Vladimir Paperny

Holl of Fame
The Russian version of the article was published in Architectural Digest Russia.

Steven Holl and Solange Fabio at Kazimir

Malevich's grave in Nemchinivka near Moscow.
2000 Vladislav Kirpichev

Steven Holl and Solange Fabio at Kazimir

Malevich's grave in Nemchinivka near Moscow.
2000 Vladislav Kirpichev

Steven Holl in his office. 2005 Vladimir Paperny.

Steven Holl in his office. 2005 Vladimir Paperny.

Steven Holl in his office. 2005 Vladimir Paperny.

Chapel of St. Ignatius, Seattle, WA. Paul

Warchol

Kiasma Museum, Helsinki, Finland. Paul

Warchol

Kiasma Museum, Helsinki, Finland. Paul

Warchol

Sarphatistraat Offices, Amsterdam, The

Netherlands, Paul Warchol

Sarphatistraat Offices, Amsterdam, The

Netherlands, Paul Warchol

Architect Steven Holl owes his family happiness to the Russian avant-garde. He met his wife,
Brazilian artist Solange Fabio, in New York at the Paula Cooper Gallery. "Who is your favorite
artist?" he asked about two minutes into their acquaintance. "Malevich," she said, without
thinking.
"Can you imagine, Malevich," Holl says to me, "he's my favorite artist; he has influenced all my
work." We are sitting in his office in New York, a former photography studio with a view of
railroad tracks. There is wet snow outside. I made my way here through knee-deep slush and
road salt, and only now I'm beginning to warm up a little.
Holl continues, "We are so different. I'm from the north, from Seattle. She's from Brazil. I look
out the windowwet snow, an ideal day for Scandinavian melancholy, and she sings and dances:
Brazil, Brazil. We found each other through Malevich. A Russian artist untied North and South
America."
Two years ago Steven and Solange decided to visit Moscow and sent an e-mail to architects Vlad
and Ludmila Kirpichev, "We want to visit Malevich's grave." The answer, "His grave is
somewhere in Nemchinovka, but no one knows exactly where." Steven did not give up, "Then
we'll go to Nemchinovka and look for it." They wrote back, " To go to Nemchinovka is to go
nowhere." Steven replied, " We want to go nowhere, we want to go to Nemchinovka."
"The first thing Steven said at the airport was, 'Let's head for the Malevich museum.'" Vlad
Kirpichev recalls, "We told him there was no such place. 'Then let's go to the Lissitzky museum.'
But that does not exist either, 'Fine, then let's do the Rodchenko museum.' When we explained
that there was no Rodchenko museum he got angry. 'You guys just dont know.'"
"They ended up getting a car," Steven recalls, "and we went to Nemchinovka. It turns out that
they had never been in Nemchinovka, these Russian architects. We drive past many very bad
postmodernist dachas and wound up on Malevich Street. There's a white cube at the end of the
street: ' Placed here by the daughter of Malevich in 1988, this approximately where my father
was buried.' I say to Ludmila and Vlad, 'There, you see, you simply don't know. Now let's find
Malevich's house.' They say, 'Nothing remains of it. Let's go home.' Fifteen minutes later we find

a house with a memorial plaque: 'Malevich lived here." And this old lady tells us, 'You are the
first foreigners to have come here.' You understand, we were the first. Ever."
"Most architects I interviewed," I observe, "have some sort of drama: Meier is accused of
plagiarizing himself; Gehry is accused of being a show-off; Venturi is said to be fixated on old
ideas. You don't seem to have any drama, everybody just loves your work."
"I have no drama?" Holl interrupts indignantly, "Everyone you mentioned came from blue-blood
families, they all graduated from Yale and other ivy-league schools. I was born in Bremerton,
Washington, a military town with a population of thirty thousand. So imagine someone grown up
in that town, they probably never saw a piece of architecture, right? And then I went to Rome.
This is what saved me. I lived in Rome behind the Pantheon, and I became interested in what
architecture could be, what amazing series of examples of how exciting it could be. I travel
Europe for years, visiting all Le Corbusier's buildings Ronchamp, La Tourette and I finally
went to the Architecture Association in London, studying with Elia Zenghelis, Rem Koolhaas.
Zaha Hadid was also a student there. In 1977 I came to New York and opened a studio. My first
loft overlooking the cemetery on the 21st Street and 6th Avenue I had for 10 years for 250 dollars
a month."
"Is that all," I ask in amazement. It seems impossibly low for that part of New York.
"I know; it was like having a grant. I slept on a plywood shelf over the entrance, and no one
knew I lived there. And I went to YMCA everyday to work out and take a shower there was
no hot water in my loft. I didn't have a single employee for fifteen years, nor did I have a single
client; I supported myself by teaching. That lasted until 1993, when I won the competition for
Kiasma museum in Helsinki. That was just twelve years ago. And you say there is no drama!"
Robert Venturi, who visited Italy a few years before Holl, returned with anti-modernist theories,
which he laid out in his book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. His ideas are the
cardinal opposite of Holl's.
"You know, when that book came out," Steven says, "I was in my first year of architecture
school. My professor gave me that book, I read it and I rejected it. Right then in 1967. I said, 'I
am interested in the opposite of this, I am interested in concept, clarity and a simple connection
between concept and clarity. I am not interested in complexity and contradiction.' I had an
exhibit in Vienna. The organizers asked me to think up a name that would express the essence of
my work. I said, 'Idea and Phenomenon.' That's my method, the phenomenological approach to
architecture."
It may sound pretentious, but Steven gives this notion a specific meaning. It all begins with the
idea, like the plot of a novel. Realizing the idea and its verification come through the experience
of architecturewhat you feel walking through the building; how your body moves; how it
interacts with other bodies; the play of light, perspective, sound and smell. This entire
phenomenological layer must come from the main idea.
"What is the main idea? Is it something like, 'I'm for world peace'?"

"The idea must be specific. Do you know about Menger's sponge?"

In fact I do. Austrian mathematician Karl Menger conceived a three-dimensional object with an
infinitely large surface and no volume. You take a cube, imagining that it consists of twentyseven smaller cubes, remove seven cubes from the center, then repeat the operation for each of
the smaller cubes an infinite number of times. The surface will thus grow, the volume shrink. The
result is Menger's sponge.
Holl is taken with the idea of porous architecture. He understands porosity in the both physical
and the social sense as the capacity for penetration. When he built the student dormitory at MIT
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he treated the parallelepiped of the building in roughly the same
manner as Menger with his cubepulling out bits until it started to look like a sponge.
"The porosity was first an urban idea, an idea of porous urban field that would connect the
landscape of the playing field to Cambridgeport. Then it was a structural idea the porosity of
concrete, each room has nine windows and they all can be opened. But then there is social
porosity that mixes the division of the ten houses inside with these drilled down spaces. In my
thinking there are always links to energizing the social fabric of what we are working on."
"That's lovely, but we all know the kinds of failures that have resulted when architects have tried
to transform architecture into a vehicle for social engineering: for example, the infamous PruittIgoe complex in St. Louis. Yamasaki also tried to create public space there, but instead it became
into a drug den. Where is the guarantee that this won't happen at MIT?"
"I thing postmodernism fails much more miserably that Yamasaki's Pruit-Igoe. The way they
cynically send a message to our youth that there is no future, it was better in the past.
Postmodern buildings are emblems of cynicism and they are standing in the cores of our cities.
Charles Jencks book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture begins with the destruction of
Pruit-Igoe as the reason we should do that god-awful pastiche, historical draperies over
contemporary buildings. The cure is worse than the original problem. Jencks is an -ism
manufacturer. Now he has something he calls iconism. Thats all about the Bilbao effect. To
build these big bulbous titanium-clad empty gestures. But a building must be more interesting
inside than outside, as it was with Louis Kahn, Corbusier, Loos, and to some extent Mies van der
Rohe."
"Frank Gehry would not pass your test?"
"No, and not just him. We have a basic cultural problem with architecture."
"Venturi separated buildings into 'ducks' (highly sculptural forms) and 'decorated sheds.' Do you
build 'ducks'?"
"Why would I frame myself in his argument of 1966? All these 'ducks' have long ago gone
extinct. By the way, the other day saw a headline in the 'New York Times' that I still cannot get
out of my mind. It was something about the bird flu from Asia: 'Two Dead Ducks Found in Ding
Dang'."

Steven likes this phrase so much he repeats it several times with varying intonations. What it
means he does not know but the phase does have a certain hypnotic effect. Perhaps it reminds
him of Venturi's dead "ducks?" Is this the ritual dance of the victor?
In spite of all the science in his theories, Holl is really a poet. He is a person with a rarefied sense
of the world, sensitive to all aspects of his surroundings. This is why it is so interesting to be in
his buildings. He is not a slave to one idea. Menger's sponge is just one of hundreds of his
concepts, although transparency and openness are the hallmarks of many of them.
I go back out onto the street. The snow has stopped; the sun is shining. Scandinavian melancholy
has changed before my eyes into Brazilian rhythm. I feel like I've been at the place where today's
most interesting architecture is being created.
12.09.2005