New Haven, Connecticut, USA

Article by Sharon McHugh

Led by Knight Architecture, which also led a major conservation effort to the museum in 2015-16, the project replaces the museum’s original lighting with new lighting systems that achieve greater efficiency.

Exterior lighting improvements include replacing the 224 acrylic domed
skylights original to the building with more resilient polycarbonate glazing.

Additionally, new laylight cassettes fabricated to match the original design, were installed below the skylight domes to modulate light entering the galleries.

For the interior lighting, the original halogen lights were converted to more energy conserving LEDS.

The conversion involved replacing more than 6,500 linear feet of track throughout the museum and retrofitting more than 600 fixtures.

Located on the campus of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, The Yale Center of British Art (YCBA) reopened to the public 29 March following a 2-year closure to renovate the landmark building; an architectural masterwork and final building of architect Louis I. Kahn that houses the largest collection of British art outside the UK.

The project, the second of two major conservation efforts in recent years, largely focuses on upgrading the museum’s lighting.

Completed in 1977, three years after Kahn’s death, the YCBA is notable for its distinctive modernist style and for demonstrating Kahn’s philosophy that interior space is defined by the interplay of structure and light.

Widely admired for its exquisite proportions, intimately scaled rooms, and spare material palette, there is perhaps no single feature of the building that better sums it up better than the lighting.

Kahn considered natural light to be essential in architecture, viewing it as the “giver of all presences” and the foundation for architectural form.

Given the importance he placed on light, any changes to the museum’s lighting can potentially run the risk of muddying intentions or worse yet, compromising an important architectural masterpiece of the twentieth century, making this project, all the more important.

To celebrate the reopening, YCBA is presenting two landmark exhibitions: J. M. W. Turner: Romance and Reality and Tracey Emin: I Loved You Until the Morning

Project: Restoration of the Yale Center for British Art
Architects: Knight Architecture
Lead Architect: George Knight
Client: Yale University
Photographs: Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art