THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE KIMBELL ART MUSEUM in FT. WORTH, TEXAS©

Exhibit Space:  Louis Kahn Building

Exterior: Renzo Piano Pavilion

The Kimbell Art Museum officially opened on October 4, 1972. 



The Kimbell Art Foundation which owns and operates the Museum had been established in 1936 by Kay and Velma Kimbell, together with Kay’s sister and her husband, Dr. and Mrs. Coleman Carter. 

Early on, the Foundation collected mostly British and French portraits of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

"The Kimbell", as the Museum is fondly known, consists of two separate buildings, each designed and constructed during different decades by different world-renowned architects, namely Louis Kahn and Renzo Piano.  

The Kimbell Art Museum’s original building designed by Louis I. Kahn has become a mecca of modern architecture. Kahn designed a building in which “light is the theme.” Natural light enters through narrow plexiglass skylights along the top of cycloid barrel vaults and is diffused by wing-shaped pierced-aluminum reflectors that hang below.  

Surrounded by elms and red oaks, Renzo Piano’s colonnaded pavilion, completed in 2013,  stands as an expression of simplicity and lightness—glass, concrete, and wood—some sixty-five yards across the tree-lined pathway to the west of Louis I. Kahn’s signature cycloid-­vaulted museum of 1972.   

For more information about each of the two Exhibition spaces at The Kimbell, visit the  Museum's  Website at: https://www.kimbellart.org/art-architecture/architecture


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