Architecture for Art, with Steven Holl and Chris McVoy

welcome I'm John Scott director of the school of art in art history thanks for coming today and it's certainly a pleasure for me to introduce Steven Holl and Chris McVoy who've joined us here today for a number of interesting events our relationship in in the school of art in our history with Steven and with Chris started way back in the nineteen nineteen 90s and we've been really working with them on and off all of these years so that we in the school tend to look at them more or less as our in-house go-to architects and we feel that there aren't many academic units who can make that glorious claim and also I would add that through most of that period we've also been working with they're a long time Iowa partner rod cruzi where you right there you are and it's always a pleasure to work with rod as as well I think one of the reasons that we enjoy working with Steven Holl architects in the school of art in art history is because they are artists and our idea was that these projects whether it be art building west or the new visual arts building should be themselves work of leading-edge contemporary art and that's how Steven even if you remember way back then in the 90s Dean Maxon was there and you came and you presented work that was so persuasive as as art that after you left the room and we were all there together Linda said to us well there's nothing to talk about is there we know who's going to get get this position so thanks thanks for that and we feel that to have a building that is a work of art is part of the program of what we do in the school our history because it is a work that will inspire our our students and our faculty when they enter the building to various creative endeavors then in any case that's how we got art building West and that's how we now we are getting the new Visual Arts Building we think that Steven and Chris have given us in the visual arts building truly a work of 21st century art now Steven will first speak about what he calls the architecture of art and then Chris will come up and talk to us about the place of the visual arts building in that larger context Steven thank you John it's really great to be back here and I I was reflecting also this morning about 1998 when we had that first interview and then Dorothy Johnson is here I'm so happy to see Dorothy was very very supportive in those first days that was from 1998 to 2006 eight years for the opening of this building and now we're from January 22nd 2010 to 2006 and a half years and you know rod Cruz he's been with us the whole time rod Leonard's it's an amazing almost kind of like a family endeavor here but for me it's really important because I've never had the analysis call get into that when I get to the building I've never had the challenge of trying to add a new building with a very ambitious program larger than the first one and and trying to find the architecture and you know you'll see it in the in the talk but this morning I was thinking you know these buildings are really different and they're very exciting because one is planar the one that we're in and one is volumetric the one that we're opening today and I was thinking back to my first-year studio that I rewrote in Columbia University which was to really take the beginning of architecture as lines planes and volumes so that means there's one more building it has to be linear otherwise we don't get there it doesn't get completed so let's see how does this work here all right so what I wanted to do was take one point which is really expressed in the new building and that is making a kind of social condenser space a place where the the people that pass through there understand or get excited about the art and we were just talking about today that some people were passing through in lab coats and stopping looking at the gallery space and this is something that we've been doing for a while all the way back the first building that in a way launched Steven Holl architects was the winning of the competition of key ozma and I'm just going to go through a series of buildings and focus on this this one idea of social condenser space the original competition this idea of intertwining but the original competition program had a lobby space that was sort of one-fifth the size of what we and we finally realized in the building and that becomes a kind of amazing place of activity of meeting there's this watercolors from the from the competition and I'm going back there in November the building is very alive and what's interesting is that space becomes a kind of let's say magnet and at great openings here you can see this sort of energy at all levels in that space that's at the other end of the space the upstairs gallery natural light of course is also something I'm really excited about this building we were I just in there this morning going through all those spaces and nobody had the lights on there were different people working in different places but no lights needed this was a the Pratt School of Architecture where the building the centerpiece burned down and we had the charge to make a new entrance and connect the two buildings left and right 1860 and 1890 and so the idea was basically the floor plates from the two buildings were different sizes to bring them through to the center and make a kind of zipper space that would be an activating space at the ground level and slicing all the way up through this is a very small addition and you can see that the front court also became a place of activity but you see that sort of zipper space and what's nice is you go in and then there's a auditorium you go down and that space opens up to be a crit space for the architecture students and then as you move through the building vertically you have views out at the end of the ramps that connect the zipper space and people can see each other as they work in the studios all the way down through the building the nelson-atkins museum likewise has these five lenses and one of them is basically a condenser the sort of large entrance to the building this was a competition which I had a very good client we had a good client we broke the rules you were supposed to build on the south north side of the building and we went down into the landscape completely going off the site and there was a number of international competitors Tata Londo and others who built right up against the building and we said that's the wrong thing to do if you should keep this building all facades restored and when I and I said the new building would be the you know in contrast to the old the stone and the feather the heavy and the light and when we went up to the jury I said you know we had the courage to break all your rules because it says in the carved stone facade from 1933 the soul has greater need of the ideal than of the real and we won the competition and realize this building which also has a kind of social space outside that's all open to the public in and out of the lenses and that's that great space at the entrance and also wonderful courtyard outside that changes in the seasons not unlike the way the water would freeze here in the pond so you have light coming down to the levels below another school of art the Reid building at Glasgow School of Art this was a competition with how many it was like a thousand applications and Chris came to me and said shall we try for this it's Glasgow it's McIntosh we should we should give it a try so we put our you know it was one of those things where you have to go through a round first use submit was it a portfolio no we had to do some sketches right were three boards so we did and we prevailed and we got into the final five or whatever it was and we we won and maybe that was the most difficult project we ever did so far so far the Kennedy Center's might might be doing more difficult I think we had like I don't know like 70 presentations to various you know Glasgow has one saint of an architect and that's Macintosh and I loved his work but we're building a building next across the street for Macintosh which is like there you see an aerial view you see the Macintosh building to the left and our building to the right so we we had this idea of really working with natural light and making that be the core of the building the sort of what we call driven voids of light and they these I don't have a pointer here I just walked over these these these concrete tubes these Hawker 15 years there's a 20-wide they bring the light down they let the air come out it's all naturally ventilated and they're also the structure that holds up the floor plate so it's all about this condition of life and making a kind of simple building in contrast to Mackintosh's so we were very excited about the simplicity and actually it does do a similar thing in terms of content contrasts and that is the Macintosh building was fin bones steel and wood and fixed in stone so our building is thick bones all exposed concrete and thin skin which is a kind of recycled green glass so this was a sort of also a way of making a clear relation to the building so this was something that they talked about is abrasive collisions through the entire school a browsing circuit a kind of circuit of connections which connect every department in the school and those would pass through and intersect these driven voids of light so that that was right that was right in the beginning the the concept you can see this notion of driven voids of light and then the realization and I think everybody's really excited with the school opened two years ago those volumes become also activators for activities this is the main cafeteria space but you could leave they became places where little concerts go on where certain student art projects go on it's a certain thing that's not in the program that brings a kind of social condensor space to the program and this is at the opening which I was I think I have this little video which I really love they had their they had written a very special piece of music let's see if I can get this to play the enthusiasm of the students in Glasgow is amazing you know and I think the building becomes a kind of catalyst and they gave me the kind of original score of this art art what is it for it was a wonderful piece written for for the opening a project that were were building right now at Princeton University which is basically the entrance to the campus from New York City if you come on the dinky train to Princeton you'll pass through this building and Peter Lewis bless his soul was the was the main donor for the beginning of this project and it was surely pigments intention that the Arts is being in a way underexposed at Princeton and so to create a balance for the humanities and the arts that this place would be a place where you would experience the Arts as you walk into the building as you walk into the campus you pass through from the dinky train through this large space and the program was for dance music literature poetry all the Arts so we had this sort of sub concept of a thing within a thing for the dance studios the notion of embedded for the literature and gallery section and the notion of suspended for the Music Building so the idea of a collective which is the big music practice room University this was this is one of the big pieces of the program this had to be as big as the stage in the concert hall that they could practice and then individual practice moves and I said they should be suspended on rods so they would be acoustically separated and they would have kind of presence making the building something special but the whole thing is pulled together over a forum this form this complex role and this piece is not in the program so this idea of social connection it condenses all three of these buildings that's something that we brought to the to the table and we had to fight for it for like five years because they kept wanting to somehow take it out but they couldn't because it's like what holds everything together and if you want to have the plaza you have to add the forum because that's connecting it so anyway actually what's really interesting about what you call staying with it against all odds is I won't mention any names but the people who are resisting this are now you know at other universities and not there anymore and so now everybody loves what we're doing and everybody is super happy and all the naysayers are gone and it's amazing they just stay in there long enough and don't give up and somehow it comes true so I'm very excited this is this is going I think it's going to be one another seven months we're just putting them everywhere you see this open-loop foil is insulation there's a Lecce stone which is like four inches thick comes from Lecce from a quarry that was opened by the Romans 2,000 years ago it's a kind of buff stone that goes over and that's wherever the concrete structure is where the Lecce stone goes and here's this water pond and look at the size of these skylights they're huge a glass laminated glass light swear that because of the technology of laminated glass now that we can do that no mullions and so the forum which is this huge space wasn't in the program this will be a social condenser space in my idea is that now people are working on their laptops they're talking they're working on their iPhones when they're when they're working they want to have like a casual place and interact in place and there's a cafe there but that connects all of these arts and then to give it kind of a very special quality those big skylights are in are below the water this is just a construction shot but what happens is this water then throws this incredible light in patterns as the wind blows on the floor and big squares all over this form space so I think it's going to be a spectacular addition to Princeton and how long the edges are the routes into the adjacent buildings this goes into the dance I call this the dancing stair and it goes toiling up into next to the dance practice rooms but that social condenser space is the main idea and there you see the Music Building where you can they're there they don't have their wood sheathing on the but you can see the rods they were suspended in these practice rooms the main orchestral practice is down below you see as you walk in from the deke train you look into the orchestral practice well that's going to be spectacular when they're practicing there but the building is so thin you can see the blue sky right through these glass walls are tensioned raw attention cable glass so there's no millions of just suspended so that's a very in the concrete frame then holds everything up and that will get everywhere there's concrete we'll get three inches of or four inches of a Lecce stone so that's that's a kind of and now here when I thinking about here I'm thinking about what an exciting thing it is to come back to this building and think about all that I mean all the stories you know about how we you know realize this I remember in the competition I guess it was the interview and Dorothy asked me you know what you know what can you what would you conclude with and I said well I would just say that the the Harrison Abramowitz 1968 edition covered up the insignia in the original building our Salonga vita brevis s don't do that mistake again art as long life as we sew but this project really was one also of a long yet was a long process of design I got certain delays and it's it was really a joy to work on and I remember the idea the ideas of planar the idea is that the building would be built out of exposed steel because we could do that it's short enough to meet the code you can expose these structural elements which will allow you a certain robustness for an art school but also a certain vocabulary and that was something early on and exciting and then at a certain point we were looking at the schemes and I realized that it looked like Picasso's 1912 guitar and after that everybody you know made that reference and that was the that was the let's say the myth origin point of the building but that didn't really come first it came sort of in between in the in the process and saving the the pond and and cantilevering the library out that had to do with the fact that there's a big utility line there's a pragmatic reasoning this project and dickerson wanted over here and I said but that could be an art quadrangle of the future somebody in the future now today you can see that wonderful garden for sculpture and to be fair he he said alright Steven let's show me what you can do and then I think he came to New York and he saw what we were trying to do and he liked it and let us go ahead so that was a key moment and a key key point in the process and it's been you know I have all these magazines global architecture magazine has it on the cover many different magazines in Spain Europe Tokyo have published it there's Richard arch water sitting figure bless his soul great artist and the stair which is also a social condenser of sorts or people meet and the Brancusi inspired Studios so then we come to 2010 January 22nd where we had a scheme I think we had a sketch scheme it was not really a competition but everybody comes to the interview these days with a sketch scheme right they already have something but the site was like five times bigger it went all the way back and then when we prevailed we they told us the site would be much smaller and I think it just kept shrinking and changing size but also I couldn't I was having a big big struggle with this and these all schemes all of these schemes have complete plans and sections and areas they're all to the same area that we were required to build this building so there you could see the struggle of an architect and Kenneth I invited everybody to come to the studio let's look at that again it's so painful let's look at it once more can we can we look at it once more every one of these teams has plans and sections with schanoes you had to draw everything right over and over and over my studio is me there crying also if you get all this extra advice like Kenneth Rampton it should be court end the original buildings court and this should be court in two if they should be a university relationship anyway I'm very happy that we settled on the right solution and that was a kind of key moment where I realized that this building could be volumetric and not planar and therefore it would be in a way a contrasting building to the original planar building and that sort of that it was a key moment this is 331 11 and we realized that because it's a very big square for plate that these cuts these vertical porosity cuts of light would really relieve it as it as you can see and experience it and then we would express the sort of simplicity of what I call the laminar section that is a different floor plate slide a little bit epic courts at the cuts and create these courts so that was a kind of key moment but but for an architect you can imagine we could have gone through any one of those other schemes and proceeded but I said it's not right yet it's not right yet it's not right yet and I think also the University and people were patient with us and let us have the time right I don't remember exactly did they give us more time or we just had more time I see so and then one of the key ideas of course we're keeping this quadrangle but one then one of the key ideas that emerge was the route through the building would be a route of of of let's say social condensor route for other people coming through the Arts Building diagonally moving and being able to experience the space and and and the galleries and you know you know be inspired while just passing through the building and I think that that was a key that was a key moment as well and that those multiple centers of light would be places that would activate the different floor plates so we try to locate some circulation next to them in different ways you know you have them a wonderful big court which is the main social condenser but these small centers of light also become a kind of social condenser ideas in themselves where people you come out of your studio you can't hat you're not having an idea you have writer's block you sit out there you talk to someone they suggest a book you you go back you have an idea so this idea of interaction is very you know like people are not just locked away in their individual studios so that was yeah that was four or five eleven multiple centers of light and as we moved you know this was a kind of let's say inspirational moment but as we develop the building we realized that that this circulation can actually also be one of these big feelings of the light coming down so it's a very large square floor plate but but it has this this possibility now Chris McVoy I think it we've been working together for 22 years and after you work together for 22 years with someone you don't even have to talk to that person but you know you just move forward you make a decision you make it together you keep going you know what's right and what's wrong and and it's amazing I I mean I I feel so fortunate I architecture is a deep collaboration you know we have rachet here we have chris is going to name all the dni rod cruzi you know this is a the difficulty is you have to everybody has to be working together for the same you know so the same you know cause and that's something you can't do alone and I think to take a little watercolor and turn it into this beautiful building I think Chris is going to tell how how that was done thanks Steven and thanks John for the for the intro Steven will be back at the end I like this photo because we're all we're often looking upside down at things so this is a great intro to summarize the concepts that Steven outlined and I think it's because of the strength of the concepts that keeps the whole team moving forward in a focused way they first it's the interconnection the fact that the arts today are more and more interconnected collaborations between different media and connected to the university to other departments that was a driving idea in the building how could the building be an instrument for that Steven spoke about the campus space shaping of that and the stairs being also social spaces as it is in this building with this great stair here multiple centers of light and then the material resonance and ecological innovation and that dialogue Steven spoke of that the new building that the new building is conceived or in direct relationship to this building this building is planar the new buildings volumetric this building extends out into the landscape the new building light carves into it this building is steel that building the new building is concrete this building is clad in weathering red steel that building is clad in complimentary blue green rising so the to create their relationship through difference and shaping that space and the you see here how the light is what's carving this building these light courts and they're shifted at the floors as a kind of expression of the loft horizontal off like floors meeting the vertical and from the interior the light pushes in as volume volume of life that engage all the studios and bring light deep into the building the center one the seventh at the center that Stephen was talking about in his sketch that we shifted to be part of this campus route from the east through becomes the main forum and Stephen was talking about working with Princeton and the challenge of getting that forum there and the interesting thing here is when we didn't got the brief for this building in 1998 there was already a forum in the brief we did not in this case you know we were complete alignment with the University in the school in fact it was called the interdisciplinary community forum which then became that space out there so the acknowledgement and the desire on the school's part for this kind of social space it was a great it was a inspiration to us and the plan is actually very simple the space feels complex and unfolds as you move through it but you see the six light courts around the perimeter that are carved out and the play between the curving carving of the light courts and the simple orthogonal organization of all the programs creates a dynamic where the light is the most the light volumes are the most organic and sculptural qualities and the center form number one there creates the the center space for all the movement but it's the white space here program Queen very space that's the social space and it's always connecting between the inner forum and the exterior courts so you're always drawn towards the light as you move through the building and you can see the yellow areas then become social spaces informal spaces for the kind of interaction working on your laptop informal meetings that are so important to teaching and working on art today and that's a view as you guys know the building well that the light is often drawing you through the building I'll speak a little bit about the making of the building it's been three years and one of the things that was exciting is to make that building in concrete in relation to this one and steel that we could expose the structure that the structure would shape the space so all the studios have these concrete walls and it's a hybrid structure where the walls are sometimes acting as beams sometimes take carrying the load but in collaboration with columns and it was developed using with Bureau Happold instructional engineering associates using this advanced software called SAP and that's one of the floor plates and the red areas are the the areas where you have the most deflection which is a problem so this program is great for architects because all you have to know is that the red area is the problem and that you got to do something about it so we were we went through I don't know how many iterations probably 20 iterations of this to be able to adjust the structure and the columns the columns are the darker blue and you know ended up with this and we had no red so we were happy but that the integration of the structure in the space in this in the new building is I think one of the best we've accomplished the other innovation is all the floor slabs are made using what's called bubble deck or these plastic bubbles that you see here that are in the slabs and that reduces the weight of the concrete by about 35% makes it much more efficient and then where you don't where you need beams or column drops you just leave the bubbles out and that allows us to span thirty-two feet with only 12 inches very efficient and and makes the building lightweight and then we integrated radiant tubes into the structure so the whole all the floors are the heating in the cooling of the building and that combination of the bubble deck and the radiant floors have not been done before so we had the great innovation in that and that's why the ductwork that you see in the building is mostly for the art exhaust and those kinds of aspects so in construction the building had all these tubes which are the heating and the cooling that then get coordinated into the slab and I'm not sure we'll have time this afternoon so I wanted to take this opportunity to thank at at least some of the key people as Steven said making a building like this is collaboration and some of the people here today were key to that rachet Espinosa project architect Philippe Towada who worked on the design in our office rod cruzi and his team Dana and kala and especially Tom Hilton and especially John Sloan for the university obviously rod Leonard's has been key and I think rod and John Belton Scot and Dorothy and Steve McGuire there's the reason two of our best buildings are right here is because of them and that kind of collaboration is rare so we're thankful for that and the engineers I'll just mention design engineers Amy Enfield and her crew and the structural engineers Kelly gippal and Bureau Happold it was a great team also the contractors Myron did a great job the building is incredibly well built and Steve Haney and Raymond Dix from Myron they actually liked the challenges you know the building was very challenging to build they enjoyed it they took it on and found ways to do it in innovative ways that's so it's really the result of that team that the building has turned out so well for example the myrand construction built all the formwork for the concrete in the computer first every piece of wood that's needed to pour the concrete was put in the computer so they could calculate it all cut it all get the curves and no it was precise and that's how we get this fluid geometry with the concrete and shaping space with concrete is a great joy because you can make these volumes because of the fluidity of the material and it's taking all the forces and the gravity but it's also able to be fluid in space and this is you know as I said the concrete is also the shaping space in the exterior structure this is actually a beam this wall of the Fibonacci square windows is a beam that spans on the on the third floor and all those windows they're all designed in the Fibonacci sequence so they're three foot by three foot five foot by five foot and eight foot by eight foot and they're spaced in those same intervals but we space them from the inside out so this is a section through the exterior wall from the rooms within so we calibrated the ideal natural light for every space every studio from the inside using the fibonacci as a kind of musical score and that that creates the exterior rhythm of the squares and they then they mix with the volumetric light of the light quartz the light quartz from Stephens sketch which is very free but has a kind of intuitive act of carving that of course we wanted to capture when we realize the building though those things those sketches that's not arbitrary even though it might be done quickly that has a kind of the act the creative act of carving then needs to be respected when you do the working drawings so the this is an example of the plan of one of the light courts and how it shifts this is with BNIM of course really working out all these geometries that then the all that glass was made in a warehouse nearby and pieces first to get the precision of the geometry and so and also to be done in a kind of pristine environment so they've spent months making all those pieces it was actually a pretty nice installation is almost like an art installation in the factory these curving volumes and then they were craned into place and as soon as they win then you could see the play of a curving cut making a shadow on a curving wall and that light becomes a material through this this is the you plank that we also used in this building but in this case it has an insulation a special insulation that makes it a little bit more thick thickly translucent the exterior screen was something it's on the two South elevation so the North elevations our punched windows in the zinc skin the south east and Southwest have this screen over it to modulate the light into the interior but it also does many other things for us it abstracts the scale and emphasizes the sculptural carving of the light courts and Stephen had an idea going from the plan and those shapes of the light courts to make the pattern so the pattern actually comes and references the light courts in the building and rachet spent probably four months drawing those into thousands of panels if I would go over to rachets des is like oh god you're still working on those panels you know we thought that it would be easy it would just be repetitive no so and then it's tested rigorously tested in this case in Wisconsin taken through storms with these machines to make sure the whole assemblies working but this was an exciting moment because we could see the phenomena of the screen and how it was playing with the light and being installed this is I don't know maybe eight months ago something and you could begin now to see the feeling and the character of the building and as Mike Metz in his talk said last night that the screen the building from a distance appeared the screen appears to be solid in the day but it's it's actually just a mesh floating over what he called the essence of the building and that it's this interesting play between things that appear one thing but are another and have an essence that can stimulate stimulate your mind as you move through the and it has this play of shadow casting on you know shadow casting on screen on shadow this play of light that gives it a depth so something that's very abstract from a distance becomes very fine group finely grained detailed up close with all this variation that thankfully were shade drew that's there and from the inside this image is a little washed out but it creates this dappled light not unlike light through tree leaves and it gets embedded in the oak Lux insulation this is the first we've been wanting to use this special kind of capilene insulation for a long time which doesn't have filter it's just tubes and which helps the insulation helps channel the light in and the shadows from the screen are embedded in that and that's it you know and it's opaque and then as as night comes you begin to see the pattern of the squares behind to the point that they really take over and the light courts which were negatives during the day become positives at night and there's a blurring that happens through that screen of the squares the studios are obviously equally important to the social space and there was a lot of effort put into them the choreography of the light in this case a painting studio so it's mostly a solid wall and the skylight top light and then some side light this diffuse and direct this balance of different kinds of light and the fact that the light is always changing in the studios as Steven said they don't have to turn the lights on but the fact that there's always this change is something that stimulates yeah you know our senses and Mike met last night was talking about how because of that change the light is energy you know fundamentally and because of this changing energy in the space you're aware of change and the making of art to make the creative act of making art is a kind of optimistic one we you can enact change so there's this relationship between the changing environment and what then the creative act and these you know on the north side you get these frame views of the landscape in the studio and the mix of diffuse and and direct light sorry I'm in these photos trying to be a professor but we want any students around when we were photographing the building the printmaking studio which has probably the most complex light several volumes light courts as well as skylight and the views in from the social spaces as you move through the building these frames of the different activities so if you're a print maker you may see someone doing textile or you may see the you know someone painting and the individual studios all of them are different every painting studio is different because of the rhythm of the windows so there's a kind of individuation and the you know we enjoyed making frame views back to this building that these two buildings are in dialogue and Steven the topic of Stevens talk is key in an art school especially the social space the space of informal working and you know this building was one of the buildings where we developed it further because of this form that the form that's here so we I think we've taken it even further in the new building where there's constant engagement between students and students students and faculty and the space has become these open volumes I heard when I was here yesterday I heard there was a dance class our dance instructor came in to practice a piece I think maybe we'll see later and she said do you mind if I just teach my class in the forum today that this is our studio and of course the school said yeah sure great so they were actually there were all these dancers in the space and it wasn't a performance they were just rehearsing it was a class so the integration of arts that you can make a space that provokes provokes that kind of inter disciplinary action is ideal we really want you know all of us want the students to take charge take control of the space do things in the space there was a the director of this Glasgow School of Art said she retired when we finished the building and they asked her well what did you learn in your 14 years as director and she said irreverence she said I learned from the students that irreverence is important because irreverence leads to openness a kind of questioning and this building is we made it solid we made it flexible and now you can start to see the art going into it which is great and we're very happy that Mike Metz parked his stone motorcycles next to our front door and that's another engagement of art in art around art and I'll hand it back to Steven now for the the rest talk about a long time I'm just going to show three things you know an architect is egotistical II involved in the recent work so I'm going to show quickly three new things but talk about long involvement Mike Metz and I have been working together since 1980 whereas Mike is Mike here 1980 how many years is at 36 years we've been working together which is a long in fact the first one of my first progressive architecture Awards was the Mets house and the model the concrete model is now in the Museum of Modern Art permanent collection so it never got built but it's in the Museum of Modern fit actually got building might be torn down but now it's safe so I wish we have a new project at Franklin Marshall College the great president daniel Porterfield wants to enhance the arts there's an existing kind of blocky building here campus I was just thinking I hope Myron construction would come and build this is there anybody from Myron construction here not anyway because they did such a great job and they were so wonderful on this building but I just briefly show this because it has this idea of the social space at the center of it and Franklin and Marshall is named by better named in honor of Marshall the justice and Ben Franklin who flew his kite into the trees or up into the electricity zone and my first sketch was crazy I mean I just make this kind of crazy sketch and it's interesting that that sketch came back in another form and that was we went through several schemes but at this actually we went quite rapidly to this idea because the trees the trees at Franklin and Marshall are older than some of the buildings there some of them are like four feet trunks and 200 years old and it's an amazing so I took can see the Rays of the trees and instead of a brick box make the inflection of three radio guys make a pavilion that lifts up and floats and one this is also an Arts Building it's 33,000 square feet it's very small it's smaller than any of these arts buildings but at the center of the idea they had in the old brick building they have just a corridor and there's no place to pit up so the center and that's been approved and we're now in design development I guess right schematic in fact I heard that we got some bids and they were on budget right so anyway I'm not going to show the whole thing I just it's very exciting and it's a building about the arts open to to the view below floating in the clouds like a kite and here's a little project that began in our studio I believe in research all the time and and working in drawings and models we call it explorations of n we wrote a little manifesto and we just and actually tonight it City Ballet in New York the the theater piece that we did with the Jessica Lange dance tests are acts of time we'll play again hopefully the New York Times will be there so you'll be able to read about it and I think it's it's going to be traveling around it's going to go to Seattle it's going to go to Dallas various places so we did a dance piece but this was a little manifesto to study architecture freed from the purely objective from origins of architecture we explore in in all space is sacred space the architecture of n dominates space via space intrinsic in is an elemental force of sensual beauty and is useless but in the future will be used purpose finds in the thing containing is not the thing contained and we worked on these thoughts in a series of models and this is went on for a year and then we decided to try to make a building out of these ideas and sort of steps there are four steers that were intersecting we're looking at the inside we do the inversion of those Lost years then we assert a tesseract to support the space the inversion with the tesseract and suddenly then we decide we're going to make a guest house I'm not going to square to a guest house yeah it's kind of crazy you know starting that way but we did it and and then there was a kind of hunter's Shack on the property and we decided to turn that into a gallery because the house is so small and needed other space so one piece is black and the other piece is white and we had this fabulous contractor but you can see it's really about these spherical intersections and we found a heavier Gomez a fabulous contractor that built everything in wood all handmade at first we were going to try to do CNC fabrication of these elements but we found out the cost was prohibitive and besides he said I can do this by hand and I would love to build it by hand so this is a something that starts in the computer it starts with an abstract idea and realized by hand by man out of a labor of love 900 square feet and lastly a project in in New York City believe it or not we're kind of never build in New York City but we do well this is our third thing I love all about social space and it's a tiny library in Queens and the idea was to and the site was large enough you could have built it as a one-story library of course would have been a lot cheaper but I said let's go vertical let's make the site a reading Garden a park and let's go vertical so you have views of Manhattan and let's and that those Manhattan views become like cutouts and let's make a balance between the digital and the book everybody knows that libraries are under let's say a change and you see both cases there are computer deaths on the other side so they're actually balanced then the section of the river it goes up so that as you work walk perpendicular to the city who get these views of Manhattan and that was basically that's all open space inside the building that that big central space I just showed you so that becomes a kind of tiny building but and it's also similar to this building and that is a concrete frame there are no columns because it's only 40 feet wide and those cuts are what you know what you were seeing on the inside that's being expressed on the outside now this building is a tiny little public library it's surrounded by these gigantic condominiums that are growing like I don't know like weeds and then hatton all over and what's really exciting okay that's that big social condensor space but what's really exciting this I just was out at the what he called topping out ceremony and there was a man a congressman by the name of Jimmy Van Brenner who supported this building and is so proud of it and he's bringing people to it and everybody really is excited about it because it has this little character in the middle of all these skyscrapers and the views back to Manhattan are going to be amazing so this will be a public space this would be where architecture as a kind of intense sculptural work draws I think the community into it there's a big reading deck on top you see Manhattan in the distance and I don't know if this shows up very well but you can see standing and all these and so to move our apartment there's continuing to grow this little figure is a public space and I'm very excited about there's new ponds if you are more this is from the United Nations little piece of let's say intense architecture about social space so I think that's what I have what we're going to have questions some questions in this building I look into this watercolor pad you know I start every day making these drawings and I really believe in the sort of let's say the the dreamlike state of the mind that you can connect to things that you're not really sure of in other words if you study something all the practical aspects the program the side and everything but then you just forget all that and you you make drawings you you connect to your intuition and there's a new book by Eric Kandel which I really recommend for this for this topic see I just I just gave a lecture at the Salk Institute in La Jolla it's called reductionism and art and brain science it's an amazing book by Eric Kandel kan de el and it really talks about top-down processing of the brain and bottom-up processing of the brain and it really explains neurologically the creative process and he uses abstraction he says there's an important thing about abstract art is it doesn't give you all the answers it makes your brain work top down not bottom up to add the other dimensions that you need to complete the thought of what it is and so therefore the beholder becomes part of the process it's a great book I I mean I just finished reading it on the plane on the way here last night and I woke up this morning I thought maybe I should just give that lecture I gave in San Diego and talk about Eric Kandel and that lecture was titled architecture activating the brain and I think well I think we're in a moment that's very interesting and that is science and especially brain science the neurobiological discoveries due to you know sort of scannings and how we can see that certain synapses of the brains are working in different ways that we never knew before can inspire art can be connected to thinking of or in new ways right now I really recommend that it's a little book and he really knows about art he talks about Mark Rothko in detail James Turrell in detail Fred sandack in detail de Kooning in detail he really understands he's a he's a genius man he teaches at Columbia University Nobel laureate Eric Kandel and he understands that linkage I think is really you know it's at the core of the creative process euphoria this is fantastic it's amazing I mean I was up I was walking for one hour this morning I want to be by myself right I mean it's like and it's really beautiful so beautiful and also to come to this building I mean I'm gonna I'm gonna spend the rest of the day just kind of walking back and forth because there are pieces and parts that I know that you can't see I mean there are certain moments in the building that I wonder did this work you know and it did work you know and well not because of me because of Chris but and all the whole team but I think it's a it's a it's a one but when you're working on it we work so deeply with models and drawings that in a certain way it's already there in my head so I'm not surprised I'm actually surprised how good this building is because as you saw in my lecture I had real doubts that I we couldn't make a building as good as this one and then I thought oh my career will be over because they'll say yeah he was good and you know back then but now look at what he's doing you know but that didn't happen but I mean it's it's a scary moment if you do one really good building if you have to build next door to it it's got to be better than the one you did before or else you kind of washed up they'll go to the next guy right I mean I don't that was running around in my mind so I'm I'm very very happy today and this is a great day to see this Dorothy this building and the visual arts building spectacular that's kind of the core that was kind of the core of this idea of the social condenser space when we when we when we were thinking about how we're going to connect this building vertically I made this watercolor which was you couldn't really read it as a stair it was like a whirl of plates planar plates going up almost like small tornado of plates going up and I thought that that could be and then there could be wider and longer and you wouldn't really you wouldn't perceive it as a stair that's something that you're walking on it you could go up and with the Nortons help me we realized that on rods and things and I think very I still love it I think it's a great space so in the new building it had to be something different it couldn't be the same that the new building I think has a bigger social condensor space and in a certain sense that diagonal movement through the campuses is super important to that that you can walk in one door and come out the other door and not be from the school of art you're just passing through so I they're very they're very related in terms of their social mission but they're very different in terms of the of the vocabulary planer and the in volumetric and I think that and then concrete and steel that contrasts we just need the third building to do the linear that's all rhod you must have say little pavilion a little a little cafe or something that we can do in lines and then I could say you know I'll send everybody here lines planes and volumes there it is you got to go to Iowa but there it is knowledge threes three's fine start sketchy I love Gordon matta-clark I think I think he you know Gordon matta-clark studied as an architect at Cornell and he was a real rebel it was that word you were using irreverence for sure Gordon matta-clark when he came out of Cornell came back to the Institute of architecture and urban studies do you know that was a very famous place that was going on in New York and when I first arrived in New York 1977 78 79 it was at 8 West 40th Street in an arraignment hood building and they had the top two floors and it was Peter Eisenman and Kenneth Frampton and they would invite people to do exhibits right and they had Michael Gray's Richard Meyer and they invited Gordon matta-clark and Dennis Oppenheim to make an exhibit and Andrew McNair was the curator at the time and those two guys came in you know he they were very let's say rebellious about architecture and they came in and shot all the windows out of the space in the middle of the night so Andrew had to cancel the opening and put plywood over the windows and that Gordon matta-clark was a amazing rebel you know a lot of very interesting work on Clark Thanks Chris can you answer that so when I make a watercolor I don't think about those things Chris the answer is no it doesn't increase because first of all the overall volume is square volume super compact so the carving in the end it's not that much area for the area that's enclosed but also that glass is super insulated need to know that translucent that's made out of two glass planks that are structural with translucent insulation between it and that's what gives it that kind of show G screen quality is actually insulation so that's super efficient even though the lights coming in that's the beauty today you can bring light in and by the way all that light means you don't have the electric lights on so it's the building is super energy-efficient that heating and cooling of through the slabs the green roof insulation the light the way we hooked into the central plant in a way that actually gives energy back to the central plant loop this building is super advanced ecologically and we didn't speak much about that but that's a goal for us right in all our work and and in this case very much so one more some other discipline my question is what do you think I think theory is very important I mean I wrote a book with you on a plasma called questions of perception for not towards the phenomenology of architecture and I believe that architecture is something that you experience very deeply so you really have to let's say have a position which is about the body moving through space about texture about light about the spacial overlap and what's really curious is now with this architecture activating the brain lecture it connects back again to those thoughts because that's what Eric Kandel is talking about you know that there's neurological evidence now that these these aspects of space light and experience really are key and they're they're their aspects of our emotional existence and I think I in that talk I said there's a famous statement by Winston Churchill first we shape our buildings and then they shape us and today we're getting neurological biological evidence that that is a truth so I think say I will end with that Winston Churchill statement thank you

Channel: University of Iowa School of Art and Art History

Views: 14,232

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: University of Iowa, School of Art and Art History, Steven Holl Architects, Steven Holl, Visual Arts Building

Id: 652Z_zjhxMs

Length: 64min 28sec (3868 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 30 2016