Steven Holl's Global Architecture Footprint

By: Aric ChenWed Sep 17, 2008 at 1:30 AM

In Shenzhen The Vanke Center, a mixed-use "horizontal skyscraper," will be as long as the Empire State Building is high. | rendering by Steven Holl Architects

How rule breaking, vision, and a healthy shot of ego propel an architect to the top of his craft.

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In Beijing: Holl turned a conventional project into Linked Hybrid, a mini-city of towers with sky bridges and a "floating" cinema.| photograph by Tony Law

On paper: The architect's watercolor concepts for the Het Oosten project, left, and Beijing's Linked Hybrid. concepts Steven Holl Architects

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There was a period not so long ago when it seemed Steven Holl couldn't get a break. Perhaps it started when that high-profile art museum he designed in Bellevue, Washington, marked its two-and-a-half-year anniversary by unceremoniously shutting its doors. Maybe it was the very public breakup with that Denver courthouse project, or when the artist Richard Tuttle -- a friend, no less -- told The New York Times Magazine that the house-pavilion Holl designed for him and his wife was "uninhabitable half the time."

In fairness, among cutting-edge architects, a perpetual state of embattlement often comes with the territory, and Holl's biggest snafus weren't his own. (The closing of the Bellevue project, which has since reopened, was blamed on the museum's management. Meanwhile Tuttle has said his quote was misconstrued; he and Holl remain pals.) Still, in the rivalrous world of architecture, you could almost hear the chorus of snickering. "Well, that's human nature, isn't it?" Holl, 60, shrugs.

These days, Holl and his 65-person New York-based firm, with offices in Beijing, are thriving -- a juggernaut with projects worth $1.4 billion on the boards last year. Among them: a marina in Beirut; museums in Norway and Denmark; and a "horizontal skyscraper" in Shenzhen, China, that will be as long as the Empire State Building is tall. Not to mention a 2.4-million-square-foot mini-city in Beijing that has the design world agape.

And then there was the unveiling last year of Holl's $200 million addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. Cascading down the sloping lawn of the existing neoclassical building, Holl's 165,000 square feet of subterranean galleries emerge as five crystalline pavilions, surfacing on the landscape like sublime boxes of light. At a time of growing museum fatigue -- it seems there isn't a city in the world without a new starchitect-designed showstopper -- the Nelson-Atkins has been earning the sort of praise that would make a lesser man blush: "One of the best museums of the last generation," wrote Paul Goldberger, The New Yorker's architecture critic. "A perfect synthesis of ideas ... a work of haunting power," gushed the New York Times' Nicolai Ouroussoff. Time ranked it the "No. 1 Architectural Marvel" of 2007.

Holl, however, takes the recognition in stride. "I'm very egotistical," he says with a wink, "so I thought it was overdue."

One of the most formidable architects around, Holl is an amalgam of renegade bravado and artistic sensitivity, social progressivism and problem-solving virtuosity -- all wrapped in a medium-build frame with blue eyes and a maestro's mop of graying blondish hair. A Seattle-area native, he arrived in New York in 1976 via the University of Washington and studied in Rome and at London's prestigious Architectural Association, where his cohorts included Zaha Hadid. Following a common architectural narrative, he spent much of his early career in academia, entering competitions, scavenging commissions wherever he could find them, and, especially, theorizing. Among other things, he produced an influential series of publications called Pamphlet Architecture and coauthored the 1994 book Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture (now in its third printing).

These days, however, Holl is best known for his harnessing of light, materiality, and movement -- often expressed with washes of colored illumination, snaking ramps and stairs, and the abstracted grids and perforated surfaces that evoke what he likes to call "porosity." Free of the over-the-top acrobatics of, say, Frank Gehry or Hadid, a Holl building can be fairly described as a series of revelatory moments: the gentle, luminous sweeps of his breakthrough Kiasma museum in Helsinki (completed in 1998); or the cavernous funnels of light penetrating his Simmons Hall dormitory at MIT (2002), a building nicknamed "the Sponge" for its uninhibited grid of windows; or the aureoles of reflected, diffused fluorescent light filtering through his Amsterdam offices for the Dutch housing developer Het Oosten (2000). Holl's work is rooted in what architects like to call "phenomenology," which means a concern with the sensory perception and bodily experience of space -- or what Holl calls an "effort to put essence back into existence."

"It's hard to put into words, because his architecture is not about words," says Barry Bergdoll, chief architecture and design curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art. "It's about an effect, a subtlety, and a kind of understatedness that's both personal and enlightening."