The Salk Institute,
designed by Louis Kahn,
La Jolla, California.
A few miles north of San Diego, off a winding tree-lined road called North Torrey Pines, lies the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. I have arrived by car, but one can really only see the complex as a pedestrian, so I walk in through the high front gates that are open from six a.m. to six p.m. This is the first noticeable oddity: a major research center that is open to the public all day long. Some people may come for science-related reasons, but many, it seems, are here just to admire and relax in and take heart from the structure designed by Louis Kahn in the early 1960s—a symmetrical set of study towers and lab buildings mirroring each other across a remarkable central plaza.
In order to get to this plaza, you have to pass between two inferior structures built in imitation-Kahn style to house the more recent labs and offices. In Kahn’s own time, the approach would have been through a grove of eucalyptus trees, only a few of which remain standing as emblems of what was lost.On my own first visit, though, I don’t pay much attention to this diminished approach, because I am drawn forward by the promise of something magical lurking beyond the rust-colored oxidized-steel fence that marks the beginning of the original site. And that promise is soon fulfilled.
Reaching the near side of the ninety-yard-long, pale-travertine-paved plaza, I see in the distance a band of blue, the Pacific Ocean, glinting at me from beyond the open end of the rectangular space. A long stone bench set perpendicularly in my path forces me to pause. Nearly as wide as the plaza, the bench asks me to stop and take in the view from this position, where sea and sky have been placed within a frame created by the tall, saw-toothed edges of the surrounding buildings. A foot-wide shallow stream, encased in a travertine channel, runs in a straight line from a small, square fountain directly in front of me and guides my eye westward, almost to the horizon. Twice a year, at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, the sun sets directly over that shining runnel of water: not so much an allusion to Stonehenge and its ancient cousins as a confirmation that this building, too, marks its history on an astronomical scale of time. Now, however, it is high summer, and the whole plaza is bathed in bright August daylight, so that the shadows—the gaps between the buildings that line the north and south sides of the plaza, the open entrances at the ground level, the recesses under the travertine benches, the slight spaces where one block of matter meets another—show up as almost black. It’s a bit like being in an architectural rendering or a black-and-white photo come to life, except that my sense of my own presence in this three-dimensional space is so powerful.
In order to move forward, which the view compels me to do, I must first move to the side to get around the bench. Whichever way I choose to go, whether north or south, to the right or to the left, I end up facing the jagged buildings that form the front line of the structures on either side of the plaza. Focusing on them now for the first time, I realize that these four-story concrete towers—in which the second and fourth floors hold scientists’ studies, with a covered steel-railed terrace sandwiched in between them—must provide all their occupants with marvelous views. Every one of the studies has a large, protruding window on the western, Pacific-facing side of its acutely angled wedge, as well as another window, set within narrow, vertical teak boards, that overlooks the mirror-image studies on the opposite side.
That transverse view is what I see now: a composition in concrete, metal, glass, and teak, all put together in a way that complements the rigorous geometric design of the plaza while softening it with something more human. Is the human element provided by the handmilled teak, which has weathered to a soft, variegated grayish-brown, giving a sense of time’s passage to this otherwise timeless place? Or does it stem from the concrete itself, which is warmer, smoother, and more personable—more person-sized, even —than anything I have previously associated with this material? Despite the feeling of weight and mass that inflects the structure as a whole, there is a tangible delicacy to the construction, with its numerous separate panels of concrete each the size and shape of a large door. These panels are doubly scored at their meeting points, as if to frame each pale-gray rectangle individually. They are also pocked at regular intervals with round, symmetrically-arranged holes. The holes, visibly plugged with a darker-gray lead, are like the belly-buttons of the cement: they emphasize its origins, marking the places at which it was originally tied into its plywood forms. And because they puncture the concrete panels in such an orderly, balanced fashion, they reinforce the eye’s sense of pleasure, and hence the brain’s repose. Nothing is random here, they imply, and what is done for practical reasons can also be supremely beautiful. This applies to the science practiced within these walls, one presumes, as well as to the walls themselves.
On a very hot day (or a very rainy one), you might seek protection under the concrete, passing through the heavily shadowed, obliquely sunlit arcades that run at ground level along the full length of the study structures. But given the mild sunny weather, I choose to remain out in the plaza, hewing close to the central channel of water even as I follow its course toward the ocean. As I approach the stream’s western endpoint, I discover a previously invisible rectangular pool (a ha-ha, in farmer’s or landscape architect’s terms)into which the runnel empties. Like the long bench at the eastern end, this pool initially halts my progress until I move around to its northern or southern side. From here I can see down into what lies beyond the plaza—the ground level of the Salk complex, accessible by a stairway—and now it becomes apparent that the true horizon is far away, past a series of low hills that continue to block my view of all but the thinnest strip of ocean. What I saw when I first entered the plaza was merely an illusion of infinity, created by the framing device of the building itself; having now reached that infinite point, I find it has disappeared, and what I am left with is a much more prosaic if still pretty view of the ocean.
Behind the rows of studies lie two matching lab buildings, the north wing and the south wing. Each is six stories high, but they appear to be the same height as the study buildings because two of the stories are sunk below ground, though even these are naturally lit by courtyards functioning as lightwells. It turns out there are actually only three floors of labs, alternating with three “interstitial” floors where most of the maintenance, storage, electrical, ventilation, and structural functions of the building reside. Because I am taking a guided tour, I am permitted to peek into one of these dark, cluttered, in-between floors, where I spot the famous Vierendeel trusses that Kahn’s brilliant engineer, August Komendant, used to solve one of the project’s key technical problems. These catenary-curved, steel-reinforced concrete beams, each nine feet by sixty-five feet, are strong enough and yet flexible enough to allow the lab floors to remain open from end to end, without supporting walls or columns interrupting the lab space.
I also manage to get into the open labs themselves, which are lit for the most part with daylight pouring in through the huge glass curtain walls on either side, though there are also fluorescent lights hanging from the eleven-foot ceilings. As I look up at those ceilings, I notice rectangular incisions every five feet or so—covered-over access points through which maintenance functions can be performed from the interstitial floors. These pre-cut openings serve the same function as the cinderblocks that form one whole wall of the largely underground eastern maintenance wing: they allow ceilings or walls to be opened panel by panel, stone by stone, so that no major structure ever has to be taken down or compromised. I had decided, out in the plaza, that Louis Kahn was a highly imaginative visionary; now I see that he also had the practical soul of a maintenance man.
“This is the cat’s meow of a facility manager’s deal,” says Tim Ball, the current Salk maintenance director, as he takes me on his own personal tour of Kahn’s ingenious design. “This gives us the capacity to maintain, repair, clean, without interrupting the occupant. It’s expensive to build this way in the first place, with full-height interstitials, but the Institute has probably paid for itself six times over since it was built.” Ball tells me he recently spent fourteen months replacing all the outmoded infrastructure that heated, cooled, cleaned, and powered the labs, but without altering the architecture or disturbing the scientists in any way. “I don’t know of another scientific building in the country where that could be done,” he says.
Everything about the design that I thought was done for aesthetic reasons turns out, according to Ball, to have its practical side. Positioning the plaza directly in line with the equinoctial sun creates maximum access to natural light—“daylight harvesting,” Ball calls it. Angling the western-facing windows toward the Pacific, with a setback between each pair in the double-bays, doesn’t just enable every scientist to have a beautiful view; it also allows each study to be cooled by the prevailing ocean breezes. The lovely travertine-enclosed central stream may recall the Alhambra or a Persian palace, but it too has a function, for all the water in it (along with any rainwater in the plaza) gets channeled via the rectangular pool into an underground cistern, from which it is eventually recycled back into the fountain. And even the “shadow joints” that are everywhere in Kahn’s design—those one-inch gaps that separate concrete from wood or wood from metal—are not just a pleasing way for the eye to mark a change in material. They also, Ball tells me, help to preserve the wood, by protecting it from the condensation caused by the concrete’s or metal’s heating and cooling.
To conclude the tour, Tim Ball insists on taking me down to the lowest level of the maintenance wing, where all the central mechanical, electrical, and system-monitoring functions are housed. (Even down here, surprisingly, there is a lightwell that brings in natural light.) Down in this basement, on one of the cement walls, he shows me a couple of penciled notations in Louis Kahn’s own hand. They were still trying out the concrete when they poured this part, he says, still experimenting with what it should look like in terms of texture, color, joins, and form markings. So right here, as the building was beginning to take shape, is where Kahn indicated the spots that had come out exactly the way he wanted them to, and his legible, hastily scrawled handwriting, accompanied by two rapid sketches of joints and forms, preserves his ghostly presence in those two places.
Like the facilities director, many of the scientists and administrators who work at the Salk Institute have a visceral sense of gratitude for both the beauty and the practicality of the space. A youthful immunologist who is lecturing to a crowd of visitors in front of the building mentions the fun of leaning back in her chair and waving down the full length of the lab to her colleague at the other end. A seasoned administrator crossing the plaza tells me that her favorite time to be there is in the rain, when the wet concrete walls turn a darker, slatier gray, and the drenched travertine gives off a sheen. I ask her, since she has been at the Salk for twenty-three years, what associations she has with the plaza, and she answers, “Jonas Salk. I always think of Jonas Salk.” Then she pats a concrete post next to her and says, “This is known as ‘Salkcrete.’” She is alluding to the fact that Salk and Kahn both stood by watching as the early, experimental concrete came out of its forms; together, they chose the final color and texture. Perhaps it was this kind of intense involvement in the details of the project that caused Kahn always to refer to Salk, ever afterward, as his favorite client.
There are, of course, occasional naysayers among the site’s regular users. A young neuroscientist whom I catch on his brief break describes himself as “jaded.” He no longer sees the pretty view, and he is tired of working in an open lab, where it can be difficult to collect one’s own thoughts. When I gesture toward the study towers in which the Nobel Prizewinners and other eminences have their private offices, he nods in envious acknowledgment: that is the kind of space he could be happy in.
One such happy occupant is Greg Lemke, a prominent research scientist who has been at the Salk for about fifteen years. He invites me to take a look inside his study, which is perched on the second floor of one of the easternmost bays in the north wing. There are no bad views from any of these studies, but his is particularly good because he gets the ocean view framed, in classic Kahnian fashion, by the buildings to the west of his. He also prefers the way the light falls on the north wing, so he has kept his study here even though his lab is now located in the southern half of the complex. He comments on the fact that the light changes dramatically with the seasons, while also noting wryly that “Kahn didn’t know about the fogs or the winter; he was designing for a tropical climate.” In the summer, Lemke’s study can be sheltered from the direct sun and cooled entirely by breezes—he demonstrates how this works by pulling the glass window sideways until it is entirely open, and then sliding a teak slatted blind into its place.
Mostly, Greg Lemke uses this luminous, spare, beautiful room when he wants to read papers or write grant proposals, though he has also been known to hold meetings here with up to a dozen people. Each occupant gets to arrange the room exactly as he wishes, and Lemke has his desk facing away from the largest concrete wall and toward the Pacific view; an L-shaped extension that holds his laptop faces out the other window toward the plaza. On one wall hangs a Picasso-esque lithograph of a woman’s head, done by one of the painter’s significant lovers, Françoise Gilot. (Gilot later became Mrs. Jonas Salk, and Lemke is the current holder of the Françoise Gilot-Salk Chair in Molecular Neurobiology and Immunology.) Otherwise the room is almost empty. Asked if he finds the concrete wall cold or impersonal, Lemke shakes his head. “If you look at the concrete, it has a lot going on. I like it a lot,” he says.
Leaving the study towers, I find myself back out on the plaza in the mid-afternoon light. I take a seat on one of the seven travertine benches lining three sides of the rectangle and try to figure out the source of this space’s enormous appeal. While I am thinking, I notice that the jagged lines of mirror-image buildings edging toward the infinite view offer a transparently simple lesson in perspective: the saw-tooth pattern, which appears loose from close up, tightens as it extends away from me. In this sky-ceilinged, open-ended “room,” the serrated walls are what give shape to the vastness, enclosing me in something recognizably manmade. And yet the exactness and symmetry of the construction are such that the place almost seems to partake of a mathematical, inherent order, something larger and more ancient than familiar architecture. What comes to mind are the Greek temples at Paestum, those grand, ruined structures which Kahn loved, and which still strike awe into the heart of any visitor. But those monuments clearly belong to old, dead gods, whereas this one feels like a tribute to something living—science, perhaps, or human brains at work, or any kind of strenous collaboration.
You are aware, in this plaza, of your own size and placement in the world. The rectangular space seems huge when it is empty, but as other people stroll across it, they look normal-sized, human-sized; the space does not diminish them. A feeling of calmness and repose prevails throughout, echoed in the constant plashing of the water. It is as if the sound of the water and the sight of the soothingly symmetrical buildings are two aspects of a single synaesthetic experience. Incor-porated with these are an imagined sense of touch (the smoothness of the concrete, the intriguing texture of the pitted travertine, the gentle roughness of the weathered teak) and a potential or even actual sense of motion. The plaza invites you to move around it—in particular, to move toward the view —and in accepting the invitation, you become ever more firmly lodged in this particular place, at the western edge of the western hemisphere, overlooking the Pacific Ocean on a particular summer day.
Allowed to remain until sunset, I watch as all this warm beauty gets transformed into an eerie magic. The sun, which in August sets slightly to the north of the runnel, casts its early evening light on the southern row of studies, making their external faces stand out in gold, their receding faces hide in shadow. As the plaza dims, the shining strip of water at its center looks like a silver path laid down in a travertine plain. It beckons me forward toward the sunset, and toward the western end of the building, where even the walls that are merely facing a sunlit wall glow with reflected light. When I retreat to one of the benches and lift my face to the sky, I can see the clouds gently moving in my direction, emphasizing the archaic stillness of the dark buildings silhouetted beneath them. I find myself trying to capture each changing moment with my camera, but no camera is supple or delicate enough to catch all the elements at once: the sky and sea and framing concrete wedges, the paler travertine with its glittering ribbon of water. Only the human eye can perceive it in all its subtle richness.
Wendy Lesser edits The Threepenny Review. Her tenth book, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books, is due out soon from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
