Featured in a list compiled by Architectural Record, KPF Co-Founder Bill Pedersen nominated Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute as one of the United States’ most significant works of architecture.
In celebration of the United States’ 250th anniversary, Architectural Record invited leading architects, curators, and historians to contribute their choice for the most significant works of American architecture. KPF Co-Founder Bill Pedersen nominated the Salk Institute, constructed between 1962 and 1965 in La Jolla, California, through a collaboration between Jonas Salk, MD, creator of the polio vaccine, and famed architect Louis Khan.
Bill reflects, “Throughout my career, the vertical axis guided my exploration. But no element dominates nature or the human imagination more than the horizon, particularly at the sea. For thousands of years, sapiens have looked to it as the ever-distant edge of the Earth, beyond which lies the unknown. Science deals with the unknown, and as architects, we realize buildings that aspire to represent the clients for whom we build. To my mind, no architect has represented their client with a structure of greater symbolic meaning than Louis Kahn with the institute he built for scientist Jonas Salk on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. It is said that Salk instructed Kahn to build a building that artist Pablo Picasso would desire to visit. He did much more than that; he built a building that represented Salk’s greatest aspiration—the discovery of the unknown.”
