Steven Holl: An Idealist Architect Who Found His Best Years in China's Giant Projects

China is new, and so are its businessmen.

Steven Holl, 71, is an architect known for museums and for buildings devoted to culture and education. Most of them stand in Europe and the United States, and most run to a few thousand square meters. He has turned down a great many commercial commissions, on the view that public buildings are how an architect takes part in changing society. In China his image is entirely different. He is now called "the most popular architect in China since Rem Koolhaas" — since 2003, his firm, Steven Holl Architects (SHA), has completed more than 10 projects in the country, and the most influential of them are large commercial complexes, Raffles City Chengdu and Beijing MOMA among them, that routinely run to hundreds of thousands of square meters.

"How should we make sense of that gap?" we asked Steven Holl. He was sitting in Sifang Art Museum in Nanjing, the famous Ex of In House model behind him. Ex of In House is one of Holl's own properties, under 100 square meters, all exaggerated curves and cut planes, built to study how interior space can be sliced. Since March it has been on show as part of the exhibition "Steven Holl: Making Architecture" at Sifang Art Museum, along with his watercolor sketches, models, objects and books.

Holl brought the exhibition to China himself. He is based in New York. Last year it ran for five months at the State University of New York at New Paltz, then traveled to Seoul. In a talk on the afternoon of March 23, Holl said he thought Sifang Art Museum was the best place to show it.

He designed that museum in 2003. It is a textbook postmodern building, with a novel, bold structure that seems to work against gravity. But Holl wants to stress its sense of history: the inspiration came from ancient Chinese scroll paintings, and the materials came from the bamboo groves around it and from Nanjing's old alleyways — details that show a newcomer working to understand China and get close to it. Sifang Art Museum was Holl's first project in China, and it is still his smallest. In a video, he said the unfamiliar culture and philosophy made him "nervous" when he took it on. In places he knows well, Holl is known for taking historical context seriously and designing for the specific site; the Maggie's Centre he designed in central London in 2017 uses matte white glass on its facade, which sits in an interesting harmony with the old buildings around it.

China is new, and so are its businessmen. What came next was not quite what he expected. In 2011, at a talk at SCI-Arc, someone asked Holl what it felt like to work on projects in China. He answered: it was like setting out to catch a salmon and finding a giant octopus on the hook.

How giant? Li Hu, founding partner of OPEN Architecture, told Designer magazine in 2013 that Linked Hybrid, the Beijing MOMA project Holl began designing in 2003, was bigger than everything he had built in the previous 20 years put together. Li Hu once worked at Steven Holl Architects and ran the Linked Hybrid project.

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In 1970, at 22, Steven Holl graduated from the University of Washington's architecture program and went to Rome and London to study architecture. At the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, Zaha Hadid was his classmate. They worked together for a while and later became friends and strong rivals.

At 30, Holl moved to New York and soon set up his own firm. For a long time he could land only small private commissions, just enough to keep going. Four years later he took a teaching post at Columbia University's architecture school, where he still teaches. He has always told his students not to make too much of a project's size. To make the point he cites Ex of In, and also a student exercise he did in Washington: fitting a complete, fully equipped home inside an 8-by-8-by-8-foot cube.

The first important public building by Steven Holl Architects was Kiasma, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki. Public buildings are what make an architect's name. Holl won the design competition in 1993. He likes competitions; he treats this long-standing rule of the game in architecture as the strongest possible endorsement of his ideas. The project, full of curves and bends, set off a huge argument in Finland. Holl made the local papers and was mocked by cartoonists. Kiasma was not finished until 1998.

After that, buildings for art became Holl's specialty: in the United States, the Lewis Arts Complex, the expansion of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the expansion of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Winter Visual Arts Center, and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. Holl likes to explain where a design came from through some form of art. Sometimes the link looks very roundabout — the novel Ulysses, say, or the beauty of Einstein's science.

In a sense, like Le Corbusier, an architect he admires, Holl stands for a certain kind of modern architect: beyond the buildings, the beautiful drawings and the striking theoretical positions are what make them popular. Next to architects who only know how to deliver a project, they look more idealistic.

Over the past few years Steven Holl Architects has finished projects in London, Houston, Virginia and Richmond, and the suspended footbridge it designed for Denmark, Copenhagen Gate, is finally under construction again after eight years on hold. But one of the most eye-catching works may be T-Space in New York's West Village, at once a house and a private gallery. Holl has many artist friends: "We always want to bring architecture, poetry, music, painting and sculpture together." A 2017 story in The New York Times reported that many of the works at T-Space came to Holl through trades — he would design a house for a friend, and the friend would give him a piece of their own work in return.

His signature working habit — drawing on 5-by-7-inch paper — has gone on for 40 years and is now about as famous as the buildings. Nina Stritzler-Levine, who curated "Making Architecture," wrote: "Holl paints ritualistically every morning… For Holl, producing hundreds of watercolors over the course of one project is entirely ordinary." Since 1978 he has published essays on public housing, urbanization and the tie between art and architecture in Pamphlet Architecture, and he has written the books Anchoring, Intertwining and Parallax, on the relationship between a building and its site, on how people perceive interior space, and on his ideas about underlying structure. Holl often reaches for "phenomenology" to explain his design thinking, though the explanation does not always go deep (and perhaps does not need to).

Holl has also attacked the way architects now work, ever more digital and ever more procedural. The chase after commerce and technology repels him. This March he again told Metropolis how frustrated he is with contemporary architecture.

For the firm, Holl is the brain and the source of ideas. "Most people at the office are used to developing a design meticulously from Steven Holl's sketches," Li Hu said. In 2017, when The New York Times went to interview him, the reporter happened to catch it happening: Holl had just finished a drawing, photographed it with his iPhone and sent it to colleagues in Moscow, who had taken on a sports center there.

Holl himself would rather stress the firm's purity. In the March 23 interview he said architecture now has a bad culture. "They do some real design work, and they take other jobs just for the money. To me that is like being a model wife by day and a prostitute by night." (Note: the architect Philip Johnson said the opposite: "Architects are all whores.") "A big firm with more than 300 employees won't tell you what it is really doing, because a lot of it is junk done to pay the bills and keep the office running. That's true everywhere in the world. But I won't do it. I can't accept that double standard." Steven Holl Architects has about 50 people across its New York and Beijing teams. The Beijing office opened in 2006.

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After seven years away, Holl was back in China. On March 23 he had also been invited to give a talk called "Making Architecture: Fluid Space in Contemporary Asia." It was held next door to Sifang Art Museum, in the conference center designed by the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, to a full house.

Holl did not talk about how he had made those "fluid spaces" in Asia, but he did explain how he got to Asia. The first thing he did on stage was congratulate Isozaki on winning the Pritzker Prize, architecture's highest honor, earlier in March. He praised Isozaki as not only a great architect but someone who never forgets to bring younger people along. "It was Isozaki who brought me to Japan, and it was Isozaki who brought me to China," Holl said. In Fukuoka he built Void Space Housing, a 1989 project, at a time when his New York firm was still scraping by.

As for China, Holl said, they arrived on August 13, 2003. He remembers the date exactly, and plainly regards it as an enormously important, correct decision.

When Isozaki introduced Holl to China in 2003, the people who received them were the Nanjing property developer Lu Jun and his son Lu Xun, fresh out of Cambridge. Lu Jun was then planning a large architectural experiment. He had taken a big piece of empty land near Foshou Lake in Nanjing, set between hills and water, and meant to invite the world's top architects to build twenty beautiful buildings there, with no restrictions on the designs. What those buildings would eventually be used for was hard to guarantee, but for the architects, the artistic ambition could be satisfied. Holl designed the most important building on the site, Sifang Art Museum.

That was Holl's first impression of Chinese developers.

On the evening of March 23, Lu Xun — now the museum's director — held a dinner for Holl. Before it began, Lu Xun said that very few architects and clients keep up a relationship like this one, still coming back to the same project more than a decade later. Usually the relationship between architect and client is a one-off. Only a non-profit cultural project can be otherwise. He hoped the friendship would last. He asked Holl, knowing he must be tired, whether he would like to say a few words. Holl said: "I just want to say, thank you."

Almost at the same time as the Sifang commission, the developer Modern Land came to Holl. This was a 220,000-square-meter residential complex that, besides apartments, would hold restaurants, a cinema and a kindergarten. They wanted Holl to touch up and dress the existing site plan. This was the project mentioned at the start, the one bigger than everything Holl had built until then combined: Beijing MOMA. Li Hu said Holl hesitated. On a project that size, he was not entirely sure of himself.

In the March 23 interview, Holl said what he could not accept was the request to "dress up the site plan." "I said, I won't do that — but give me three months and a bit of a design fee, and I'll give you a beautiful, idealistic scheme. I put bridges between the swimming pools. In the middle of the site I put a water garden. After I handed it in, there was nothing for about a week. Then I got an email. It said, your scheme is far over our budget. But — we are going to raise the budget and build it exactly as you designed it. Nothing gets cut." Beijing MOMA was completed in 2009 and won several awards, including one for sustainable design from the New York chapter of the AIA. Holl calls the project Linked Hybrid.

"In the United States this doesn't happen anymore. Most American clients can't accept an idea like that; they just order architects around." Holl thinks this is why his projects in China differ so sharply from his projects in the West. The reason, he says, is that the Western architecture business began sliding back in the 1980s. "I'm not against doing commercial buildings, but the scheme has to be idealistic. You need good clients. Not all of them, of course, but on the commercial projects I've done in China the clients have been good — they simply wanted my ideas built."

"I think the timing had something to do with it too — it was around the Beijing Olympics. In China they very much wanted to show their best side."

Chinese developers believe these celebrated Western architects can help them show that best side. Once word got out that Holl would be in China this March, they filled his calendar. In one week he had to travel to a different city almost every day. None of it had anything to do with whether they understood his theory of natural light cutting through a building, or what public space is for.

Developers must also have worked out that an architect's reputation helps sell property. The success of SOHO's projects around the country proves it. Zaha Hadid's best-known work in China is the series of commercial office buildings she did with SOHO China, and that partnership was not a one-off either: Galaxy SOHO in Beijing, completed in 2012, Wangjing SOHO in Beijing, completed in 2014, and Sky SOHO in Shanghai. Pan Shiyi, SOHO China's founder and chairman, told QDaily in an interview that it was SOHO that gave Hadid a wider stage, the chance to design at greater scale, and more support in construction. "She said Zhang Xin was one of her best friends," Pan Shiyi said.

It is not only SOHO. The whole Chinese property market works this way. There has been volatility and a slowdown since 2014, but data from the Singapore-based research firm Stansberry Churchouse show China is still the largest housing market in the world: home sales last year came to US$1.7 trillion, seven times the total value of transactions in the United States. Chinese cities have expanded and rebuilt themselves at speed — over the 40 years from 1978 to 2017, urban housing units went from about 31 million to 303 million.

Architects got a rare opening out of this. For Holl it meant he could try to make public space inside big commercial projects. The Raffles City he designed in Chengdu in 2007 is larger than Beijing MOMA, at 310,000 square meters. "The client's plan was to build a shopping mall and an office tower. I said, no, let's make a public space. We'll sink the mall and put a water garden on the roof, and make a building about light — natural light cutting through the architecture." Once again, "they accepted my idea."

After that, Holl put a large garden inside Vanke's headquarters in Shenzhen. CIFI's Qilizhuang project in Beijing broke ground a year ago; Holl's design for it includes five gardens.

Holl is not the only one who has gained from this wave. In many cases Chinese developers want the prestige without knowing the difference between one famous architect and another. They rarely invite a single architect; they run open competitions instead. Architects compete, but the client still decides — and architects are lavish in their praise of Chinese clients, who are more generous and more "forgiving" than clients anywhere else in the world.

Over the past few years there have been fewer projects and more people chasing them. A few days ago Steven Holl Architects submitted a scheme for a public building in Shenzhen that includes a conference center and a hotel. "It's a beautiful idea based on concave and convex curved surfaces," Holl said. He loves curved surfaces. But seven international firms are competing for that job, Foster + Partners and OMA among them.

In 2013, Holl beat both OMA, founded by Rem Koolhaas, and Zaha Hadid Architects to the Qingdao Culture and Art Center. Three years ago, though, Steven Holl Architects failed to win the competition for a public library and museum in Shenzhen. Their scheme put a public plaza between the two buildings. ArchDaily reported that it won a majority of the jury's votes, but Shenzhen government officials chose another design.

Cover image: Ex of In House. © Paul Warchol. Banner image courtesy of Sifang Art Museum.