In all the time I’ve spent at Yale, I’ve never really had a good sense of its Art Gallery, which has existed since 1832, nearly as old as the National Gallery (it was described as a ‘Pinacotheca for Colonel Trumbull’), and is spread across two buildings, one which is Tuscan Romanesque, opened in 1928 and designed by Egerton Swartout (no, I hadn’t heard of him either) and the other, much more famous, designed by Louis Kahn early in his career, when he was teaching in Yale.
This is the Tuscan Romanesque part:-
And this is Louis Kahn in 1953:-
Both look good but hardly complimentary to each other.
They’re so totally different. The 1920s building has only recently returned to being part of the art gallery: it makes for a complicated visitor experience, but not unsuccessful. Charles