Steven Holl: Written in Water [Hardcover]

Steven Holl (Author), Lars Müller (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2002

This is the first publication of Steven Holls legendary watercolors. Built as diary, the 365 watercolors represent the creative process of this famous and influential American Architect. The watercolors show the highhly individual methode of Steven Holl, developed over many years and containing first ideas and scetches of all major buildings and competition projects. Holl is know for his sculptural architecture and his genuine use of light. Both qualities which meet the characteristics of the watercolor-technique.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Born in 1947 in Washington State and raised in the cloudy Pacific Northwest, Steven Holl designs understated buildings that traffic in beauty and illumination. His first structure was a 400-square foot sculpture studio and pool house built in 1980 in New York. Since then, he has gone on to design dozens of award-winning buildings for university campuses and urban settings in the United States, Finland, and Japan, including a new wing for the School of Architecture at Pratt Institute in New York; Void Space/Hinged Space Housing in Fukuoka, Japan; Kiasma, the Helsinki contemporary art museum for which he received the Alvar Aalto Medal from the Finnish Association of Architects; and his famous Chapel of Saint Ignatius at Seattle University. Holl currently lives and works in New York, where he is a professor of architecture at Columbia University. His most recent project is a major addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, scheduled for completion in 2004.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Lars Müller Publishers; 1 edition (May 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 390707887X
• ISBN-13: 978-3907078877
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 5.1 x 2.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,658,529 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars wow, October 11, 2010

By 

Joong Won Lee "Joongwon" (Cambridge, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Steven Holl: Written in Water (Hardcover)

Steven Holl is an awesome speaker, prolific writer, and a great material composer.
Architects around the world were surprised to hear his lecture, read his books, and
experience his works. Steven Holl, a man from Seattle, exercises the Genius Loci of the city.

After the daily ritual rain, the shafts of light-columns between dense clouds illuminate
that great water surfaces of Puget Sound. It comes as a no surprise, when young, that he was
completely mesmerized in the Pantheon, Rome.

On that particular rainy day when the droplets of water fell through the oculus of the semi sphere
ceiling and when shafts of light fell through the apex of the dome he couldn't resist but take off his shoes,
as if Moses did in front of burning bush at Mt. Sinai.

That day, that experience consummates to his architectural philosophy and becames the keystone of his later practice.
His architecture afterwards seeks and explores the greatest themes in architecture, the water and the light.
It comes as a no surprise, for a reader, why Holl uses watercoloring as his medium.
He literally designs light with watercoloring.

Take Atkins Museum for example in the book, his Noguchi-like, light boxes not only illuminates
exhibition space below, but also functions as a landscape element. He didn't put just another glass box
next to the existing Beaux-Arts building, instead, he shattered the
monolithic box into pieces to better the existing institution.

In the series of watercoloring of Atkins, one is fascinated at the focus of his design intentions.
He draws critical section at the light box, he sketches promenade along the light box, and he morphs
the shape of the light boxes to see what best works for the landscape.

We know as architects that sometimes a page of well thought out drawing can be more telling than one
hundred pages of illustrating words. Holl's drawings are like that. His drawings calls the reader for a
personal invitation. I enjoyed reviewing his drawings a lot, particularly on a rainy weekends by myself
in the office over a cup of coffee.

5.0 out of 5 stars Written in Water - The Review, July 11, 2009

By 

C. Ellinwood (Santa Monica, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Steven Holl: Written in Water (Hardcover)

An amazing compilation of Holl's watercolors. Inspiring for an aspiring architect, I had coveted this book for a long time. I see this book as a resource to be visited from time to time when in need of motivation or a reminder of how poetry can be translated into architecture.