art, as well as to see it in a wider context.\u00a0Kahn was arguably the first major US architect to reject the modernism\u2019s objectivity and modular rigidity in favour of something more archetypal and monumental, an architecture that was fiercely contemporary and yet which created spaces that were humane and often even familiar.Here he used a Renaissance palazzo as a model, referring to the entrance atrium as a \u201ccortile\u201d.\u00a0Now cleaned up and freer of stuff, those ideas become clearer. Much like in an Italian palace, this is a building at street level, with none of the steps of the traditional art museum but instead contiguous with the pavement. Free to enter and open to all, this is truly a public palace.\u00a0And if there were ever any doubt about the nature of a building that appears to melt into the street with its storefronts and its unassuming cutaway entrance, that has now been addressed through the commission of a canary-yellow neon work by Tracey Emin:\u00a0\u201cI loved you until the morning\u201d, scrawled in familiar angsty script transmuted into light. It shimmers through to Chapel Street, intriguing and inviting.\u00a0Love become light seems a pretty gorgeous metaphor for one of the modern era\u2019s most seductive museums.britishart.yale.eduFind out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Louis Kahn died in a lavatory at New York\u2019s Penn Station in 1974. He was returning from India but the address in his passport had been<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":261869,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-261868","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261868"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":261870,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261868\/revisions\/261870"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/261869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}