Steven Holl Interview: Spaces Like Music

I believe architectures in art it changes people's lives and I think that's what architecture has the potential to do and I'm feel enormous ly grateful to have the chance to make a few spaces that I think will change people's lives I'm sure that the Glasgow School of Art which we just opened on April 9th will change lives you should see the students in there I mean they love the spaces the critics tried to screw me tried to kill me before the they tried to stop the building from being built you know because they don't understand it and they won't take the time to look inside of it that's this building was really is a building made up of driven voids of light and it's a building that is totally about the experience of going through it and how the structure and the light and the circulation intersect and a really dynamic way to give a fantastic spatial energy that connects all these different art forms textiles dude you're making paintings sculpture this whole school of art you know is in now this new dynamic relationship because of the spaces I'm Steven Holl here in New York in my office I have an office in Beijing and in Manhattan but my origin is really Scandinavian my grandfather was born in tonsberg norway and immigrated to Seattle where my dad was born in Mukilteo Washington and he's full-blooded Norwegian ninety three and a half years old and his first trip to Europe was when I opened the key Osmond Museum in May of 1998 which was a seminal project for me and I was very happy that it was in Scandinavia it was a international competition for the Museum of Contemporary Art which we renamed kee Ozma intersection the Kia's Matic intersection from the Philosopher's merleau-ponty it came from a book that I was reading when we were doing the competition and I had an office since 1974-75 but I was always sleeping on a plywood shelf above the entranceway and nobody knew it so the key Ozma the Kelson key was a kind of threshold building for us because when we won it in 1993 we went from almost nobody to six people and it opened in 98 and put us I mean it totally changed my office because it was a competition international competition and anonymously judged and we won first place in 516 entries and there were you know people like Alvaro Siza there were very important people in it so that was a big it my beginning life as an architect in a way in terms of that kind of work of culture where you're making space for art it really be good became the cosmic museum so I was very excited about that but my my position which I drew up in a manifesto in 1988 is the book called anchoring and I I said that architecture really begins with a sight and a circumstance a situation and a program and should be re you know in a way reinvented for every situation and I'm not interested in making a signature style that you move from one city or one culture or one kind of climate to another trying to establish yourself in this coastal you know how this goes it goes very easily in the 21st century because the internet doesn't give you any context so that people are making architecture like in a way like Louis Vuitton bags like kind of branding a kind of operation which when you actually visit the buildings in their in their context to have meaning only based on the the reputation the star architect making this kind of implantation in it and curiously enough there's a big desire for it because each city wants one Jeff Koons right each city wants one we won't mention any names so I'm kind of the opposite of that my position is that architecture should be really about the place and its meaning the idea that drives the design should be also related to the way that the structure and the light and the space and the material are in some kind of organic relation something is tying all these things together so each project has a kind of idea that drives the design in the case of of key ozma it's this intertwining this notion of the inter 20 intertwining of total Dante Bay the intertwining of culture and art the intertwining of this low angle of Sun that only reaches I think 51 degrees even in the summer so that building is like a catcher's mitt to bring that light in and that that concept sketch was actually made in Helsinki the night I visited the site so so so the the the development of each project then begins with some impulse and a concept that's driving the design and and and I I once had an exhibition called idea and phenomena so I believe in the a priori idea driving the design but I don't think you need to know that to get the meaning of the building so the phenomena the experience you know a five year old child walking into a space that I made can understand it just like you can understand a piece of music you don't need to know that Beyla Bartok's percussion celeste is divided into four movements and they're made out of wood win a lightweight instruments and heavy you know drum percussion instruments and even divider on the stage you don't need to know all those conceptual strategies that Bartok had to understate the music to experience the music and I would say also I believe that light is a material I mean to me space architecture is about shaping space I'm you know we turned down projects where we're just asked to do an object building you know especially if it's mono-functional turn down a lot of those in in Abu Dhabi and in China we've made like space with buildings like from linked hybrid and Beijing where there's 822 story towers that form public space to the horizontal skyscraper in van key which is really about turning the entire ground plane into a tropical garden open to the public elevating the building a kind of 30 meters above the ground so you can see the sea so it's the shaping of space I think on the urban scale but when you come down to the interiors in the building scale its how also how that space works with light in the nelson-atkins Museum of Kansas City which was a building that we won in another international competition in 1999 against tato Ando a lot of people we broke the rules nearest but there's a neoclassical building 1937 250,000 very large building and you were supposed to add on to the north and so ando added on a glass box Polson Park added on some pieces each architect followed the rules and I said this this is not the right thing to do because you should keep that original building intact and make a new building that would integrate into the landscape and I remember that the jury was a very key jury because Jake Carter Brown the head of the National Gallery was on the jury ADA Louise Huxtable the greatest architecture writer from the New York Times was on the jury but was a very you know was a large jury including the director and I said I apologize I really feel that I had to break the rules and I really think now we have an exceptional scheme an exceptional way to add 140,000 square feet onto your Neagle neoclassical a stone building and it was the idea of the stone and the feather but I said boy I got the nerve to do this I I read in your facade in the limestone facade you know how they have these sayings all around the building and one of them was the soul has more need for the ideal than of the real and I said so this is an ideal scheme and you know maybe we're going to be eliminated because I know we're outside the boundary of the site actually one of them said but it's so long and I said have you ever been to the Louisiana Museum that's the one of the greatest museums of art because of the experience because of the variety of the experience coming in and coming out in the landscape coming into the sequence you never get museum fatigue at the Louisiana Museum and if you look at what we're doing here it's shorter than the Louisiana Museum and actually all the head people on the jury had been to the Louisiana so I actually used that bill to win this competition in Kansas City Time magazine named it the best new museum of the year and all that kind of things and it still stands for anybody who goes and sees it realizes it's it's all about the interior spaces and the light and the sequence of movement because there's nothing on the outside and it's buried in the ground it comes up in five lenses in the landscape so but it works as a public space - at night it's open it's a sculpture garden people you know walk their dogs they jog through it's a very porous and open kind of place all of my architecture from the very beginning has golden section ratio you know something I really believe that's perfect you know what's wrong with it's in nature it's in the nautilus shell it's in the solar wind it's everywhere so like I I worked with that since my father's house that's probably the only thing that connects every single building we've ever done so but what happens is you have a concept but then you go inside of it you try to understand what the proportions are how do you make these great proportions you start using the relationship of the golden section and you start thinking about sequence of movement through so there's no plans and that's just that's the way I work I'm working from the inside and then come to the outside afterwards and that's the same thing we did in Helsinki the interior perspectives of the competition were done before the outside forum was settled and to larkey oh the director in Helsinki she said well as soon as I saw those watercolors of those interior spaces I knew that was that's what we needed you

Channel: Louisiana Channel

Views: 67,847

Rating: 4.9534049 out of 5

Keywords: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum, art, Steven Holl (Architect), architecture, organic

Id: u4xoohJvNvs

Length: 12min 7sec (727 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 06 2015