Steven Holl

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Steven Holl
Born (1947-12-09) December 9, 1947
Bremerton, Washington
Nationality American
Alma mater University of Washington
Architectural Association School of Architecture
Awards Alvar Aalto Medal (1998)
AIA Gold Medal (2012)
Practice Steven Holl Architects
Buildings Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Helsinki, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Linked Hybrid, Beijing, Knut Hamsun Center, Hamarøy, Norway

Steven Holl (born December 9, 1947) is an American architect and watercolorist, perhaps best known for the 2003 Simmons Hall at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the celebrated 2007 Bloch Building addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri,[1] and the praised 2009 Linked Hybrid mixed-use complex in Beijing, China.[1]

Early works

Kiasma, Helsinki, 1993-1998

Holl won first prize in the Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek International Library Design Competition in 1988, an expansion and renovation of the American Memorial Library in Berlin. In February, 1989 Holl's work was exhibited in a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. MoMA later purchased twenty-five works by Holl for the museum's permanent collection. In the 1992 competition for a new contemporary arts museum in Helsinki, Finland, Holl's entry, entitled "Chiasma," won first prize out of more than five hundred international entries. The museum opened to the public in 1998, having permanently adopted the name "Kiasma," the Finnish translation of "chiasma."

St. Ignatius Chapel had been built from 1994 to 1997 in Seattle University for the Jesuit chapel. The plan of the chapel won a design award in the American Institute of Architects of New York. Steven Holl has designed the Chapel to symbolize "seven bottles of light in a stone box," which translates into seven volumes of different light. Each volume represents a different part of Jesuit Catholic worship. Moreover, each bottles has different colored glass so that various part of the building are marked out by colored light. Light sources are tinted in this way but also indirect reflection from painted surfaces and each is arranged with its complement color.

Career

Steven Holl's design for Simmons Hall of MIT won the Harleston Parker Medal in 2004.
Bloch Addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Holl graduated from the University of Washington and pursued architecture studies in Rome in 1970. In 1976, he attended graduate school at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and established his offices New York City. Holl has taught at Columbia University since 1981.

Holl's architecture has undergone a shift in emphasis, from his earlier concern with typology to his current concern with a phenomenological approach; that is, with a concern for man's existentialist, bodily engagement with his surroundings. The shift came about partly due to his interest in the writings of philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and architect-theorist Juhani Pallasmaa.

Recognition and awards

In 1998 Holl was awarded the prestigious Alvar Aalto Medal. In 2000, Holl was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In July 2001, Time named Holl m'man America’s Best Architect, for "buildings that satisfy the spirit as well as the eye." Other awards and distinctions include the best architectural design in New York for The Pace Collection showroom in 1986 from the American Institute of Architects, the New York American Institute of Architects Medal of Honor (1997), the French Grande Médaille d’Or (2001), the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture (2002), Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (2003), the Arnold W. Brunner Prize in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the 2008 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Arts category.[2] In 2007, Steven Holl Architects received the AIA Institute Honor Award and the AIA New York Chapter Architecture Merit Award for Art Building West for the School of Art and Art History (University of Iowa, Iowa City). The Higgins Hall Insertion at Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, New York) and the New Residence at the Swiss Embassy both received the AIA New York Chapter Architecture Honor Award in 2007. In 2010, Herning Museum of Contemporary Art (Herning, Denmark) was awarded the RIBA International Award. The Horizontal Skyscraper-Vanke Center received the 2011 AIA Institute National Honor Award, as well as the AIA NY Honor Award. In 2011, he was named a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council.,[3] and Holl was named the 2012 AIA Gold Medal winner.[citation needed]

Notable works

Bellevue Arts Museum, Washington
Pratt Institute Higgins Hall, Brooklyn, NY
Bloch Building expansion of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri

Recent competition success

Selected publications

Along with Pallasmaa and Alberto Perez-Gomez, Holl wrote essays for a 1994 special issue of the Japanese architectural journal A+U under the title "Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture." The publication was reissued as a book in 2006.

  • Steven Holl: Educating our Perception, in “Magic Materials II”, Daidalos, August 1995.
  • Steven Holl: Pamphlet Architecture 1-10, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1998.
  • Steven Holl: The Chapel of St.Ignatius, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1999.
  • Steven Holl: Parallax, Birkhäuser, New York, 2000
  • Steven Holl: Architecture Spoken, Rizzoli, 2007
  • Steven Holl: House - Black Swan Theory, Princeton Architectural Press, 2007
  • Steven Holl: Urbanisms: Working with Doubt, Princeton Architectural Press, 2009
  • Steven Holl: Horizontal Skyscraper, William Stout Publishers, 2011
  • Steven Holl: Scale, Lars Mueller Publishers, 2012
  • Steven Holl: Color, Light and Time, with essays by Sanford Kwinter and Jordi Safont-Tria, Lars Mueller Publishers, 2012

Notes

References

  • Scott Drake, “The Chiasm and the experience of space”, JAE, Nov. 2005, vol.59, iss. 2, 53-59.
  • Alberto Perez-Gomez, Juhani Pallasmaa, Steven Holl, Questions of Perception. Phenomenology of Architecture, William K. Stout Pub., San Francisco, 2006 (2nd edition).
  • Alberto Perez-Gomez, “The architecture of Steven Holl: In search of a poetry of specifics”, El Croquis 93, 1999.
  • Philip Jodidio, Architecture Now!, Icons, Taschen, New York, 2002.
  • Gareth Griffiths, "Steven Holl and His Critics", Ptah, Helsinki, 2006.
  • Nancy Marmer, "Holl's Kiasma Debuts in Helsinki," Art in America, October 1998, p. 35.

External links

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