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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Holl's greatest talent may be for persuading clients to buy into his creative vision in the first place, then keeping them true to it. Exhibit A: his Linked Hybrid complex in Beijing. When Modern Investment Group, the project's Chinese developer, approached Holl, the brief was "basically to put a skin on some conventional, blocky towers set behind a gate," Holl says. Instead, he brazenly came back several months later with a proposal worthy of Buck Rogers: a city-within-a-city of eight irregularly massed residential high-rises interconnected by sky bridges supporting aerial cafés, a spa, even a swimming pool. The buildings would ring a new urbanistic core outfitted with public parks and a cylindrical boutique hotel, plus a faceted three-screen cinematheque that seems to float on a pond cum reservoir. Features such as gray-water recycling and 660 geothermal wells would make it one of the greenest megaprojects on earth.

It was a counterproposal so extreme as to border on arrogance. But the project is due to begin opening this month -- and the Linked Hybrid apartments are now selling at about triple the initial offering price. "When Steven changed our original proposal into an open urban complex, he did it without our authorization, and we could have terminated his contract," says Chen Yin, the developer's chief engineer, who first interviewed Holl. "But in reality, his radical design awakened us." The result could well become a Rockefeller Center for this century.

A visit with Holl can sometimes feel like an audience with architecture's self-appointed messiah. He relishes recounting how he beat the five other firms competing for the Nelson-Atkins commission by "being the only one to break the rules." (Holl's underground scheme differed from the others by flouting a suggestion -- though not a dictate -- to use the site more conventionally.) Meanwhile, about the Herning Center of the Arts, now rising in Denmark, Holl huffs, "I had to argue for months to get them to put geothermal energy in, because they didn't want to spend the extra money. [He offered part of his fee to offset the cost.] But we kept fighting and fighting for it, and now they're very proud of it."

One facet of his work that he actually downplays, however, is his interest in sustainable architecture. "I'm sorry to say, but 85% of so-called green firms make some of the ugliest buildings that were ever made," he says, in a typical excess of candor. "So for God's sake, I don't want to be categorized with them." Holl no doubt cultivates the image of himself as an insurgent, a David among Goliaths. He also tends to wear his erudition on his sleeve -- slipping in the odd allusion to Stravinsky, or a bit of Wittgenstein, wherever he can, while savoring the role of artist (or "artiste," as Nelson-Atkins director Marc F. Wilson says half-jokingly). It's a caricature reinforced by the fact that Holl famously starts each day by painting a watercolor.

And yet here is an artiste in action, one who is restoring architecture to a social art form. When Holl sticks to his guns, others benefit; he rarely takes on a project unless there's a public component, and even then, he'll try to expand it. His forthcoming Vanke Center, the mixed-use "horizontal skyscraper" complex in Shenzhen, China, is another good example. By lifting the building some 50 feet off the ground, Holl isn't just providing occupants with sea views; he's making it possible to transform nearly the entire 13-acre site into a public park.

In the end, despite the setbacks and controversies, Holl's unwavering faith in himself comes with the subtext of vindication. He was recently asked to expand Het Oosten's Amsterdam offices. The client for a hotel he designed in Austria has returned for another property in France. And one of Holl's first projects, the Manhattan offices of David E. Shaw's hedge fund, now has a Holl-designed glass showcase for the supercomputer at the center of the firm's new technology-driven venture, D.E. Shaw Research.

"You can say I'm not the easiest architect in the world, because I'm always trying to push the limits," Holl says. "But now I have repeat clients. And I never imagined I'd be able to say that."

Aric Chen is a contributing editor for Fast Company, I.D., and Interior Design; he also writes for The New York Times.