Drawing as Thought (Steven Holl)

a summative April winter so you're talking a code anything ran very future this service that you perform said you are do you use your hands the service you perform do you use your hands absolutely that I make these drawings every day in the morning because as you know the mind from from waking up is got all the subjective lengths he communicates in the most effective way through a sharp pencil and a beautiful block of paper he's always drawing drawing drawing drawing it's the way he thinks it's the way he argues points you can see the buildings take shape [Music] but to challenge the idea presentation 25 years ago I was student which I did not think the current mode of presentation was would allow me to explore space in the way I can there's really before computing was available to to all of us and the other thing was the idea of the projection which I think became a very important another very important component that projected the production of the drawing becomes the way kind of start the idea of kind of deformation distortion through projections allows you to look at the building and wait for the way so every time you look at the project you look at competing differently and that really became a design process in architecture doesn't necessarily mean that it's the final form of a built building a drawing to me is a completed piece of architecture a building is a completed piece of architecture a photograph of a drawing or a photograph of a architecture is a piece of architecture I remember dr. Eisenman coming to Berlin and seeing these two pieces of the Indus Great Hall they were 50 foot high and he says to me that did not architecture because you can't get in and I looked at him and I said you can't get in that eye in other words he was not in the position to get into them because he did not understand that you can only get into something if you understand to make something happen because nothing like miracle [Music] so sensitivity company to your ideas into black National Front paper and those tracers are Oh select flock not exactly or vain so just a few words of introduction to Steven Steven Holl we should say and there is this thing in architecture where where we use only the first names as if we are actually all one family or very close friends and in some ways architecture is a very very close family and there is something not like a secret society but but like a group of people that absolutely love something and to be an architect is to is to love buildings and and to like being with people who love buildings so in that sense it is Steven not Steven Holl but Steven Holl is absolutely wonderful architect and I think it's obvious an architect in his prime and to be in his prime means for an architect something different maybe than for other fields I think for for Steven it means he now makes buildings that are almost exactly the way he was drawing at the very beginning when nobody was letting him build and he was making a magazine and if you look at some of the projects in that magazine you will see them now in the streets of China almost as they were drawn so the passage from the drawing to the building through thought which maybe Steven will talk about a bit can happen over a long arc of over Korea but it is to me absolutely no question Steven Holl is an architect absolutely in his prime everything he's touching right now is is coming out so beautiful and it's obvious in the space we are but I think there are two terrible conditions for an architect to give a lecture there at least to one is to give a lecture in your own school it's a it's a disaster and and because somehow it's it's would be like for example giving if what I was saying to you before is true a lecture to your family right suddenly now your family is there and you have to explain what it is the you're doing no matter how much they love you in fact precisely because they love you it's a bit almost impossible it Steven has been teaching and and being loved in the school I think for something like 31 years so this is something like that arc I was talking about before from the drawing to the building so almost when Steven started to teach in the school it was somebody drawing and publishing and thinking now it is somebody drawing publishing thinking building and the building part flows exactly out of that so the arc of Steven as a teacher is very similar to this great arc in in his in his in his work you could almost imagine that Steven is becoming young because there is also something about architecture that everything goes in Reverse that he's becoming younger by the minute anyway that's the first terrible condition to ask somebody to speak which is speak in their own school and then perhaps even worse to speak in their own building so because you are you know and if you're an architect you you believe that buildings you believe that buildings talk that they have ideas that they talk so no matter what Steven says today the building is also giving a lecture and the interesting thing is whether the building and Steven give the same lecture or not and so again difficult difficult but therefore unbelievably nice that that Steven is willing to run the risk of these two restrictions to talk to us and just I think an absolute thrill to be in this particular project in one of the most strategic locations of one of the most famous islands in the world and if you were after being to this building asked where would be the acupuncture point on this island you might after seeing this building think that it's here not at the other end which is normally what people are pointing to and anyway if you were to think of Manhattan as some kind of ship which is the front of the ship and which is the back I think if you come to Stevens building you start to think this is the front of the ship and that for years we have been living in the back and it is great that an ark it is an architect that pulls us to the front which is where of course you see America and as you know New York is very close to America and it's just right there so this is a an architect that also allows us to see our to see our own country wonderful thing so Steven thank you for the building and thank you for everything James I just want to say Adam gross and red Mike are here from spirit of space and this is their work drawing his thought can be accessed at 32b NY with other video polemics one every four weeks right if you guys keep working hard and it's a project it's a group project and I was happy that they could get busy and and finish it because I couldn't pull together that the topic drawing as thought so this lecture is time light a lecture that I gave and twice already and this is going to be altered tonight but the lecture is dedicated to my my late friend levius woods Louis Kahn wrote architecture does not exist what exists is a spirit of architecture and I think in Kahn's words that most my feeling about what levius woods stood for comes out in Kahn's words his designs were kind of politically charged fields of a reality that he created and lebbeus worked in ways very mysterious that kind of he had collaborators but he led he led the charge and I asked him to do in a pamphlet architecture in 1980 and he made up this idea of a pamphlet entitled Einstein's tomb and from his words the tomb is a vessel journeying outward on a beam of light following an immense and subtle arc through the Stars for eons it will inhabit the dominions of space until in a distant time it must return to the world of its beginning thus a cycle the epicycle of space and time will close we know Einsteins not buried in that tomb so I imagined that that tomb was launched on October 30th that thousand mild long storm sandy and now levius himself travels on his own beam of light invention and a little bit more on lebbeus by way of resistance he had by the way you can access his websites many of the things that he said are still quite accessible there's a lot of information still and there's one section called by way of resistance lobbyist says it seems to me if architects really want to resist then neither the idea nor the rhetoric of resistance has a place in it rather they must create an independent idea of both architecture in the world one looks for principles but we are better off if we control them not the other way around principles can become the tyrants foreclosing on our ability to learn when they do they too must be resisted so these are a few of his right off of his website resist whatever seems inevitable resist people who seem invincible resist any idea that contains the word algorithm resist the impulse to draw blob shapes resist the desire to travel to Paris in the spring resist the desire to move to Los Angeles any time resist the idea that architecture is a building resist the idea that architecture can save the world resist the hope that you'll get that big job resist getting jobs resist taking the path of least resistance resist the temptation to talk fast resist anyone who asks you to design only the visible part and by the way that's really happening a lot lately so really I'm going to read that one twice resist anyone who asks you to design only the visible part resist the idea that you need a client to make architecture so in the spirit of lebbeus this talk then goes back to when I didn't have any clients and mark kind of referred to that and I just made these projects up I I invented a client this was a gymnasium in the South Bronx not far from here a bridge a bridge out of the destitution of the South Bronx this is 1977 and I drew this in prentice-hall on my brother's a drawing board he was doing a Masters of Fine Arts the form of the buildings of Sarah bridges over bridges small entrance bridges at each end of the main span served a view down the axis of Brook Street were not really far from that site the bridge is in water rather than over water and acts as a structural pivot from which the turn bridge portion of the main span rotates so ships can go through the channel you see or someone in a rowboat coming down the channel and in the floor plan we had to invent a new sport called long basketball in order to fit it into that long skinny plan another without clients project I started in 1979 and I saw myself the last boxcar go over the High Line and it was a boxcar full of frozen turkeys I think that was appropriate and I'm very happy today that I can walk to work this by the way was an idea about how many P of people can live in Manhattan like you have an SRO hotel you have a luxury condominiums you have a student housing you have let's say two bedroom apartments but right now it's all luxury condominiums unfortunately but the public space is there and we made several models many many models in steel another client list project was the gang bibliothèque a competition in 1988 the original competition for the American gang bibliothèque right after the airlift was for German architects and was paid for by American funds and this was the reverse and there were 13 architects invited my project one it was about a browsing circuit by about the unknown meeting of of the user and the book a notion of of really open stacks this is one of the first open Stax libraries in Germany built in 1950 so this extension was really opening the open stacks but but alas when the when the after the competition was announced the the senator said I will not build this building and he ran another round of the competition and we we were we didn't win that one and it reminds me that you know architecture is a kind of war and what doesn't kill you makes you stronger you have to just keep going this is another client list project for the palazzo del Cinema and by the way this lecture is called time light so this is really about time in cinema you have this ability to take something that lasted 40 years and put it down into four minutes or you have the ability to take something that lasted 40 seconds and stretch it into an hour so it's a kind of accordion time by the way you approach this through the from Venice via vaporetto to to the lagoon below it so there's this kind of let's say accordion time which is cinematic time the kind of light that drops through into the lagoon is a diaphanous time and there's a kind of absolute time in a cubic Pantheon and these built these cinemas interlocked and by the way all the sight lines work we worked on this competition for a year and I think in a way it was a breakthrough project for me we never we never expected it to be built and we didn't expect even the winner to be built and in fact the winner wasn't built it was Rafael Nanao but it was an important project for the idea the ideas of time and the ideas of cinema and the ideas of architecture and how in a way cinema is a more powerful media than architecture and then recently last year we made this book together with Sanford Quint about what I call the seven times of architecture and yet afterwards after the book was published I realized I made a big mistake because I had worked on the book for a year saying that there's diurnal time there's seasonal time there's linear and cyclical time linear time like the Greeks had cyclical time so they kept perfecting and perfecting and perfecting and were condemned to linear time which means we we have to keep making something new all the time something new it's like fashion that's the kind of that's the kind of trap as well anyway but what I left out was the immeasurable and I realized that's the most important and I thought about Lake Corbusier what he called ineffable space or inexpressible space and and leucon also spoke about the immeasurable quality of architecture so that book is flawed if anybody buys it I will personally inscribe the missing piece in this is a project that also is about time and light above the Arctic Circle and it's also a project about the struggle of architecture the take this took 15 years from the first sketches to the realization and it was for the writer new Thompson a famous surrealist writer in Norway and I see it as a body of invisible forces inspired by the 19th at 1890 a novel hunger and and this is his words despite my alienation for myself at that moment and even though I was nothing but a battleground for invisible forces I was aware of every detail of what was going around me a big brown dog ran across the street towards the trees and the Tivoli it had a small collar made of Mexican silver farther up the street a window on the first story open and a girl with her sleeves rolled up leaned out and began polishing the panes on the outside nothing escaped my eyes I was sharp and my brain was very much alive everything poured in towards me the women before me had two blue feathers in their hats and I was really excited about the project but there was enormous resistance there were some 300 newspaper articles over a period of three years and the resistance came from many different aspects one of them was about the farm so we moved the building to another site was actually it became kind of the joke of hemorrhoid in the tavern they built a model and served beer out of the the model and yeah it went on for on and on and on and I thought okay oh this was a this was a schoolteacher sending her students out to drop vernacular buildings in the landscape and they all came back with the new Thompson Center because it was in the newspapers and that was in their minds they couldn't see the landscape the media is so powerful today it's just going to blind you but someone came from Nava Ric and said this building must be built it's important for a Norwegian culture etc etc and he says I'm going to the Parliament and he went to the Parliament and he got the thing funded and suddenly they said we have to have this ready for the hundred and fortieth anniversary of new Thompson which was only 14 months away so they they worked night and day in three 8-hour shifts continuously for 14 months and they finished it on the 4th of August 2009 and it's a great sight if you get a chance to go there but it's also a building that really does capture the angle of the Sun and how it changes in time the the windows are not aligned to the floor so the floors slip and slide up through the building intersecting the windows in strange places and you get a real kind of amazing condition of light and time changing and every year the Sun goes down around September our December 17th and doesn't come up again until about January 30th so they always send me that last piece of Sun and they say they just you know say goodbye we'll see you at the end of January it's amazing and then in the summer time it's a Midnight Sun for six weeks and Sun never goes down another project about the sea and about light and in a way the the time of the ocean that is that empty horizon is the Biarritz City to surf a building about the ocean but really about the space of the Rison the whole building revolves around being under the sky and under the sea and this is under the sky and it tilts towards the ocean horizon and then under the sea there's nothing on the curved surface it's just one big curve without a single light fixture or any any imperfections thanks to her Veda Scott and and a great team of people that worked on the project so you really feel that sense of the sea in this white concrete and and it's a great place to experience the sunset this is the only surfing city in Europe bjur it's so that's a longer story I won't tell it now this is the Chapel of st. Ignatius also a building about light and about the idea of Spiritual Exercises of the Jesuits and the building was really designed around their program the exercise is a kind of complement there's a speaker and then there's a receiver so we had the idea of complementary colors so wherever there's a yellow field there's a blue lens wherever there's a green field there's a red lens and so everything is in complementary colors like the Spiritual Exercises of the Jesuits and this is a project also without it this is really without a client this is a totally hopeful wish we could do it project that we did south of Rome in a town called Cassino and a monastery was bombed by the Allies in 1944 and it was going to be the museum of the city of Cassino and they had they had no program so we had to write the program and I decided the building should be about light as if it was a score like a dance score like a lab on notation and it would take me an hour to present this building but Jeff Kipnis said it was one of my most important projects and this is a long time ago this is 1990 I think and and it forms a public space and then the way we discovered how the light would come in and these are you know kind of crude sections but we build models of every piece so each condition of light was studied in model form and all these kind of strange occurrences have to do with the angle of the Sun and you can't model this in a computer because light falls off the surface of something by the square root of the distance from the source so there's no ray tracing program that can do this you have to build models to check this light and to see these phenomena and also to check them in the time of the day and how the Sun moves but they're a series of simple spaces with some amazing conditions and we thought you know they could close this off and darken it if they needed to but each room then just had this condition of how the light could change it just one slice of light and then we realized last year a building which is about music and time and light and this is a building that you can see on a couple of videos built around the analogy of symphony in BA of modules a piece of music written in 1967 by by a Hungarian composer its von Anhalt and never played it was never played and it had too many people in the orchestra it was too complicated to play it became our analog for the light being coming in to the frames of the building in three parts it's a gallery in house so there's a 10,000 square foot combination mostly gallery and there's a sheet of water that unites everything in the three pavilions push up so one's an entrance pavilion one is the the main house and one is a guest house but the gallery connects everything below I think we did 30 schemes for this project and once we had the concept of the symphony of modules that came together in a week it was a great client the really appreciated architecture and they kept giving us presents for doing our work like they gave us a ma a plaque they made they made these every time I came over they were giving us another present I never and they did everything we wanted I mean it's a kind of I could think I wanted to do this in sort of this it's copper but it's it's stained in a special way to turn this leathery red and I couldn't get it done in Korea so I said it has to be done in Kansas City that's the only way we can get the color and they did it so the whole facade system was built by Zehner metals in Kansas City and shipped to Korea in so everything isn't made into Asia some things are made in America and go back to Asia and the building is really an experiential thing here you are you've just come into the entrance and you come up into the entrance pavilion and you think you're inside but you realize that when you're here you're really looking at the outside not really because this is the inside of another outside so you're inside looking at it outside but that outside is really the inside of another outside so the condition begins to be more like music and it's really it's an I mean that's why we did video spirit of space did these videos you can get them on on Vimeo because it's really hard to take pictures of an experience like taking pictures of music it doesn't it's it's a sequence of experiences and they let us do the furniture and the rugs and light fixtures and there's a sort of feeling of how that light changes wonderfully built by Korean craftsmen all local material Korean granite bamboo form concrete they wanted they wanted a signature at the entrance and I said well what about a kind of plan a signature that sort of does the story or the whole the sheet of water that unites everything has to be recycled so it goes down into a fountain and comes back up to the sheet again and continually recycles and just briefly this is a this is a new project in Maggie's it's a Maggie's Cancer Care Centre in London right in the centre of London a very historic site very ancient site st. Barts Cathedral is there st. Bart's Hospital the first major hospital in the United Kingdom is there and and the ancient st. barts Cathedral is there and so I wanted to connect to music with this because I think music is a kind of healing in fact on the New York Times just three days ago there was a whole article about how music has a healing capacity so these people are cancer victims and so I connect it to shape notes which is the Gregorian chant notation before five line staff and I took the colors and tried to insert them and the building really is a thing within a thing within a thing there's a bamboo kind of interior there's a concrete structural frame and now that's all wrapped in a oka Lux a skin that has these shape these shape notes floating in it and then you know you can see the kind of condition of the staff lines it's a very modest building in a way but I think it's going to be a powerful one because of the details that the details we have developed something new absolutely new okhla luxe is a kind of like polar bear hair it's hollow and it the glass is very thick and it you can insert in between the outers membranes you can you can actually insert a sheet of color but that color dissolves like a mark Mark Rothko painting so that's and it's a new material that we're developing with o'clock's for this project so and that's just in the works now so that should be coming up soon and now I was going to do the whole lecture just on this building but I didn't have time and I'm kind of glad I didn't because I realized it's they're just too much material we were asked to do this building and have a design ready for October homecoming mark do you remember that come on it was like August and they wanted design to show everybody on October homecoming that was scary so I immediately tried to have an idea well the first designs actually well first of all it's like Mark said it's a very important site you know Broadway is the first street in all of Manhattan this was an Indian Trail and here we are this this this is the most important street in Manhattan the oldest Street in Manhattan that connects all of Manhattan and there we are and also you know when it crosses that's the first bridge into Manhattan that was the first that was Kings bridge built in 1693 the first bridge into Manhattan so the site you know and there's Broadway bridge that's the site of the first bridge into Manhattan now it's Broadway bridge so the site is very charged and I one of the first things I kept looking at the Broadway bridge you know this is a lift bridge I think of unprecedented strength because it has to lift the subway trains and the taut immobilo of lanes so it's an enormous power to lift all these things up so a boat can go through there but then you get this whole structure this strange gray structure okay when an architect gets a commission and they say well let's just do whatever so immediately I want to redesign the whole area you know like everything and golf league building the next door and go up the street and change this and that that ended pretty fast they said there was a budget which is very low and thank thanks to Olaf and Chris McVoy my partner they somehow made the budget work so now you see this is what we showed in October we said it's about it's like a football play points on the ground and lines in space by the way I played pulling guard at the on the West High Wildcats in my high school and I was calling defensive signals and playing offense I was one of the only players that played both offense and defense and so those stories helped me get through the first part of the Commission because I could talk to the football people football language and yeah I think we showed them some of these drawings field house velocity time energy circulation and then so now we have to try to translate this concept into the form of a building so then I'm making you know sort of points on the line lines in space points on the ground and then I had the idea that athletes run over they run under and they run through and then we made a series of models because we said that the running under is very important so what it looks like from below might be more important than what it looks like from above and then so we started just looking underneath the building and then we started to connect it to the other field house that didn't work it's too big too by the way here it's over budget totally over budget and then it was brown it was Corten steel and Michael Bell came up and said it's so heavy can't you make it something lighter color and I immediately made it into aluminum oh and then there was a moment where I said it's got to be linear points on the ground on lines in space and then it got really ugly for a couple of weeks enormous ly ugly you know but I was just saying the stick with it maybe we're going to get something new out of this thank God we realized to lay of it and then there was a meeting with mark and we started to talk about what's inside this building and we said there's three main parts there's the body that's a big gymnasium there's the mind body that's this room where by the way the ccr sitting in our very wide because you're supposed to be sitting with football gear on hip pads and shoulder pads that's why those seats are so wide and by the way we didn't design them because there's no budget for us to design those seats so you know I mean it's not like and and you don't want to argue with a bunch of football players either but but it is it's it's the mind this athletes collar the body and the mind body so that became more of the diagram without points and lines ended blah blah blah that became the diagram that we could communicate with the client and everybody around except my other idea was still hovering under there so it's an interesting problem because you know I always say there you need to have a concept that drives the design but in this case many so many other factors are working on it that it starts to become something a third thing and and so as it progressed and many forces and its enormous ly difficult client I hope they're not in the room they leave this to us and but we got through it lee bollinger was nowhere to be found wonderful man you know invite you to do something says would you be willing to but then you never see him again only at the opening oh great job Steven yeah but what about all that hell we went through for four years and there were models of the inside models of the outside models of the details and details that had to be in the steel drawings this this is the you go outside I think you can see this light that had to come in the structural drawings because I want this piece to come to light to hang out there so yeah so and then we had the groundbreaking we weren't finished with the drawings but we had the groundbreaking and there's there's Lee he shows up oh nice a good good idea I'm like nervous as hell I have the tie on I'm the only guy with the tie on because I'm nervous it's over budget you know they don't have the money yet but we're breaking ground anyway oh yeah yeah and it has to be open in September and I don't see how they're going to ever get it ready but because it was all prefabricated and all off was a genius the steel pieces were already in production when we were breaking ground right off and the planks the planks were in production so it was like an erector set because the foundation was already in by the way we broke ground and the foundation was in already so it went together very fast I mean I went to China and it came back and they said let's go up to this and I said what where'd all that come from so fast it was all there and then they topped it out very quickly by the way amazing build everything out of precast things in Manhattan especially because it's built in New Jersey it's much cheaper and all these steel beams were built in New Jersey there's a steel beam in the gymnasium that weighs 38 tons is that right it's so heavy they had to have two cranes to put it in place that's because I didn't want any columns in the gymnasium and then we want to expose all these because these are beautiful this is these are all structural joints and these cut these are bolts but they look like rivets so they had that feeling of the Broadway bridge back in the days of riveting construction and so we cut holes in in certain walls to let us let us see those joints and then the underside is really important so you have to see it in the sunlight and the reflection and that by the way is New England ceiling blue if you know anything about New England houses all the porches have that baby blue sky blue paint it's not Columbia University blue it's New England don't tell anybody they think it's Columbia blue it can be whatever you want it can be Columbia blue or I wanted New England blue and you know it can be it's like whatever you want it to mean and then the stairs have another linear pattern which we developed to catch the light in a special way and that's you that's why you have to come up here in the sunshine oh yeah and then the rail the train goes by so when you're in the gym it practically feels like it's going to come into the gym with you and that's pretty interesting experience but this detail it's all digitally cut and was hand-drawn first and the idea really works wonderfully and that is that it picks up and that's not even a good view of it but it picks up the Sun because the Sun hits the thickness of these lines in different ways depending on which angle of the Sun is going and then it throws very interesting shadows and I don't really have a good slide of that phenomena but that's really wonderful phenomena of lines of light and then Janine inserted something we just did just this second about two minutes ago so this is a football diagram called pre-snap identifiers and you can see the you goo and then you see the points on the ground and the lines in space that's this pulling guard I used to play pulling fire and here's the building just fits right in there there's an auditorium and these are the points on the ground and that the lakes could move maybe people go up and down and onto the roof and then down the stairs that drawing that original drawings in the room next to if you want to and then I just want to end with the slice porosity block going back to levius woods very very important project for us three million square feet in this amazing town of Chengdu and right from the beginning we didn't want to make an object we wanted to make space and also Chengdu is the oldest city in China with the same name for over 2,000 years you see this map a very old map and none of these cities are in the same place Chengdu has always been Chengdu so there's another kind of history and the building is a exoskeletal concrete frame sliced by the Sun and an idea of an integral urban form of making this urban space making a public space with the building the notion of micro urbanism it's shops that are in the shopping center below that also open out onto the street and give life to the street and then these micro urbanistic buildings within buildings buildings within buildings that was the first sketch of building within building with three I wanted three so then we said what will they be that's the sunlight shut slicing this is the two hours of required sunlight in China slicing and that gives us two hour that we need here that gives the building its form these are the actual diagram of the required sunlight so we just followed it we just said okay the structural concrete frame that's the load-bearing frame these are earthquake forces and then where it's sliced we turn it into glass and then there was the idea for the main garden comes from a poet who lived there in the year 713 this fugitive between the Earth and the sky from the northeast storm toss to the southwest time has left stranded in three valleys so that gave us three valleys and each one of these has a different idea of time and I won't talk about this but it's very important another another professor should give you a class on energy I think today more important than many other things that we do as architects on every project we made in China is almost like leads platinum this is all geothermally heated and cooled has every possible system that would take another hour to speak about and there's the public space and there's levius woods peace and there's our peace and i Weiwei's peace they never realized I owe a waste piece for political reasons so there there was the proposal and and there's AI weiwei there's levius there's our peace and then the building was realized very in a way for such a big construction quite rapidly and that's the that's the structural frame that you're looking at there's where the history pavilion goes so when you see the building on the horizon in the city you see that it's a space and not an object because it's forming this public space and this is a piece of a much longer film about spirit space [Music] [Music] [Music] that's all structural concrete very thick with penetrating white stain there are a hundred and fifty thousand people came to the opening of the project in November and this the couple there's quite a few good cafes and restaurants around the edges of this point magnets on Fifth Avenue of Chengdu [Music] fountain of 366 days so each one of the fountains has to do with time this is this is the the doufu quote in cast-iron history Couvillion provincial history of Chengdu is projected on the vanderwaal's [Music] and there you can see the light pavilion so this project for lebbeus was really important it ends up being the last building that he built and you see exactly and there's a wonderful book by christophe compass the light pavilion which has just been published by lars mueller that goes into more detail as you can see right from the first sketches this notion of vectors the notion of forces and and and the notion of let's say occupying this carved out space is about four storeys tall that's it's engulfing several levels and connecting with different levels of the building and we're a period of about two years levies and christoph worked on the development how the walkways how you would occupy exactly how be suspended inside and then the client tried to push it out of the project because of the budget so we had a genius moment where i say hey wait a minute that's the light fixture that lights the whole public space you can't push that out of the project and that somehow saved that part and i way way we couldn't argue our way way so they didn't even build my way ways but there's just a big hole there where i Weiwei's is supposed to be so then this became sort of more instrumental as it's going to give light to the space and it really does light the whole space it's amazing and then more models were built and then the construction enormous pieces of steel occupying the inside of the the lenses and i I went to Chengdu to be sure everything was going correct so inside of those wonderful delicate lines of lebbeus woods is this enormous steel section carrying the load because they're going out from the building cantilevering and going way out from the facade you see the walkways they're standing here you can stand there and walk down those stairs I stand there and the entire envelope is lined in polished stainless steel there you can see it's coming out from the facade a couple three meters and you walk out from the facade so you really feel you're outside that's that's a construction drawing because the walkway is not in and here's standing here in the light pavilion of lebbeus woods in chengdu in our sliced porosity block it's an amazing experience levius has realized at work that is actually everything he ever drew anti-gravitational the feeling of up this down the feeling of down is up it's an amazing piece cut into the side of this building which when you occupy it you really understand the work and then in the sort of feeling the vision of levius work and I'm really enormous ly excited that this piece of architecture got realized so the when I was there in November I realized they had named this building shig Wong which means time light or any weights and Chinese people here will know what that means it means something like time light transcendent so they gave it their own name this is what happens in China I love it you see CCTV is called duck Kucha big pants I think he went to you know he's probably angry about that but for us time light she Guang that's wonderful I'm very happy about that and then I thought just to summarize this is one complicated idea but I have this idea that this building this piece of architecture is way more important you know then its size and here's why I always loved cigarette Gideon's book space-time and architecture it's from 1941 and I have a 1941 this is my 1941 edition of space time in architecture Gideon wrote the four-dimensional space-time creation of architecture not merely for the eye but for the entire organism the experiencing soul you know it was like a breakthrough who was like the extension of space and time merging and fusing but what happened what happened was you know complexity and contradiction you know everything went backwards and then we have 1963 we have the seminal text Colin Rowe and Robert Slutsky transparency literal and phenomenal they returned the viewer to the static position the frontal plane the postmodern period it returned us to three dimensions took us out of four dimensions returned us to three dimensions but that's not what the physical world is doing it's actually moving the other direction so what I think is important about Libya's pavilion is that this it's is as if okay I know he worked in four dimensions always XYZ in time but because he dissolves the axis vertically and horizontally it seems to me that there's some kind of fifth dimension to this project and it's in a way it begins with the X Y Z and then there's time but this dissolution of the X Y Z because of the way that everything dissolves in all directions yeah that's something important and you have to go in it to see it and it does light the whole space and I'll just end with the first quote but longer there is no such thing as architecture what does exist is the spirit of architecture but it has no presence what does have presence is a work of architecture and at best it must be considered as an offering of architecture itself merely because of the wonder of its beginning thank you [Applause]

Channel: Columbia GSAPP

Views: 80,871

Rating: 4.9280362 out of 5

Keywords: Columbia, GSAPP, architecture, New York, urban history, island, time, light, drawing, Lebbeus Woods, Steven Holl, Mark Wigley, Manhattan, Bronx, athletics, Baker, Campbell

Id: qnp3g-6VoaU

Length: 50min 33sec (3033 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/jaredlussier]

I love the way that Holl incorporates the idea of time into most of his work, and how we typically uses natural light to communicate that. It's incredible how he can look at something, come to a conclusion, and then communicate his idea so well and eloquently. Holl makes me want to juat draw everything I see and every idea I have.

I was never crazy about Holl until I watched this video. I really think to truly appreciate an architect's work and fully understand it, you have to read what they write/wrote and listen to what they say/said.