Visual Arts Building and Art Building West - A Conversation with Steven Holl & Chris McVoy

the dormitories are up in that direction and just yesterday they saw two med students with their lab coats on coming through this space they never cut through here before this is what we hope for in the future that this place becomes a kind of catalyst for people to pass through and get inspired by art I think one of the great things about the humanities and the arts is that they can stimulate chemistry science physics in different ways that we don't really realize we're fortunate enough to have Steven Holl and his team working with us over the span of now what has become the better part of two decades on to remarkable buildings but it really all began with our building West and I still recall the very first time I met Steven he came to interview for the project and his boards were shipped to Utah not to Iowa so he was going to go solo and over the course of the next 45 minutes he gave a no visuals preface to what we would have for this project and I have often told people I felt I should have paid for that and that was it the rest is magic we've got two wonderful buildings from Steven hall next to each other and it is truly difference making for an entire University of certainly school of art in art history the main architectural principles of this art building west are a planar construction that is all these spaces and forms are made out of planes so you'll have a kind of vocabulary of steel i-beams steel truss exposed in the cantilever of the library and the stair is like a small tornado of planes that sort of flies up almost as if the wind had picked it up and you can walk in different planes and meet people it's not like a stair it doesn't look like a stair it gets you from one floor to another but it's a series of planar positions that you can occupy and it's all suspended on rods from the ceiling one of the inspirations was a Picasso's guitar from 1912 I realized after we had done a bunch of models that there was a resemblance and I brought that up and they just love the idea that a building would be built inspired by the guitar of Picasso of 1912 this building has the possibility of walking on this deck and taking a shortcut to that part of the campus so the water pond that we saved this is an old quarry becomes a kind of meditative space that everybody loves to come to on campus a lot of times up there in the library this can leave it over this pond you'll see students from other disciplines all over the university because it's such a great place to study and and to reflect so at the heart of it Chris McVoy and I went after the idea of getting the students to be activated within their own departments and opening that up but also connecting to the rest of the University campus [Music] it's a great challenge to do a building next to one of your other works so after many studies we came with this complementary relationship idea where the first building is a planar building and this one in contrast is a volume that's carved out for life it's a porosity it's like walking through a sponge it's a very big square and we have these seven cuts of light and the idea of a laminar shift of the four floors so at each of the seven cuts of light you would get balconies and certain geometric energies and that was the concept you could put the entire strategy on a five by seven watercolor paper right it has an idea that's driving the design and it's a very simple idea and that and that follows through everywhere inside so the building has an integrity a deep integrity which every move that's made you feel that it's related to other moves and I think that just comes out of the process of following a concept through a little bit of rigor we shift into central nightcore to the middle of the building and brought the campus circulation right through it it I'm live in the building because of the different grades elevations of the streets that we now brought together through a ramp and the working out of these different levels started to shift the building in section the central space became energized by the diagonals of the movement up you feel that this isn't just a normal kind of an atrium space this is something dynamic and it has to do with Oly circulation connections to the different floors but also the fact that this is a migrated cut from that original concept doesn't start as an atrium at all and that's how it gets its dynamic form and this building this is the first use of a bubble slab which reduces the weight of the concrete in half mixed with geothermal heating from cooling the slabs have these big black bubbles that are cast in this lap it cuts on to come look at this look at this this amazing thing about life is once you begin to engage it in the design that the light gives you back even more than you thought so that the building is dynamic it's always changing and we're using light in maybe the most complete way we have in a building in that we have skylight top light we have diffuse light we have figured light directly and in this space there's no electric light on in fact there's no electric light on in this space of the whole day and that exterior has a stainless steel perforated screen and that screen modulates the south light into the studios because of its abstraction during the day you don't see the windows behind it so it's the four-story building becomes one volume like a sculptural volume but then at night it transforms the screens light up with these blurry rectangles that are the windows that are in seminar series and those become like these fuzzy mark rothko sort of light paintings on the facade it has this kind of animated life and this building it's a solid building but it's dynamic to life and it's flexible and our hope is that the students will try all kinds of things that we could never even anticipate in this building just yesterday a dance studio asked if they could use the forum as their classrooms it's those kinds of engagements and especially for students to have this building dedicated to questioning dedicated to the unknown that we don't empower these students that they can have an impact on the world they can change the world and that this building can be an agent for change and they can be an agent for change

Channel: University of Iowa School of Art and Art History

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Id: n67u5X0j5XI

Length: 7min 0sec (420 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 27 2017