First Day at Steven Holl Architects



Today was my first day at SHA. And it was, perhaps, the first time I realized that I was working in an extraordinary environment- where architecture was not copied or emulated but, in fact, invented. One of the partners- Chris McVoy- flew in from New York, and gave a lecture during lunch. A lecture! He talked about the philosophy at SHA- about idea and phenomena- and talked for more than an hour about the recently completed Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. It took 8 years to complete this project, but wow, was it ever worth it. Over dinner at an old Beijing restaurant, Chris was remarking about how light is so infinitely complex. It behaves as a both a particle and wave. And one can never fully understand it. In the Nelson-Atkins, light is honored. It is reflected and refracted through "lenses" that "bend" light in. There are new structures- like the wavy roof structure for the garage, or the light wells that flutter north and south light in, new details- like the bent steel railings- and new materials like the perforated concrete and acid-etched glass.

Nicolai Ouroussoff says this about the museum:

Working on theoretical proposals and the occasional house commission, Steven Holl emerged as a rare, original talent in the 1980s. The strength of his vision was rooted in a desire to reconnect architecture to the physical world — the shifting nature of light, the reflective surfaces of water, the texture of materials — and an atavistic love of craft.

He went on to design plenty of good buildings, like Simmons Hall, with its porous steel-grid facade, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the angular forms of the art school at the University of Iowa. But missing was the kind of project that cements an architect’s place in the pantheon: a building in which his special gifts, the full support of a client and the qualities of a site magically fuse into a near-perfect work.

The waiting is over. Mr. Holl’s breathtaking addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, opening here on June 9, is his most mature work to date, a perfect synthesis of ideas that he has been refining for more than a decade. By subtly interweaving his building with the museum’s historic fabric and the surrounding landscape, he has produced a work of haunting power.

Read the full article here.

Also see an excerpt of Steven Holl on PBS.

Oh, and you must see the new bridges!