Steven Holl's top 10 architectures, from China to America

May 09, 2024

The possibilty of concepts and shapes to intertwine and thus contaminate each other is another pillar of Holl’s practice, who has also experimented with phenomenological translations of this figure, starting from the very archetypes of architecture such as the house. In the Y House, in the Catskill Mountains (New York State, 1997-99), contamination translates into the contamination of design languages: the steel construction, which nonetheless echoes the traditional wooden balloon frame, takes on a shape dictated by the overlapping of two different housing flows in the figure of a Y, a diviner’s rod prsenting the sleeping area on the ground floor and the living area on the first floor of its northern branch, and the exact opposite in the southern branch.

A few years earlier, one of Holl’s first large public projects, the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki (1992-1998) had already brought the figure of interweaving to an the scale of city and landscape: by collecting and overlapping the alignments of the two adjacent streets in the exact centre of the Finnish capital, the curved volumes of the building bring Eliel Saarinen’s station, Alvar Aalto’s Finlandia-Talo and the surface of Töölo Bay into a visual dialogue. As Kenneth Frampton has pointed out, Kiasma is not an architecture made of compositional elements: it is more about spatial sequences and the details that can be captured within, about the exhibition space redistributing throughout its surfaces in the figure of the “salt gallery”, just as the “ice wall” of the curved translucent glass façade does, once on the outside.