The Salk Institute for Biological Studies
Where
On the bluffs above the Pacific.
The Institute stands in La Jolla, San Diego, on a mesa that drops away to the ocean. The courtyard is laid on a single axis running due west, so the sun sets down the middle of it — which is why the evening is built around that hour.
RE:SONATE uses two of its spaces. The courtyard becomes the room for the main set, its towers carrying projection. The eucalyptus grove alongside it holds the afternoon: the science stations, the installations, and the quieter part of the day.
The building
Louis Kahn, completed 1965.
Jonas Salk commissioned Kahn and asked for a building that would be worth inviting an artist into. What Kahn built is two mirror-image blocks, six storeys each, facing one another across an open travertine plaza — cut lengthwise by the river of life, a thin channel of water that crosses the courtyard and falls into pools at the western end.
The palette is deliberately short: concrete, teak, lead, glass, steel. The teak of the study towers and the west-facing windows was left raw on Kahn's instruction — no stain, no sealer — so the building would weather rather than be maintained into stasis. The American Institute of Architects gave it their Twenty-five Year Award in 1992.
The grove
Eucalyptus, and room to talk.
The grove sits beside the courtyard, shaded and quiet enough to hold a conversation in. It is where the science stations and the art installations go.
Why here
Not a backdrop. The reason.
The Institute is the conceptual and symbolic home for this idea, not a venue that happened to be available. Jonas Salk wanted a place where scientific inquiry could sit alongside cultural and philosophical life — open, creative, built for the exchange of ideas — and he said so in the terms an event like this would need.
In my view, art and the approach to life through art, using it as a vehicle for education and even for doing science, is so vital that it is part of a great new revolution that is taking place.
Founder, Salk Institute
Look it up
Straight from the Institute.
Further reading
- Architecture
The Institute's own account of Kahn's design, the materials, and the conservation work on the teak. salk.edu/about/about-salk-architecture
- The Institute
Who works there and what they research, from immunology and neuroscience to plant biology and genomics. salk.edu
Support the launch RE:SONATE is its own format. The Salk Institute is where it launches.