Steven Holl: Making Architecture
Steven Holl: Making Architecture is an exhibition examining the work of one of the world’s foremost architects. Architect Steven Holl has realized numerous commissions from private houses to major urban projects. Despite the demands of a highly successful office, he has managed to maintain the integrity and quality of his work by resisting corporatization. His practice reveals an inextricable link between his art and architecture. Holl draws with watercolors everyday, a solitary and hermetic practice from which each of his projects emerges. He also develops conceptual ideas in sculpture. Steven Holl: Making Architecture will reveal Holl’s intricate and distinctive process of making architecture through approximately one hundred models and related sketches and other studies created for nine recent projects, among them the Arts Building at Franklin and Marshall College, Pennsylvania; The Kennedy Center Expansion, Washington D.C.; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Maggie’s Cancer Care Center in London.
Steven Holl has realized numerous commissions from private houses to major urban projects. Despite the demands of a highly successful office, he has managed to maintain the integrity and quality of his work by resisting corporatization. His practice reveals an inextricable link between his art and architecture. Holl draws with watercolors every day, a solitary and hermetic practice from which each of his projects emerges. He also develops conceptual ideas in sculpture.
This exhibition, part of the Dorsky Museum’s “Hudson Valley Master’s Series” will reveal Holl’s intricate and distinctive process of making architecture through approximately one hundred models and related sketches and other studies created for nine recent projects, among them the Arts Building at Franklin and Marshall College, Pennsylvania; The Kennedy Center Expansion, Washington D.C.; and Maggie’s Cancer Care Center in London. Despite their broad geographic range, extending across four continents, and their programmatic diversity from healthcare facilities to libraries, art centers and museums, each of them involves the thinking-making coupling of well-functioning architecture.
The exhibition considers three distinguishing aspects of how Holl works. Thinking focuses on how watercolor drawings, small exploratory models, and material fragments generate the ideas and thought that ground each project. Building reveals the process of making architecture through models, sculpture, and in photographs taken during the actual construction process as the particular qualities of space, light and materials emerge. Reflecting brings Holl’s ideas into sharp focus in a selection of digital films and through his writings and writings about him. This section also considers the process of making in objects that are
microcosms of Holl’s thought.
