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The
Gallery Goes Home
An
ambitious $94 million renovation plan calls for the Art Gallery
to take full possession of the three adjacent buildings that have
housed its collection. Phase one -- the renovation of the 1953 Louis
Kahn wing -- starts this summer.
May
2003
by Mark Alden Branch '86
Over
the last 136 years, Yale's art collection -- and its artists --
have moved periodically down Chapel Street into
a succession of new buildings that Sterling Professor Emeritus Vincent
Scully calls "one of the most eloquent streetscapes of modern
times." From Street Hall (1867) to Egerton Swartwout's Old Art Gallery
(1928) to Louis Kahn's New
Art Gallery (1953), the procession has been consistently westward.
But as part of a large-scale plan
for the arts area, the art
history department will in the next few years move into a new
building by Richard
Meier adjacent to the Art & Architecture
Building, and the Art
Gallery will commence a move backward in time, reclaiming the
Swartwout building and Street Hall to form a greater whole that
Gallery staff and architects Polshek
Partnership are calling the KSS site (for Kahn, Swartwout, and
Street). Also on the agenda is a new building to provide accessible
"study storage" for the Gallery on a site to be determined.
To accomplish this
plan, the Gallery launched a $94 million capital campaign for the
building this spring, soliciting art lovers and alumni who are sympathetic
to the Gallery's dual mission as a teaching museum and a community
resource. The plan is designed to enhance both missions, with classrooms
and teaching galleries accompanying expanded display space for the
permanent collection.
While the plans for
the Swartwout and Street buildings are still preliminary, the Kahn
building will close
this summer for a two-year renovation project. Its window walls
will be replaced, partitions removed, the roof repaired, and mechanical
systems upgraded. During that time, a selection of the Gallery's
works will be installed in the Swartwout building, and the recently
reinstalled American collections
will remain on view. 
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