Light at the Kimbell Art Museum

This project was a part of the PhD coursework. We were asked to analyse daylight strategies for a building by any prominent architect known for their intuition to design with light. I chose the Kimbell art museum being a big fan of the buildings designed by Louis Kahn.

Louis Kahn designed the Kimbell art museum in the 1970s. Experts have described it as having the precise combination of daylight and artificial light. The resulting colour temperature in the building is 3500K to 3800K referred to as the ‘sweet spot’ for viewing colours in paintings displayed in a museum. Using 3D modelling and daylight simulations, I was able to deconstruct how the details of the geometry, material selection, and openings create a specific lighting quality at the Kimbell. Follow this link to read more about my analysis of the light at the Kimbell.

Follow up of this project was to develop an architectural detail for daylight inspired by the analysis of the Kimbell Museum.