Steven Holl, in Conversation with Jeffrey Kipnis

Steven Holl In Conversation with Jeffrey Kipnis Translated by Farzaneh Taheri

Memar 7 · Winter 1999

Biography:

Steven Holl was born in 1947 in Bremerton, Washington State. In 1971, he graduated with honors from the University of Washington and that same year went to Rome and then to the Architectural Association School in London to study architecture. In 1976, after completing his studies, he began working at the Architectural Association in London. After establishing his practice in New York City, he has been teaching at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture and Planning as a full professor since 1989 and as an assistant professor since 1981 at the University of Washington in Seattle, at the Pratt Institute in New York, at Parsons School of Design in New York, and at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

What are your thoughts on critics' reactions to your work?

Well, overall critics have treated me well. On the other hand, at least so far, I generally feel they haven't grasped the core of my work — the deeper concerns I've tried to address in every project. Whether I'm attacked for the unconventional form of a building or praised for attention to fine detail, from my perspective it's essentially the same thing. Pleasant, not so pleasant. But craftsmanship in details has never been my primary concern. In fact, these are peripheral aspects of an effort directed toward a larger conceptual goal. A goal that critics apparently haven't noticed or have chosen to avoid. Perhaps the fault lies with the works themselves. Perhaps that level of engagement is still difficult when someone else reads your work. But in any case, it's been somewhat disappointing for me.

How do you approach a new project? How do you imbue it with a conceptual purpose?

I rely entirely on conceptual diagrams; I consider them my secret weapon. These diagrams allow me to move fresh from one project to the next, from one place to another. If I approached my projects with a fixed vocabulary, I'd be worn out by now; I would have lost my interest in architecture long ago. Finding an initial concept for each project that captures the essence of the architectural opportunities unique to that project is, in my view, vital.

In each and every one of my projects, experiential concerns are meant to serve the underlying idea. From the beginning of my career, I've worked with diagrams. In fact, to this day, my work still draws from the set of diagrams I prepared for Milan. In those diagrams, I studied what I coined "mediated relationships" — a concept of fundamental importance in urban spatial organization. Relationships such as between, above, beside, and so on. I felt that these spatial qualities play a foundational role in urban experience and yet are ignored in traditional urban planning strategies. Since then, I've been developing my diagramming techniques.

If you'll allow me, I'd like to show you some of these diagrams. Not the buildings, just the diagrams, so I can at least reveal some of these ideas to you.

Martha's Vineyard House: The house diagram, whose skeleton is on the outside, reflects the legend of a whale skeleton on the shore where Native Americans live. The rooms are like bodies. So the main feature of that external skeleton is the casting of linear shadows, which in my view is the poetic achievement, the spatial achievement of the project: shadows and lines, shadows as lines.

Stretto House, Dallas: In my first sketch, I discovered light and heavy elements. Then I turned that sketch into a diagram by analogy with a work by Béla Bartók, the composer. This musical piece has four sections with alternating light and heavy passages marked by a stretto. In the diagram, I took the stretto and tried to turn it into a spatial dance. We stayed very close to the diagram. The diagram guided the entire progression of the house, even the construction techniques. Not only do the forms that make up the house function like musical instruments, but the landscape also functions as one of the existing voices in the stretto.

Nexus Houses, Fukuoka, Japan: I prepared this diagram — which the final building followed exactly — on my first visit to the site, and my two initial intuitions are visible in it: hinged space and void space. I didn't want to design one-, two-, and three-bedroom apartments; I wanted to create hinged space. Flexible space that could change its organization, so that thirty apartments could all be different. The void space — a tribute to the incomparable depth of the Zen garden — takes up more than fifty percent of the building's area. You can imagine the great battle with the client over the void space. But I insisted that the integrity of the diagram be preserved in the building.

Makuhari Houses, Chiba, Japan: In this diagram, I tried to create a path of Zen inner journey within architectural space. Small cupolas coexist with large silent structures. Each is a gateway into the project and each has its own story, like the House of Nothing, or a house where... until I arrive at a concept that, in my own view, captures the spirit of the project with clarity and certainty. I cannot and will not begin thinking about the project's advancement — space, light, phenomenological and material aspects of the work — until... though always, when I do find this concept, I realize it's as if a light has been switched on. I never know how long it will take to reach this concept. In fact, I'm never certain I'll find it. Finding it is for me the most exciting and at the same time the most terrifying part of a project.

Kiasma, Helsinki: Here the diagram was about coupling at an intersection. A building that draws the surrounding city's landscape and light into itself. The building works by capturing Finland's horizontal light: light whose angle of incidence never exceeds fifty-one degrees. Later, of course, practical matters come in: the program is developed and things like that. But the realization of the concept embodied in the guiding diagram always remains in view.

St. Ignatius Chapel, Seattle: Seven bottles of light in a stone box. Constructing this diagram is no simple task.

The power of these diagrams is useful to me in many ways. They help me deepen my relationship with the client. Or perhaps I should say they help me engage the client more deeply in the project. When the financial officer wanted to eliminate one of the three bottles to make the building cheaper, the university clergy absolutely refused. In my view, the understanding the authorities showed, their commitment and determination, was because of the diagram. So the diagram, in addition to helping me advance the construction of the building, also increases my power in negotiations, so I can fight forces that show up in every project and, in the name of cost-cutting or other practical matters, impoverish the architecture.

Knut Hamsun Museum: Sometimes, on the other hand, the diagram falls apart before my eyes. As soon as I realize I've found the project's diagram, I present it to the client. In the case of Knut Hamsun, the diagram shows the building as a body under the assault of invisible forces. The elevator shaft is the spine, and these surreal explosions are the extraordinary effects of invisible forces on that body — bearing a strong resemblance to one of Hamsun's fictional characters. He was one of the first Scandinavian novelists who abolished the linear time of the novel and created another, interior and episodic time in, for example, Hunger, which I've interpreted in the diagram. Hamsun builds this sense of time within a novel, in its descriptions or narratives. But my challenge was to express it in architecture, in the origin of a play of light. In any case, I feel the underlying idea of both works is connected through the diagram. When the city saw this drawing, a huge controversy erupted. Over 350 articles in the press attacked it. They were shocked: they saw the diagram as a kind of cartoon. A caricature of the writer himself: his hair, his protruding chest, his mesh-like skin, his leathery skin...

In one respect they were right, weren't they? Maybe it's not a caricature, but this building does have a kind of portrait quality. Though surprisingly, it also emerges from its context, since it draws on local building materials and traditions — like the turf roof and all the rest.

I detest the term "emerging from context." But well, yes. Of course it belongs to the situation in which it's placed. It would have been impossible to build such a building in America.

You said that the diagram is a tool with which you keep your projects fresh and make each one unique. But what's important in your work is the consistency you demonstrate both in arriving at a diagram and in transforming the diagram into a building. Isn't it this steadfastness, rather than the innovation hidden in each diagram, that makes your architecture yours?

Absolutely. But when I come to a project, it's of no use to me — or at least it's not interesting — that the building I'm making should be a "Steven Holl building." I can't look at architecture with a fixed vocabulary of form, materials, and site strategies repeated from project to project. I know other architects — some of the great ones — do exactly that. But not me. Frankly, the very thought of such an approach makes me sick. I need to feel with each project that I'm facing a blank slate, even if I'm deceiving myself.

Of course I can't speak for others. But what gives me energy in my work is discovering a new concept with every commission I accept and the desire to realize that fresh concept with total clarity.

Is recognition of the initial diagram important for the final acceptance of the project by the client and other stakeholders?

It's like music. Concertgoers don't need to know the structural details of a given piece or the composer's compositional techniques to enjoy the music. Though knowledge may enrich the experience of that piece. But there's no question that such structures and techniques are vitally important in the creative process of that piece: the idea of the work is precisely these things. I think my intense attachment to these structures is what distinguishes me and my work from other architects working today — even those I'm often compared to. Today there are architects who claim they harbor no theoretical ambitions, who regard the search for ideas as something internal. Frankly, they make me a bit queasy. If there's nothing underlying the work, no ambitions beyond existing craft, the result will be nothing.

Often when we think of a diagram — say a bubble diagram of a program or a formal compositional diagram of a site — in addition to seeing it as a vehicle for activating an intuitive sense of discovery, we think it also functions as a tool for predicting and guiding the final architectural effects. Like a first draft for a writer or a circuit diagram for an electrical engineer. But your diagram strips itself of these second qualities. For example, the Strange Attractor diagram functions as a kind of inspirational device and even analogically guides many of your decisions. But you're not claiming you're building a strange attractor, or that your building behaves like a strange attractor, or actually plays that way? As I understand it, you don't intend to turn the Strange Attractor diagram into an image for your building. In this sense, though the diagram is vitally important to your method, the final achievement of your work — its architectural meaning — is not a function of how fully your diagram is realized in practice. For instance, in Helsinki, the Kiasma diagram of organizing lines drawn from the urban situation determines the main characteristics of how the building masses behave — like the way you've cut the end of the form. But the specifics of that cut aren't what's shown in your diagram, right?

I understand what you're saying, and yes, from that perspective — Helsinki, the diagrams from which the building was born — they're a kind of information that has moved very far from the spatial reality of the building. Yet I have no doubt that...

I suppose what I'm trying to say is as obvious as the observation that a particular story a poet tells ultimately has little effect on the quality of the work as poetry or on its poetic effects. Though without that story, the poet couldn't have achieved those effects.

Your use of diagrams reminds me in a way of one of the techniques taught in "Method Acting" for preparing for a role, called "animal study." The classic example is Lee J. Cobb preparing for the role of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. Cobb, a vigorous and charismatic thirty-year-old actor at the peak of his career, had to convincingly play a character who was his exact opposite — a broken man in his late sixties whose professional and personal life is on the verge of collapse. To prepare for this role, Cobb spent weeks at the zoo watching an elephant. He imitated in full detail the way it moved and held its head — how it looked around, ate, and so on. His thinking was: "I don't know what Willy Loman feels like. I can never truly know that devastating, crushing emotional weight that is pressing down on him. But if I can present in my performance that mass, that stillness of the elephant, perhaps the audience will feel this effect as an emotional weight bearing down on the character." There are other astonishing examples of the animal study technique in film and theater acting. For instance, Anthony Hopkins's use of a cat in The Silence of the Lambs. In every case, the animal functions as a detailed and exploratory diagram. But the success of this technique fundamentally depends on the actor not revealing this trick to the audience. If revealed, the impact of his efforts is ruined.

That's marvelous. I'd never heard that before. It's truly astonishing. But you're right. My diagrams are a device to place me in a different mental framework. To pour me into another mold. To push me out of my fixed mental mold. And like your animal study example, my diagrams can't be merely functional. They're expansive and comprehensive. Their details must have a quality that sensitizes me to possibilities for project strategies — possibilities that otherwise couldn't even be imagined. Until I have the conceptual diagram, I don't know where to go. I get lost. But the only difference is that I very much like to reveal this trick. I show the elephant to everyone. I think that's important.

Your Museum of the City project has caught my attention, and I think I understand some of its aspirations, though I know nothing about its guiding diagram.

One of the problems with the Museum of the City — and a problem that aligns with the earlier discussion about critics' treatment of the work — is that no one has really gotten it right. Every time something is published, the focus is on the Roman slit-like light effects in the space, which photograph better than anything else. Though I love that image very much, from my own perspective it's only part of the building's architectural theme. In the museum there are two passages: one leading to the future and one reaching into the distant past. The slit-light effects are experiential aspects whose dance was designed in relation to those two passages. But when you see it published, it seems as though the whole thing is just a light effect. Who knows? Perhaps these misreadings aren't a problem. But as far as I'm concerned, they tell only half the story.

Can you say more about your commitment to making each project different? It seems to me this is a concern of contemporary architecture. A wide range of architects — from Eisenman to Libeskind to Herzog to Nouvel — have all expressed this same sentiment. If we accept that phenomenology deals with our pre-critical and archetypal experiences that connect us to the world and to each other, it seems to me that, strictly speaking, such a tendency is anti-phenomenological.

I disagree. One of the things I learned early in my study of phenomenology — especially from studying a specific place, its light, its air, its smell, the color of its surroundings, its history — or perhaps I should say its multiple histories — was that I realized every piece of land in the world is a starting point that is experientially, historically, mentally different, and when our body moves through it and when this place passes through our body, it can connect us in new ways. This simple but profoundly stirring fact opened my eyes to the possibility of a radical new beginning in architecture.

[They are] irreconcilable. Especially from the standpoint that the phenomenological tendency always seeks to penetrate beneath the surface, to find that essential core, that timeless element. But interest in what is contemporary, what is new, apparently demands that one devote oneself to the world of surface matters — the world of fashion, style, taste, and so forth.

I completely disagree again. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that phenomenological reflection is the best — if not the only — way to arrive at the contemporary as an authentic experience. But here I should say that from my perspective, contemporary is different from new. That's right: I have no interest in novelty worship, in the adoration of the latest things. But contemporary things — this sense of truly being in today's world — is something entirely different. It's no longer a catalog of innovations that constantly changes. It's not a chart ranking the top forty forms and ideas. Rather, it's a deep and complex web of thoughts and sensations. For example, the contemporaneity of our everyday language has more to do with the sound of our words and the structure of our sentences than with the particular subject we're discussing. Our interest in discussing various topics — the last film I saw, or the impeachment of the president — may change as quickly as fashion. But this sense of our discussion being contemporary doesn't change. It's a deeper phenomenon. In my view, the architect interested in contemporary architecture should pursue the matter from this perspective.

I try, but I also admire the efforts of other architects who take very different approaches from mine. Once, when I was on a tour in France, I was returning a rental car and happened to look across the street and saw an astonishing building that immediately captivated me. I later learned it was by Jean Nouvel. It was a mysterious and bewildering building, in a way that aroused a sense of contemporaneity in you. I was smitten. This building and other works by Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas, Toyo Ito, and many others mean more to me than the work of many architects whose tastes are apparently closer to mine. They affect me. These architects, though in a different way, in their works pursue the deeper matter of finding and expressing the essential qualities of contemporary life.

Who is your work primarily for? The building's users, the public, or architects?

Obviously, one wants to communicate with and influence as many people as possible. But ultimately and in the long run, I hope to add something to architecture with my work. In fact, I hope to do this not with this or that building or project, but with my body of work as a whole. In this regard, I'm quite patient. I believe if I engage with each project in the deepest and most complete way I can, eventually — in thirty years or more — the totality of my efforts may add something to architecture.

This desire to create a focused body of work rather than just great buildings connects to the question you asked earlier about the distinctiveness of each of my works. In the early years, the discourse of difference that was shaping architectural and cultural thought had me enthralled. At the same time, I despised the semiotic techniques that then dominated architecture's approach to this issue. Inspired by the works of Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, and others, I consciously decided to engage with architecture in a completely different way. To make each project different, but in doing so to avoid linguistic tricks and instead turn to phenomenological experiences. I thought then, and still think, that in this way I can achieve the intellectual rigor I admire and at the same time avoid the hollow superficiality that bothers me in so much of that work.

When I made this decision, I wrote "Anchoring," which is my personal manifesto, to establish the basic preconditions for such an architecture. In that text, I first articulated the concept I had in mind, for example, about constructing place. I set out to propose an alternative approach against typological semiotic patterns and contextual conformity. I demanded a specificity born from deeper reflection on the unique possibilities of the building's site and program. In my own view, I've remained faithful to those ideas to this day.

One of the approaches I first developed was close attention to the very first thought that came to mind about the project after visiting the site. For example, in Fukuoka I arrived at the site and found myself before a flat, empty piece of land. There was absolutely nothing there to establish a relationship with; no context whatsoever. Just a slab of clay. So I let my mind wander and realized I was thinking about two things. First, the emptiness of the site reminded me of the incredible emptiness of a Zen garden. Looking at the clay, I thought that perhaps a thin, smooth layer of water, untouched, separating the apartments, could create a contemporary Zen space in the project — just as the gravel bed separating stones creates the traditional Zen space in a garden. So the void becomes as important as the block. This led to a fight: the investors wanted to create gardens and lawns and such things in the void spaces, they wanted people to use them. But I firmly held to my initial intuition: they had to remain unoccupied, untouched.

Then I thought about the various ways the Japanese, using devices such as fusuma and shoji screens, make use of a single space. I asked myself: can this be done in new ways? A way to use this idea while making each apartment in this residential complex distinct and unique. These two qualities were the result of combining my study of Japanese culture and my direct contact with the site. When I was invited to design two hundred housing units in Makuhari, I knew I didn't want to approach this project the same way. Though I think that's what the clients wanted. Practically speaking, even if I'd wanted to, I couldn't have designed each of these two hundred units the way I'd designed the Fukuoka units. But more importantly, I wanted to try something different. That's why I turned to Basho's journey of inner activation, a journey in which he stays in the House of Fallen Palms and various other houses, each activating a new and different facet of his inner spirituality. Then I drew a diagram that blended this spiritual journey with contemporary civilization.

Then after arriving at the site and crossing the silent plaza created by the large buildings... I'm currently working on an even larger residential project for Guadalajara in Mexico, in an interesting new city. Libeskind is doing the university. Nouvel is doing an office building. Enrique Norten another office complex. Wolf Prix a cinema complex; Toyo Ito a museum, and we have two hundred mixed residential units with two hundred hotel units. The site is four times the size of Makuhari. At first I was tempted to merge the hotel and residential units — a kind of amphibian creature... I did these sketches that, frankly, were inarticulate. No concept, no idea. Just a shot in the dark... This went on for a while: I knew I was getting nowhere but had absolutely no idea where I should be going.

Then these thoughts about shadows came to me: shadows reflected in a mirror, shaping space, making the people of Guadalajara sleep on shadows! Gradually the diagram for the project emerged. My scattered thoughts about shadows quickly took the form of an image of two completely different realms: an upper layer and a lower layer, with no division between them. I realized that until that day, everything I'd done in housing had dealt with the middle layer — five to six stories. So I decided to eliminate that aspect of the project entirely. I defined these two zones and then let each zone's shadows generate other spaces.

Is the program also divided the same way — residential on the horizontal, hotels vertical?

No! The program is completely mixed. There are spaces in the vertical buildings assigned to residential, and horizontal ones that hotel guests use.

Outside of architecture and the studies you mentioned — Bergson, Merleau-Ponty — what influences you the most? What do you turn to for inspiration? Novels, films?

I detest Hollywood films. I never go to see them. Frankly, I very rarely go to the movies at all. I study extensively for every project. When I was working on the Hamsun Museum, for instance, I read all of Knut Hamsun's novels. You can imagine. This takes a great deal of my inspiration time. But honestly, what I love most of all is science. I'm fascinated by its depth, its certainty, its commitment to truth, its freshness. On Tuesdays, the New York Times has a science section called "Science Times." Every Monday night before I go to sleep, I can barely contain my excitement thinking that tomorrow morning when I wake up I'll get to read it.

Projects:

1. Martha's Vineyard House

2. Stretto House, Dallas, Texas, USA, 1990/1992

3. Fukuoka Houses, Japan, 1989/1991

4. Makuhari Housing, Chiba, Japan, 1992/1996

5. Museum of Contemporary Art Helsinki, Finland, 1993/1998

6. St. Ignatius Chapel, Seattle, United States, 1995/1997

7. Knut Hamsun Museum, Hamarøy, Norway, 1996

8. Housing and Hotel Units in Guadalajara, Mexico, 1999

St. Ignatius Chapel Seattle University, United States 1994/1997

In the Jesuits' "Spiritual Exercises," no single method is prescribed; "different methods help different people..." Here we see the unity of differences gathered in one place. Light, through several different volumes rising from the irregular roof, is directed toward creating light of different quality. Southern light, eastern light, western light, and northern light all join together. Each volume of light corresponds to a part of the Jesuit Catholic worship program.

The main worship space receives volumes of light from east and west. The dialectical combination of a transparent colored lens and a field of reflected color in each of the light volumes gives greater breadth to the concept of different lights. Before the large window of each "bottle of light," a shield has been constructed. The back of each shield is painted in a bright color: inside the chapel, only the reflected color is visible. This colored light comes alive each time a cloud passes before the sun, combined with a colored lens in its complementary color. At night — the particular time for prayer gatherings at the university chapel — the light volumes glow like colorful lighthouse beacons in all directions across the campus.

The chapel is sited to shape the new quadrangular green space of the campus to the north, west, and in the future to the east. The elongated rectangular plan is perfectly suited to defining the courtyard space and the space for collective procession and gathering of worshippers inside. Directly to the south of the chapel lies the "reflecting pool" or "meditation square." At night, this pool, reflecting light, becomes a silent forecourt for the chapel.

The concept of "seven bottles of light in a stone box" is further expressed through the tilt-up construction method. The colored concrete panels that form the building, tilted up on site, are more economical than stone cladding from a tectonic standpoint and more directly shape the construction. The building's outer envelope was divided into twenty-one interlocking concrete panels that were cast lying flat on the chapel's floor slab and the reflecting pool slab. These panels were lifted, rotated, and set in place over two days using a hydraulic crane with a lifting capacity of nearly two tons. The hooks embedded in the panels were capped with bronze after the panels were raised upright. The windows were formed by the gaps between the tilted-up panels.

The different lights are:

1. Processional space: natural daylight

2. Entry: natural daylight

3. Main hall: yellow scrim with blue lenses (east), blue scrim with yellow lenses (west)

4. Eucharist: orange scrim with purple lenses

5. Choir: green scrim with red lenses

6. Reconciliation chapel: purple scrim with orange lenses

7. Bell tower and pool: projector reflecting night light