Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute is in La Jolla, California, completed in 1965. I have not visited it. I know it through photographs, plans, and the persistent image of the courtyard split by a narrow channel of water.
“The work is to stay near the things that make you curious.”
The concrete is severe without feeling hostile. The teak screens make the laboratories human without making them soft. The two sides of the courtyard hold the sky between them, and the water gives the eye a line to follow before it reaches the horizon.
What interests me is that a working institution can contain a place where nobody has to be productive for a minute. The courtyard does not decorate the laboratories. It gives their work a measure of quiet.