The Architects Series Ep. 14 - A documentary on: Steven Holl Architects

[Music] one of the great things about being an architect is that you give a gift of a building like this that's open to the public all the time [Music] and it keeps giving you back your whole life [Music] you don't have to create so many it's it's about that that building brings a spiritual space to a lot of people [Music] you know i grew up in manchester washington a small town we we we'd go to the to the beach all the time and and we still have the cabin in front of where my my parents house the first house i ever built that was it was built in 1975 and there's a cabin there and there are row boats that we use right and in a row boat the bow is here and you sit in the middle and you pull the oars like that right so you're pulling and the boat is going this way so you never can see where you're going and i in my first drawings for the sokolov house and the bronx gymnasium bridge there are there this picture of this robot guy so andrew mcnair and i said andrew andrew says to me what's that about i said oh that's me you know growing up growing in manchester washington you can never actually see where you're going you can only see where you've been [Music] that has to go all the way back to bremerton washington you know when i was like seven seven years old with my brother we're making uh clubhouses in the backyard at 2021 13th street it's a crummy little town hard scrabble town no architects in that town only 30 000 people so but i loved to make things and we were making a you know a game we call property little roads and little buildings and then we began to build clubhouses and at one point we had a a two-story tree house and we had a another you know kind of clubhouse that had a kind of balcony in it and then we had an underground clubhouse where we dug a hole and we put logs in a rug and then put dirt on top of it and it's funny because when i began to teach at columbia university the first year they i took over the first year program i think it was 1986 with kenneth frampton and i rewrote the first and i said they're there there are four kinds of architecture under the ground in the ground on the ground and over the ground and just a few years ago it started to occur to me that i was doing that at seven years old so maybe it was a kind of i never thought that i would do anything else it's not like i decided when we submitted the kiasma museum it was 1993 i had moved the office to a space like this too big for me too expensive and a couple of projects that we thought we were going to get we didn't get so i had reduced the office to two people or three people whatever i hadn't paid the rent in four months i maxed out my credit cards we were broke i went to teach at the burlaga institute and i said to herman hertzberger i said herman you got to give me two classes because one class is only three thousand dollars i need six thousand dollars to pay my rent and you know that's for one month and i got a phone call from the new from new york well we we found out about the uh the helsinki competition you want to hear the news you want to hear the good news first or the bad news is that give me the bad news first they said the 26 000 that they promised us because of the evaluation of the fin mark is only going to be 18 thousand dollars i said well what's the good news the good news is we won the competition and that was the turning point of my office because that that that competition then after that i had four people five people and we built the building opened in 98. without winning that competition i might just just be a teacher that did a couple dress shops in new york that'd be it it was a transformative moment for sure luckily enough yeah i think luck is part of it you know it's not although you know there were 417 entries and we we won it so it was a good design but luck luck is part of it too i mean the competition you know we've done over 150 competitions and we've maybe we won one in 25 and then the problem is some of those times they never get built like in mumbai or qingdao or berlin the one i won in berlin in 1989 so you can it's hard enough to win and then you can win and it doesn't get built so this is you have to be very lucky that it gets built you know in order to make that that leap i'm working with an idea that drives the design a central concept that holds all the manifold parts and pieces together and that's not easy to come by sometime it takes weeks sometimes you can get the idea right right away and then that central concept relates to the site to the program to the you know to all the spaces and makes the building unique i mean i just came back from the chapel of saint ignatius you know and there was a drawing you know seven bottles of light in a stone box it was about saint ignatius about the religious experience in space and the building's 20 years old and it's really beautiful but the the concept the concept drawing gives an order to the process and then everybody buys into it and we all work to try to get that concept to happen another thing that happens when you have something as clear as seven bottles of light in a stone box when people try to take things out the other people sometimes the client will stand in and say wait a minute so there was a physical planning director who said uh it's over budget we're gonna take three of the bottles out and then the campus ministry stepped in and said wait a minute you can't take you can't take some of the bottles of light out there are seven days there are seven bottles of light in stephen's concept you can't change that and so we shrunk the building footprint a little bit but we kept the concept and and that's you know i mean that's how i've been working ever since i started that that there should be a meaningful concept that drives the design i don't believe that that intellectual there's an intellectual idea but i don't believe that's the most important part the most important part is the experience and i wrote a a text called questions of perception a phenomenology of architecture in 1993 it's still a valid book for me it speaks about the the actual experience of the body moving through space seeing the light the color the tactility the the the the smell the sound that's the meaning that's visceral that anybody can get a five-year-old a two-year-old whatever [Music] i still get emails from people who visit the chapel that that are very moved by the light and the space you know i mean i i think one of the great things about being an architect is that you give a gift of a building like this that's open to the public all the time the center of this campus you know you and that's 20 years ago and it keeps giving you back your whole life so you know in fact you don't have to create so many it's it's about that that building brings a spiritual space to a lot of people and it will continue it's in perfect condition maybe it's going to las i don't know how many years it's the center of the campus so i think architecture is a form of art and that message is conveyed by this this work if you can leave it in a way and i think that that that continues you know i get every once in a while i get some emails from mit at our simmons hall dormitory somebody you know wrote a piece of music oh spongy sponge they wrote an opera about the sponge building it's humorous but the students they get it you know that's that's a that's a special piece of architecture so yeah no i think it's uh that's exciting that's an ex that's one of the greatest honors of being an architect if you can leave a good building that carries on the message if you want to find the intellectual meaning the idea that drives the design that's up to you but it's got to work at the phenomenological level to be a success so i'm not a conceptual artist that way you know there's a movement of conceptual art that the idea is enough to me it's a force that holds the meaning but the real test is in the space and the light and the material so my heroes are people that care deeply about that like carlos scarpa you know or sigurd leverance or louis khan adolf los or laker bouzier you go and visit any building by laker bouzier you see the detail mean something i know the whole story because jose uberee who's still alive great friend of mine was working on the working drawing he was doing the drawings in the studio and there were only six people in his studio so i think today what's what's wrong with architecture is it became too corporate you know the idea that you have to have 250 people or 300 people or whatever that that's not a value about architecture that's a business value it's a corporate value and that's what's kind of gone wrong with architecture because you cannot be working with 300 people and be passionate about how the joints come together and the details too many miles to feed you know so i think this is a sad moment in architecture because there are a few only a few firms that are working with the kind of idealism i was just with alvaro cesa last july in porto and i said alvaro how many people in this studio nine nine fantastic you know what zaha zaha was a very close friend of mine she came to our apartment about two weeks before she died she wasn't even sick she brought my daughter my i have a three-year-old daughter a little issy miyake dress and she said to me i just wish i could go away with five people and have my own you know do my own thing she didn't like that big office in a way that might be what killed her it was just too much the burden of all the you know all the forces that that are at play so i think architecture it comes down to yeah it comes down to the detail to the material to the light to the space to the phenomena of the experience it's not about the size of the building or the size of the firm [Music] hi i'm carolina so my name is magdalena i'm an assistant project architect is the lead architect and i take great responsibility for managing a lot of the work i've been at stephen hall for about four years now and i've been working for stephen hall architects for the past six and a half years and i'm working on the franklin and marshall college project in lancaster pennsylvania i've been working on the expansion of the kennedy center for the performing arts in washington dc for the past five and we're opening the project in two months so that's a big milestone and it's a wonderful project [Music] so i started working for stephen hall architects shortly after graduating from the graduate school of design at harvard so this in a way has been my first my first job which has been a really challenging but also a wonderful place um to work i always wanted to work here when i was in school um i always read steven's books and and his watercolors and kind of really inspired by the way he plays with light and and no space is the same you know all other architects maybe their architecture looks the same and here every again every building is unique to the conditions of the project and you know the story behind it and the site so i find that really compelling to work and you learn with every project you work on [Music] parallax i love parallax that was i read that my last year in college and it really inspired my thesis yeah how he talks about time and space and light that was that's my favorite it's an inspiring place to work i think as a young designer that is looking for a substantial opportunity to grow as an architect and to realize who they are as an architect i think that's a it's a beautiful place to start your career at and to build a substantial part of your of your portfolio and yeah i mean stephen was my idol in school so here i am very very happy [Music] it's not really two offices it's one office you know like i'm making on these watercolor pads the drawing for the building okay and there's there's a carrying out office in beijing 10 people and there's all this here but i don't see it as two offices because first of all i right now i have we have such great skypes that i i don't have to go there all the time when i when we first started i had to travel to china more often now i can make we just had a skype a three-way skype this morning shenzhen beijing new york it lasted two hours saved me a trip clients happy so and i found in china great clients who wanted to build exactly what i imagined and without changing anything arata isasaki appointed a museum nanjing museum sifang museum which is just had an exhibition of my work and i was just there again in in in march and and that was my first project in china and when i when i was on site we got this message uh to go to beijing to do eight towers and i thought ah this is crazy what's this about and i told him to send a send us a ticket and then we flew on their ticket they picked us up in a limo took us you know and uh they wanted us to do you know they wanted us to do a facade on this zoning envelope of these eight towers and i said i'm not interested but i will make a vision for you and this was right before the beijing olympics so i said give me you know three months and you know so many dollars and i'll make a vision a real vision for this project it's eight towers they wanted to save some industrial thing in the middle which was not worth saving and then we really made a vision and i i thought i don't care you know whether they ever build this i want to make it something about you know all geothermally heated and cooled you know the towers are connected by bridges with programs there's a big water garden a cinema floating in it oh the whole thing and so we presented to them and there was silence you know i thought it's over you know they're never going to do this i didn't do what they asked me to and then we got an email from them your vision greatly exceeds our budget however we're raising our budget to build your vision don't take anything out which was amazing i mean that's china i opened an office only to build that project that was the only reason to make sure the details are good i didn't try to get work i wasn't going out after work [Music] in fukuoka i was invited you know to to make a 30 unit apartment building and i i was very nervous because i'd never worked in asia before uh you know it was kind of frightening proposition how do you control the uh what's going to happen so i wanted to expose this right from the beginning i said i want to expose this structure somehow and make that so they can't take that away or change it so i was thinking of creating like zen-like space between the apartments and and have water gardens that would reflect sunlight back up into the interiors and then i i thought it's japan what can we do and instead of just you know soji screens and fasumi instead of those sliding walls pivoting walls so i said hinged space the idea that you know i mean you can see that that's a little bit of that i'm still carrying on that idea of big walls that pivot and change the spaces and there are 30 apartments in that building and they're all different because of the hinged space and and you can reconfi you can actually erase a bedroom by moving two walls open it up or make a bedroom it was a very yeah it was a very successful idea the building is you know super successful and nowadays it's occupied mostly by interior designers and architects that you know bought the spaces over the years resold them and bought them or whatever and uh yeah i know i think those two ideas were the the couple of ideas that you know that gave the direction of that design i i i i i i haven't been back i want to go back there and visit that particular building again you know because it's it's like one of the first major buildings 1992. [Music] maggie's cancer care center in london i'm very proud of that building music is a kind of healing a healing condition for people with terminal cancer and so i thought ah let's connect to to you know that early music that's of that old saint bart's cathedral where they had music that was shape notes written by monks before musical notation it dates from the 12th century so then i began to think about that and then i thought how can i bring that to bear and then we had this idea of a musical staff that wraps the building and then these colored pieces of what i call shape notes are in this new material called okalux where we developed with the company in germany a kind of new kind of stained glass really it's a colored a uv protected color film between two layers of super insulated ecological material in this glass sandwich and it's a beautiful thing it's like a mark rothko you know kind of watercolor kind of blurry color and it lights up at night and glows out and then during the day it's very subdued but when you're inside the glow is on the inside and then there was how do you put this idea together and so that we had the idea that the structure would be like a hand you know the beginning of the staff is basically five lines like the hand and that that structure would be exposed in concrete and then inside of that would be a bamboo basket a kind of comforting you know natural bamboo with no no varnish on it just natural bamboo and that was those those that there's one drawing that shows these three things coming together to form the central idea [Music] every project is different you know i mean the one that we just won in ostrava for the concert hall was the perfect acoustic instrument in its case and there's an old building the the house of culture and you were to add a 1 300 seat concert hall to this and i got up one morning and i made a single sketch that we won't touch the old building or jump over it because this is the side of the promenade but it's noisy that's the side of the park that's where we should be putting the concert hall where it's quiet and you can have a view to the park so i said don't touch the old hall just have an escalator that goes up and then jump over it and my wife demetra said i made the sketch i always work in the morning on my watercolors from like six o'clock until you know sort of 8 30. i brought you know did breakfast i brought this sketch and she said it's a winning idea and we never budged from that and we won and we just found out we won on the fourth of july so i'm very excited about that because we teach a class called the architectonics of music so i'm always interested that there's a analogy between music and architecture so as we develop this i want to i want to work on the interior of the hall in relation to janocheck yanachek's great musical concepts somehow to have this development of this 1300 seat hall reflect some of his thoughts and music you know you someone says what do you want to do what if you could just choose anything i i always thought i would like to do a concert hall so this is a great moment in these competitions [Music] i love to paint i would you know i i make paintings just pure watercolor paintings just for the sake of making paintings i think i could have i could have been a painter there's something really beautiful about sitting down with a white sheet of paper and beginning to work not quite knowing what you're going to make and having something that you really get excited about i actually just had that feeling this morning i got up the air conditioning is not working in our apartment so i was kind of cranky i was sweating it was like six o'clock i'm working on this astrophysics building in toronto i'm kind of angry because the site is too small so i just said i gotta i gotta draw something and i began to draw this thing and i said oh yeah and i started to have then i started i looked up astrophysics and i was learning that all stellar movement is characterized by curvilinear and anyway i just i i i shocked myself into being being excited about what i was making so that that's a very difficult thing to un to explain but that's why i love to paint every day i never miss a day without one or two paintings that i make and in the summertime many more than that so there's over like 30 000 i have an archive with you know all these paintings and drawings every building that i ever made has a series of watercolors that go first before the before the building i teach i've been a professor for over 25 years at columbia university so my writing is also something i share with my students and it's a way for me to raise the bar as high as i can raise it you know for myself like a challenge anchoring 1989 30 years it's been important for me because i can say what what i'm intending in an overall way you know and uh yeah it's a challenge that i gave i gave myself and uh they're not published you know there's 3 000 copies that's it it's not like i'm trying to get work from it or something like that not at all no it's about trying to you know decide what it is you're really trying to aim at what is the what is the what are the core aims and as you develop over the years i've found they don't my all the things that i said in anchoring i still believe in but then there are other levels of thinking that you can develop further and also you have other work so you need to speak to the the other work we're publishing the fifth in that series anchoring intertwining the house urbanisms and this is called compression and i wrote a text called architecture activating the brain because i was i was giving a lecture at the salk institute about neuroscience and architecture and i was interested in these these connections and uh it's some new thinking and i was going to publish it just like a little pamphlet by itself a couple of professors came up and said no no no you must put it together with your projects because you're the only one that's doing the theoretical and building projects you have to keep you know these things together so that's then i instead of architecture activating the brain i titled this book compression and it's going to come out and it's in that same series [Music] well i think we were already we are already maxed out on the digital you know the problem with the digital is it it's too literal so you can have something that has no idea and basically no structure no interior space and you can make an image that looks like it's built and place people in front of it and whatever it can make a drawing so realistic that this is a danger in architecture because the developer can say okay i want you to do it and then there's not there's no substance there and i think that that you know that dimension is problematic i think there needs to be a an educational dimension whenever a building is built that that that the people have that have the power to build the building have to like look deeper than a a digital rendering you know so yeah that that's a that's you know we always build models we make models of our spaces and then we photograph the interiors of the models to get the light to work properly james terrell told me once he said you know the reason that these computer drawings don't work for interior light is natural light falls off a surface at the square root of the distance of the source and that you can't do in a computer you have to make a model to to make that light be the true light and you know i've always made models of the spaces and and testing the light so when we're working on a project to me natural light is really important this is the life of an interior and so we don't trust the the computer model for that [Music] it's completely the the the field of architecture has completely changed because of the digital world and as is communication as is the publishing industry thank god you still have a magazine because i don't like reading things online i mean i have to read them online but i don't like looking and i won't mention those three websites that dominate the whole architecture world now it's a there's they're not it's not thorough enough it's not deep enough and and the images stay up there for about one day and then they disappear you know i mean it's a [Music] a superficial there's a superficiality that's added to the speed which is not very i think it's not very good for thought you know architecture should be raised to the level of thought but that that's the world that we're living in and we have to you know we have to deal with it of architecture should go and visit i mean this is not my match this is a message that i think at many professors my great professor herman punt would leave the same message two things go and visit the buildings physically visit them that's when they speak to you and the second message is the interior ought to be more than what the building looks like from the outside and i can tell you in the in the work of lego bouzier or khan or adolf los the interior the interior experience is always more than what it looks like on the outside but in most of the famous architects practicing today is the reverse and i always put that up as a challenge to myself too that the interior experience must give you more than what this building gives you from the outside you know jeff kipnis was very keen on the chapel of zane in nature he says it's very homely and quite not very good looking from the outside but the inside that's fantastic and you know he's a critic so that i achieved it you know and i think that's that's a goal i think that i would say would be valid forever [Music] so [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Iris Ceramica Group

Views: 24,395

Rating: 4.9761906 out of 5

Keywords: steven holl, steven holl architects, architecture interview, architecture video

Id: ib569_71Nxk

Length: 32min 47sec (1967 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020