Architects whose buildings don't announce themselves like a pair of golden arches by the highway can wind up bus-depot obscure. But now an architect who's been hovering just below superstar level for years is finally having his moment, even without pushing an easily digestible gimmick like swirling sheets of titanium. In his 33-year career, Steven Holl has punched thousands of holes in an MIT dorm, jammed deep fissures into a cube-shaped wine spa in Austria, and twisted a Helsinki museum this way and that. But what has unified it all is a singular determination to build the right building in the right place.
At his Manhattan office overlooking the West Side railyards and the Hudson, Holl strides in looking like a jolly Viking with his flowing blond hair and a bit of a work-related bag under each eye. At 59, the Washington State born architect still travels constantly, and he shows off his prime work tool: an airplane-tray-friendly watercolor sketchbook. "Three or four drawings a day," Holl says of the organic method of thinking that he promotes as a longtime professor at Columbia University's school of architecture. "No matter how sick I feel, or jet-lagged, I force myself. Something appears and I get excited about it."
One thing to get excited about: his School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa, which has just received the American Institute of Architects' Honor Award, one of the profession's highest accolades. Holl torpedoed the proposed site plan, preferring instead to cantilever the bulk of the glass and terra cotta–colored steel building over an old limestone quarry pond. Now he has completed an addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. Holl calls the existing museum "the Met of the Midwest"—and he means it in terms of both the Nelson-Atkins' grand collection and its stately neoclassical lines. When Holl, whose wife happens to be an artist, was invited to compete for the project, he found there was no way to expand the museum without destroying one of its landmark 1933 façades, so he risked it all and went underground. He proposed sticking the new galleries beneath a sloping sculpture garden punctuated with lantern-like glass boxes. Holl won unanimously. It's just another ballsy, take-it-or-leave-it, seismic shift toward perfection that has always been his M.O.
A brisk walk around the Holl office shows a crazy amount of activity. His crew of 36—there are 10 more in a new office in China—are busy poking bits of Styrofoam into place and wedging toothpicks between cardboard squares. Most eye-catching is the tabletop-size model for Linked Hybrid, eight mixed-use towers in Beijing that, when they're completed in 2008, will be connected by bridges. Holl mentions that he has, by necessity, become something of a student of feng shui. "If you read enough of the books," he says, "you realize there's really a kind of common sense about the movement of the sun, about water, about air, about energy—qi." Then Holl shows me his working watercolors for Nelson-Atkins. The evocative shapes, which the London Telegraph referred to as "the building blocks of America's best architect," could pass for luminous icebergs. (Like some kind of light D.J., Holl is a master of natural illumination.)
The attention he is getting for the museum, set to open in June, is stirring up rumors of even bigger awards—and of new projects that could, with any luck, light up the Manhattan skyline.—OWEN PHILLIPS
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