Steven Holl

• Born December 9, 1947 in Bremerton, Washington

• 1971 – Graduated from the University of Washington - Seattle

• 1976 – Established his offices in New York City and Bejing, China

• 1981-2007 – Professor of Architecture at Columbia University

• 1998 – Awarded the prestigious Alvar Aalto Medal.

• 2000 – Elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters

• 2001 – Named as “America’s Best Architect” by Time Magazine

Biography

“The success of Steven Holl’s architecture derives from his sculptural shapes, his interest in the poetics of space color, and material, as well as his fascination with scientific phenomena.”

“Steven Holl is a virtuoso of light: interested in the connections between light and space and their perception.”

“The facade of the M.I.T. dorm was partly inspired, Holl has said, by the sponge he was bathing with one morning. ‘A sponge can absorb several times its weight in liquid without changing its appearance.

Cast glass seems to trap light within its material. Its translucency or transparency maintains a glow of reflected light, refracted light or the light dispersed on adjacent surfaces. This intermeshing of material properties and optic phenomena opens a field for exploration.’

Simmons HallMIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Design Portfolio

Cranbrook Institute of ScienceBloomfield Hills, Michigan

Little Tesseract HouseUpstate, New York

Sarphatistraat OfficesAmsterdam, The Netherlands

School of Art & Art HistoryUniversity of IowaIowa City, Iowa

T-HuseneØrestad, Copenhagen, Denmark

Whitney Water Purification Facility and ParkSouth Central Connecticut

New York University Depart-ment of PhilosophyNew York, NY

Cité du Surf et de l’Océan Biarritz, France

Loisium Visitor Center &Loisium Hotel Wine and Spa Resort Langenlois, Austria

Seven bottles of light.

Chapel of St. IgnatiusSeattle University, Seattle, WA

Holl conceived of the chapel as “seven bottles of light in a stone box,”

with each bottle or vessel of light corresponding to a focal aspect of

Catholic worship.

Light passes through each bottle in a specific area of the building to

define physical and spiritual spaces with pools of clear and colored light.

Procession natural sunlight Narthex natural sunlight Nave yellow field with blue lens Blessed Sacrament orange field with purple lens Choir green field with red lens Reconcilation Chapel purple field with orange lens Bell Tower and pond projecting reflecting night light

Chapel Space Color Lens

Knut Hamsun Center, Norway

Rem Koolhaas

Born in Rotterdam (1944)

Founded OMA, the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (1975) with Madelon Vriesendorp, Elia and Zoe Zenghelis

Professor of architecture at Harvard University (1995–) where he runs the Project of the City

Awarded the Pritzker Prize of Architecture (2000)

“We are flamboyant conceptually, but not formally,” Koolhaas says.

His firm is known for thoroughly researching and then radically addressing a client’s needs; this cerebral approach to design undergirds all of his work.

Koolhaas’s work is as much about ideas as it is buildings. He became famous for his writings and social commentary before any of his designs were constructed. And, some of his most celebrated designs are still only on the drawing board.

The Casa da Musica is a ruthlessly inventive building. It is the only concert hall in the world with two walls made entirely of glass. As a result, its 1,300-seat auditorium is suffused with daylight.

Glass walls are a hopeless way of trying to achieve the conditions you need to hear music properly. They scatter sound in random and unpredictable directions, and of course they risk letting in the noise of passing traffic.

Koolhaas claims the problem has been dealt with by making the glass ripple in tightly curved folds, and setting two glass skins a metre apart to insulate the interior from noise in a manner that is both ingenious, and beautiful to look at.

Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff calls the Casa “a building whose intellectual ardor is matched by its sensual beauty.”

McCormick Tribune Campus CenterIllinois Institute of Technology

The site was previously a parking lot heavily trafficked by students under the noisy Chicago El.

A major design challenge was what to do with the noise of the public transit tracks passing through the lot.

The ultimate solution to this problem was to enclose a 530 foot long section of the tracks in a stainless steel tube passing over the building.

The tube’s support structure is independent of the building’s in order to minimize vibration passing between the trains and the building.

An important aspect of Koolhaas’s design conceptwas to track the movement of students across thelot, which informed the set of diagonal passagewaysthat were ultimately built to serve as the center’sinterior thoroughfares.

Maison à Bordeaux

A house designed to accommodate a man who was confined to a wheel chair after an automobile accident.

The husband explained to him: “Contrary to what you might expect, I do not want a simple house. I want a complicated house because it will determine my world.”

Instead of designing a house on one floor which would ease the movements of the wheelchair, the architect surprised them with an idea of a house on three levels, one on top of each other.

The wheelchair has access to these levels by an elevator platform that is the size of a room, and is actually a well-equipped office. Because of its vertical movements, the platform becomes part of the kitchen when it is on the ground floor; links with the aluminium floor on the middle level and creates a relaxed working space in the master bedroom on the top floor.

For the SPL, the building’s required functions dictate what it should look like, rather than imposing a structure and making the functions conform to that.

For example, a major section of the building is the “Books Spiral,” a four-story circular ramp designed to display the nonfiction collection without breaking up the Dewey Decimal classification onto different floors or sections.