Word: hollings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...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...
...MOMA show marks the growing influence of Steven Holl, 41, whose ascetic yet lyrical architecture points a way out of the modernism-classicism standoff...