No finer arts around than at these college museums

Today, New England colleges are home to some esteemed art museums. Collections span ancient times to the present day, representing the world's most celebrated artists from Greek and Roman sculptors, Asian printmakers, and Renaissance masters to Impressionist icons, early American painters, and contemporary innovators. The appeal of the exhibits extends far beyond campus limits, beckoning art lovers from all over, and in many cases, the buildings that house the collections are exceptional themselves. A few notables:

The nation's first university art museum, the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, is also among the most prestigious with a collection of more that 185,000 objects that dates from ancient times to the present day and represents civilizations worldwide. The gallery was founded in 1832 after John Trumbull, an American history painter and portraitist, donated 100 works to the school. He also designed a Neoclassical building for the display: The north gallery was devoted to his paintings, while the south gallery displayed works by other artists. Within 30 years, the museum's holdings had outgrown the Trumbull Gal lery and were housed in several locations around campus.

By the late 1920s, noted architect Egerton Swartwout designed a building to unite Yale's burgeoning collection. Inspired by Trecentro Italian architecture, Swartwout worked to ensure the building harmonized with the neo-Gothic style then favored throughout the campus. In time, the gallery's expanding collection and activities required even more space, and a second building, in a radically different style, was commissioned. Designed in 1953 by modernist pioneer Louis Kahn, the building, which stresses materials and surfaces - bold geometric forms, crisp lines, and sensitive use of light - was his first significant commission.

Kahn's masterpiece represented a departure for US museum architecture, and in its early years, visitors came as much to see the fascinating structure as the collections within. Made of brick, concrete, glass, and steel, the building's distinct features include a five-story glass wall and tetrahedral ceilings, fashioned of poured concrete and configured to form three-dimensional matrices of interlocking triangles.