The courtyard form was fundamental to Louis Kahn's institutional architecture. From the Trenton bathhouses and the Salk Institute laboratories to the Exeter library and the Yale Center for British Arts, he created buildings whose focus was situated at their center rather than at their edges and whose courtyards doubled as places of community and contemplation. It is not possible, however, to draw a straight line through these commissions, as the organization of the first two was far less complex than those of their successors. Kahn learned only slowly to design courtyards in which functional considerations would not overwhelm or obscure his search for archetypal forms. In particular, the ways in which he mined a largely unsuccessful early experiment in courtyard planning, the school building of the Indian Institute of Management, in the far more celebrated courts of the Exeter library and the Yale Center for British Arts illustrates this progression from a focus on the individual pieces to an understanding of the power of the whole. A close examination of this process sheds light on the obstacles involved in his rejection of the highly flexible plans characteristic of such contemporaries as Alvar Aalto, in favor of the beaux arts–influenced geometry that he reinjected into the mainstream of twentieth-century architecture.