Steven Holl

Born 1947 · American · 9 buildings on the wall

Steven Holl (born 1947) is a New York-based American architect and watercolourist whose buildings are shaped around the experience of light, material and movement. With Juhani Pallasmaa and Alberto Pérez-Gómez he wrote Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture (1994), and he has taught at Columbia University since 1981. He received the AIA Gold Medal in 2012 and the Praemium Imperiale in 2014.

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The Chapel of St. Ignatius in Seattle (1997), "seven bottles of light in a stone box" in Holl's words, colours the daylight by bouncing it off painted baffles and through tinted glass. Kiasma in Helsinki (1998), the city's museum of contemporary art, takes its name from the Greek chiasma, "crossing". For the Bloch Building, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City (2007), designed with Chris McVoy, five glass "lenses" rise above mostly underground galleries and let daylight reach the art, against the usual caution of museums. Linked Hybrid in Beijing (2009), 750 apartments with shops, a cinema and schools, is heated and cooled by geothermal wells. Steven Holl's projects are studied for how light and the way a visitor moves through space can lead a design.

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