Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/496780
178 CULTURED The unusual roof forms act as "wedges of light," says Holl. "One of the original ideas was the notion of the big Texas sky, and these clouds are so large that somehow they come down and create these concave openings. Then that light just moves across the inside of these curved linear surfaces. I call it a luminous canopy." Holl and his team favor buildings that give off a glow at night, as he demonstrated in perhaps his signature project: the Bloch Building for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, completed in 2007 and widely seen as one of the most successful museum additions of the decade. The approved plan for the future Queens Library at Hunter's Point in New York City is a lantern-like structure on the East River in Queens that looks at Manhattan. Diagonal cuts in the façade reveal the staircase circulation so that library users can see out and light can escape. Holl's buildings are rarely solid forms—all are penetrated and perforated in some meaningful way. "We see space and special volume as a material, so we don't design buildings as objects," says Chris McVoy, the firm's senior partner. "We design buildings as a series of spaces, both interior and exterior. The void is as important as the solid." In the design for the Mumbai City Museum, one of several Holl's far-flung projects due to be completed in the next couple of years, the sensuous red sandstone of the exterior appears to have been dramatically scooped out in various parts. The award-winning 2002 Simmons Hall at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, resembles a computer chip, with regular rows of square windows and large, cube-shaped voids cut out of the rectangular building. From these gestures of "porosity," views were opened up, terraces created and air flow maximized. A sense of movement is key for Holl. Goethe famously said that architecture is frozen music, and while many architects have cited the connection, including Frank Gehry, Holl really lives it—his New York office features a piano. "The thing about music is it has time," says McVoy. "And it's immersive and spatial." Music certainly informs the addition that Holl and his team have designed for the first-ever major addition to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., due in 2017. The design includes a pavilion space for more intimate concerts. "You don't read it as a building mass," says McVoy of the addition, which finds a new way to connect the nation's performing arts center to the Potomac River and the rest of the city. "It feels like a series of landscaped terraces." The project will achieve what Edward Durrell's initial design for the stone building aimed to do more than 50 years ago. That kind of respect for context has been a constant for Holl over the decades. "I wrote a manifesto in 1989 called 'Anchoring,'" he says. "The site and circumstances are the beginnings of an architectural work. You build meaning into the site. To me, that mission is what we do." A watercolor rendering of the Glassell School of Art, 2014 PHOTOS COURTESY OF STEVEN HOLL ARCHITECTS