TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/032089/03208900.001

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 106 lines

DESIGN, Page 75

A Dreamer Who Is Fuzzy About the Details

With a new show at MOMA, Steven Holl's influence grows

By Kurt Andersen


    When curators at New York City's Museum of Modern Art were
preparing the current exhibit of the work of Steven Holl, the
architect did not just settle back and wallow in the flattery of
the high Establishment. Instead, Holl -- who is opinionated,
uncompromising and, concerning architectural details, fussy to the
point of fanaticism -- turned opinionated, uncompromising and
fussy.

    He demanded that MOMA mount only black-and-white photographs
of his work because he believes color photos encourage an
appreciation of the merely picturesque in architecture. He insisted
that some of the walls of the gallery be covered with rough
plaster, like many of Holl's own interiors. And he demanded that
certain salient details -- a basswood-and-airplane silk screen from
a Manhattan apartment, for instance -- be built right into the
exhibit's walls. Fortunately, the museum indulged him: the result
(on display together with a handsome exhibit of Emilio Ambasz
buildings) is the liveliest MOMA architectural show in years and
palpable evidence that Holl, at 41, is one of the most influential
younger architects in America today.

    Since he has completed only a dozen architectural works, Holl
is best known for the dinner plates and candlesticks he designed
for the upscale marketers Swid Powell. But in his buildings he has
found a way out of architecture's tired to-and-fro between
caricature modernism (the neurotic Rubik's Cubes of the
deconstructivists) and caricature classicism (the pretty
confections of the postmodernists). His best work combines virtues
of 1920s European rigor and 1980s American charm, of Gropius and
Graves. His designs tend toward the ascetic, and he is determined
to invent, not simply revive old styles.

    Yet Holl does not compulsively reject history. His basic forms
are familiar. He makes roofs that are variously hipped, pyramidal
and barrel-vaulted. He is drawn to earthen materials -- stucco,
concrete, sandblasted glass, stone -- and virtuoso artisanship.
Holl is either a modern architect with recherche tastes or an
old-fashioned architect with modern instincts.

    While he calls himself a modernist, Holl has conscientiously
learned backward-looking lessons about building scale. "Buildings
in general are too big," he says. "I'm happy doing houses and
buildings a bit bigger than houses." The two largest projects Holl
has designed, a planned addition to the University of
Minnesota/Twin Cities School of Architecture and a West Berlin
library extension, would each be only about a tenth as big as a
modest skyscraper.

    Apart from his philosophical disinclination to build behemoths,
it is hard to imagine Holl producing anything so large that he
could not personally fret over every detail. The walls he designed
for one apartment, for instance, tilt for arcane aesthetic reasons
at precisely 4 degrees. Given the chance, Holl designs not just a
building but also its custom chairs, custom lighting fixtures,
custom rugs, custom windows and custom door handles. His signature
gesture, geometric figures imprinted onto everything from windows
to tableware in a kind of new-age homage to Johannes Kepler, can
seem the impulse of a meticulous craftsman, not a large-scale form
giver.

    His small buildings do not disappoint. They are lyrical,
thoughtful and like no others. The down-to-earth materials are
juxtaposed thrillingly with luxe: a pool house and sculpture studio
in suburban New York is a cube of stucco-covered concrete block,
but inside are deep green marble counters and a honed white marble
floor. For a handsome safe-deposit facility in New Jersey, Holl
made the facade a grave, quasi-industrial grid, but on the inside
were elegant wall sconces and depictions of the nine planets.

    Holl's big break could come next month if he gets the go-ahead
to build his design for the new West Berlin library. It looks to
be a handsome, modernist masterwork, more complicated by far than
anything Holl has built. The new complex is to be a collage of
bridge, tower, ramps and asymmetrical boxes that surround and
gracefully subsume the existing library. The three-story-high wall
of Holl's main reading room would be a grand, Kandinskyesque mosaic
that the architect compares to stained glass in Gothic cathedrals,
thick sheets of clear and amber glass crisscrossed at wild angles
by a scribbly latticework of steel mullions (no cool, formulaic
rectilinearity for Holl). The children's wing is to be sheathed
entirely in translucent glass.

    At Seaside, the architecturally innovative community in the
Florida panhandle, finishing touches are just being put on Holl's
retail-office-residential complex, the town's biggest, strangest
building. There are eight apartments, five of them identically Mod
duplexes facing west (for sunset-loving partyers) and three quirky
units facing east for less sociable residents -- in Holl's scheme,
a poet, a musician and a mathematician. As ever, every detail is
an opportunity to fiddle: in the mathematician's rooms, the winding
staircase is subtly warped.

    Holl runs his nine-person office in Manhattan like a monastery.
And he can be prickly. Although Seaside is his greatest patron so
far, Holl disparages the town's architectural code, which calls for
old-fashioned roofs and windows. "Why legislate window proportions
and roof slopes?" he snaps. And he only grudgingly acknowledges the
work that has given him his widest visibility, the Swid Powell
objects. "It's too much about selling," Holl says, "and not enough
about ideas and hopes and dreams." Coming from lesser architects,
such a pronouncement could seem disingenuous. But Holl's work,
built and unbuilt, is exceptionally dense with original ideas,
salutary hopes and fetching dreams. He practices what he preaches.