Salk Institute for Biological Studies building
Interesting facts
- Twice a year, at the spring and autumn equinoxes, the sun sets exactly in line with the courtyard's water channel, an event nicknamed Salkhenge.
- Jonas Salk saw the channel as a stream of knowledge flowing out of the institute into the ocean of human understanding, and it is often called the River of Life.
- In 1992 the American Institute of Architects gave the building its Twenty-five Year Award, an honour granted to only one building each year.
- Eleven Nobel laureates have been on the institute's faculty, and five more scientists who trained there went on to win the prize.
- Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, was among the eminent scientists who served as consultants when the institute was conceived.
- In 2006 the entire 27-acre site was declared eligible for the US National Register of Historic Places.
- About 850 researchers work in some 60 research groups inside Kahn's laboratories.
- Time magazine ranked Joseph Ecker's Salk-based mapping of a plant epigenome as the second most important scientific achievement of 2009.
Why it is worth it
Two mirror-image ranges of bare concrete face each other across an empty plaza of travertine on the clifftop at Torrey Pines, and down the middle of the plaza runs a single narrow channel of water, pointing straight at the Pacific horizon. There are no trees, no lawn and no planting in the courtyard of the Salk Institute; the sky and the ocean are its only ornaments. Built between 1962 and 1965 to designs by Louis I. Kahn, it is widely regarded as the defining work of one of the great architects of the twentieth century.
The institute was founded in 1960 by Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine, who wanted a building beautiful enough to draw the best scientists in the world. Salk and Kahn persuaded the city of San Diego to grant land on the Torrey Pines mesa, and the March of Dimes paid for the first phase; researchers moved into the first laboratory in 1963. Kahn's plan foresaw three clusters, for meetings, for living and for laboratories, but only the laboratories were built. Late in the design the scheme was changed from four narrow blocks to two wider three-storey ones, and the engineer August Komendant re-engineered the structure and taught the builders how to achieve its famously refined concrete, a pozzolanic mix with a faintly warm tone. Each laboratory floor is free of columns, spanned by deep Vierendeel trusses, with a full service floor above it for ducts and pipes. On the courtyard side, small teak-framed studies in angled towers turn their windows towards the sea.
Kahn struggled for a long time to decide what the space between the two wings should be. He asked the Mexican architect Luis Barragán for advice, and Barragán told him to plant nothing at all and make it a plaza of stone with a single water feature. The result, a stone square divided by its thread of water, is now the most celebrated part of the design. The original buildings were made a San Diego historical landmark in 1991, and since 2014 the Getty Conservation Institute has worked with the institute on conserving the concrete and teak against the salt air. La Jolla, the seaside community of San Diego around it, is known for its coves, cliffs and research campuses.
Getting there
The institute stands on North Torrey Pines Road on the mesa north of La Jolla, about 5 km from the village centre, in the city of San Diego. San Diego International Airport (SAN) is about 18 km away.
On these lists
32.88740, -117.24534per Wikidata