Program. Client

In 1959, Dr. Jonas Salk was working at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, where he had been director of the viral research lab since 1947. It was here that Salk had developed the first polio vaccine. Rivalry and jealousy over his work was high, and some researchers thought that Salk’s success had been too easily gained. Robert Oppenheimer, then director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, convinced him that he should start a new institute and move to the West Coast. Later that year, Salk moved ahead with a plan. He secured funding from his longtime ally Basil O’Connor, head of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, which was later renamed the March of Dimes. O’Connor had been appointed by President Roosevelt, who was himself a polio patient. Salk also acquired a gift of 70 acres of land from the city of La Jolla at the urging of their mayor, another polio patient.

Although funding for the Salk Institute came from the March of Dimes, Dr. Salk, by all accounts, filled the role of client alone. His visionary ideals of research activity and human community were the founding principles of the Institute. When Jonas Salk died in La Jolla of congestive heart failure on June 23, 1995, he was working toward a treatment for the disease caused by the human immunod­eficiency virus (HIV). He was then 80 years old. Dr. Salk never patented the polio vaccine, and he never profited directly from it.

A friend of Salk’s had heard a Louis Kahn lecture, “Order for Science and Art,” related to the Richards Medical Laboratory, and suggested that Salk and Kahn meet. In December 1959, Salk interviewed Kahn in Philadelphia, intending only to query him about the best way to select an architect. While touring the Richards Medical Laboratory construction site that same day, how­ever, he was taken with Kahn’s enthusiasm and insight. Salk decided to offer him the commission for the new facility.

The story that unfolded is a tale of great success and the interaction of formidable thinkers. For Jonas Salk, the Institute was a “community of mind,” where intuition and reason would merge, where the cultures of science and art would harmonize, and where work and spirituality would fuse. Louis Kahn, of course, shared these notions and had complementary motives of his own.

Brief

Having a client of Salk’s intellect and visionary drive was of immense benefit to Louis Kahn’s work for the Institute. There were some of the normal quantitative stipulations of course, such as a space to be about the same as Richards Medical or roughly 100,000 ft2 (9,286 m2). But there was no formal building program given, and Kahn was charged with working one out. There were, however, definite ideas about the qualitative aspects of the Institute. It would have to be a lab worthy, in Salk’s words, of “inviting Picasso.” Incidentally, this comment seemed especially poignant because Dr. Salk was married to Picasso’s second wife, Fran^oise Gilot, herself an internationally recognized artist, author, and lecturer who had spent ten years with Picasso.

The program and concept of the Institute took form from there. Salk alluded to the cloistered courtyard at St. Francis of Assisi in Italy (1228-1253), where he had stayed briefly in the 1950s and experienced a sudden revelation concerning the polio vaccine. Kahn worked at shaping the requirements for the Institute into an objective program. Salk appointed an advisory committee. Kahn sought strategies for overcoming the problems scientists com­plained about at Richards. Eventually, Kahn devised a pro­gram in three parts: laboratories for eight Nobel-winning scientists, a meeting house to seat 500, and a researchers’ community with living quarters and recreation facilities.

The laboratories were to occupy the central position, up on the bluff and set parallel with the ocean. There would be four clear-span laboratories of two stories each so that each researcher would have an entire floor. These independent laboratory spaces are an obvious carryover from Richards Medical, where each floor plate was con­ceived as one “studio.”

The project underwent a series of bad turns about two years into the design work when the Kennedy administra­tion took office in January 1961. Funding for the Institute was drastically reduced from the $20 million initially promised. Further troubles surfaced when the general contractor, George Fuller, complained about Komendant’s design for the unfamiliar concrete construction across the long-span laboratories and persuaded Salk’s advisory committee to force a redesign. Komendant disputed Fuller’s ability to judge the structural design and refused to do further work. Eventually, the laboratory was reduced to two 3-story buildings. The meeting hall and the living community were completely eliminated. The team, fortu­nately, was reunited.

Site

The Institute sits on 27 acres of ground overlooking the Pacific Ocean, 1360 feet below. It is located across Torrey Pines Road from the University of California at San Diego. A deep, winding dry ravine, eroded into the low scrub brush, runs from the high ground down to the shoreline some 400 yards away.

Climate

The La Jolla/San Diego climate is friendly and mild, and the microclimate of the Torrey Pines bluff is little differ­ent. Normal temperatures are comfortable and with little variation through the day. The climate is Mediterranean, sunny and dry with less than 10 inches of rain per year. Breezes are steady off the Pacific. Morning fog is frequent. The arid sands sometimes create dusty conditions.