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A.
INTRODUCTION
Throughout his career, Steven Holl’s challenge has been the same: how
to transform ideas into buildings without resorting to language manipula-
tion?
As an answer to this question he never turned down his strong beliefs.
Holl is against developing an architectural style, a personal brand. He uses
experimentation to differentiate every project from others, making them
unique by conceiving each work as a result of the cultural and morpho-
logical context. This traditional quality of facing the design process as a
merger between ideas and context conditions is also embedded in Mod-
ern Movement philosophy but what is really surprising -and compelling-
about Holl’s architecture is the fact that it is almost impossible to formally
link his projects and even sometimes it is difficult to associate them with
the same architect. The logic behind his work is always the same. Never-
theless, the results are as heterogeneous as the contexts themselves,
and that is where his coherence resides.
As he claimed several times, every project is an opportunity for experi-
mentation and that is why he is selective with his works, having a small
office rather than a big productive one, and keeping personal control of
the production. This strategy of continuous change is motivated by his
consistent theoretical framework. Phenomenology -physical doctrine that
studies the consciousness as a construction of direct experience- is the
ground where he has built his discourse, and from where he fights against
other contemporary architectural trends. The way spaces feel, the sound
and the smell of these places, has equal weight to the way things look.
1
For Holl, design is a search in which he combines several techniques. He
1. Steven Holl in the Preface of “The Eyes of the Skin: architecture and the senses”, Pallasmaa, J. 2003