Salk Institute for Biological Studies

This guide to the Salk Institute in La Jolla traces how a walk through a thirteenth-century monastery in Assisi unstuck Jonas Salk's stalled search for a polio vaccine, and how that experience shaped what he asked architect Louis Kahn to build once the vaccine succeeded. It follows Kahn's paired concrete-and-travertine blocks framing a bare stone court, and the argument over what should fill the empty space between them. Listen for the role a second architect, Luis Barragan, played in that decision.