Detail Is the Key to Architecture, Steven Holl Tells UCI Forum

New York architect Steven Holl had not been to Newport Beach for 24 years, he told his listeners at the start of a lecture Monday night in UC Irvine’s Beckman Center. His last visit was a post-high school surfing adventure during which the powerful waves pulling against his paddling suddenly made him feel his life was about to end.

The obligatory anecdotal opener was oddly revealing. In a talk filled with abstruse ideas and illustrated with slides of arresting images that sometimes had no apparent connection with architecture, Holl’s big theme was the importance of understanding the way spaces are experienced by the body.

The subject (with fellow architect Emilio Ambasz) of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York last year, Holl is considered one of America’s leading young architects. Founded in 1977, his firm has won seven citations from Progressive Architecture magazine. He is the author of “Anchoring,” a book about his work published by Princeton University Press.

“People don’t experience (architectural) plans,” Holl said. “They experience the detail.”

In the design of a clothing shop in New York, Holl said he wanted to create the maximum sense of density on the exterior and the maximum quality of lightness on the interior. For the storefront, he used cast glass (“almost a kind of ice”) and created door handles that were literally peeled out of the brass plates that form the door, revealing the thickness of the door. Inside, he used “the thinnest” countertops and reveled--in his spare, disciplined way--in the “tactility” of wire mesh.

In an attempt to explain his intellectually complex yet innately poetic approach to architecture, the 42-year-old architect rambled freely through the broader world of culture and everyday life.

One slide of a woman biting into the stone toe of a statue from a film by Luis Bunuel evoked Holl’s notion of “the physicality of material.” A captioned image of a Japanese man brushing his teeth “using only a finger and a little salt” illustrated Holl’s awareness of the forms of traditional culture when he set about designing a Japanese apartment building.

One of the guiding lights of Holl’s particular vision is the phenomenon of parallax, according to which an object appears to change position depending on where you are when you look at it. A fanciful-sounding project of his for the city of Paris involves “ultra-thin towers” that create changing spatial relationships among themselves as the viewer walks through neighboring streets.

Designing an addition to a public library in Berlin, Holl was intrigued by what he called the “browsing circuit”: the paths visitors take as they seek out books that might interest them. The ramps and asymmetrical boxes that surround the original building take the circuit into account while “shearing” the space to create a sequence of different views.

A retail-office-residential complex in Seaside, Fla., was a routine project; the problem, as Holl saw it, was “how to intensify meaning.” He imagined five of the apartment-dwellers as “boisterous types whose balconies face the (public) square, who toast the sunset and have Jacuzzis.” Each unit would be identical since the residents all drive BMWs.

But the other three residents would be “melancholic types who face the rising sun.” He conceived of one as a tragic poet whose apartment had skinny windows and a skimpy awning on the roof like a rag on a pole. Another would be a musician, and the third, a mathematician in whose living spaces “everything is slightly warped.”

Other dreamlike solutions are everywhere in Holl’s work. “Hinged spaces” in a Japanese apartment building can open up select portions of the walls to create shifting patterns of light and space. (“The sun brings (these apartments) to life, not the architect’s gesture.”) Grandest of all is a visionary plan for Phoenix, Ariz.--part of a project to reverse the creeping sprawl of cities--to “bracket the desert” with a Maginot Line of 30-foot-wide adobe-like buildings.

Holl’s talk was part of “California and Beyond; the State of Design in the ‘90s,” a series presented by the Architecture and Design Council of the Newport Harbor Art Museum. Next on the schedule is graphic designer April Greiman, speaking at UCI on March 28 at 7:30 p.m.