Steven Holl Architects’ traveling exhibition, Steven Holl: Making Architecture, has opened at the Museum of Architecture in Wrocław, Poland. This is the first venue to host the showcase in Europe, as the ninth stop of the exhibition’s tour. 

The exhibit opened on June 11th, exclusively through an online broadcast and opened to the public the following day. Steven Holl: Making Architecture explores Holl’s intricate and distinctive creative process of making architecture through eleven projects, featuring a collection of approximately one hundred models, sketches, and other related studies. The exhibition highlights the rapidly changing pace of architecture, specifically, the way ideas are formed and visualized as manual tasks fade in favor of digital approaches. Steven Holl’s design approach that he is using to challenge the trend towards digitization, which famously includes painting in watercolors at every stage of a building’s construction, is put on full display. 

As stated on the Museum of Architecture in Wrocław’s site, “The increasing sophistication of computer programs undoubtedly makes things easier for architects, but the elimination of manual tasks in the creation of architecture changes the final appearance and behavior of a building, and can even affect the feelings of its inhabitants. The connection between hand and mind, as opposed to computer, allows subtleties and nuances of color, materials, light, and space.”

The exhibition has been expanded to include new concept drawings and a large model of the Ostrava Concert Hall in Ostrava, the Czech Republic, which is currently in design and expected to begin construction in 2023.  

The Museum of Architecture in Wrocław was founded in 1965 and is the only museum in Poland dedicated entirely to the history of architecture and contemporary architecture. It comprises 15th-century post-Bernadine buildings. Steven Holl: Making Architecture is on view in the nave of the St. Bernadine of Sienna Church. It is the first exhibition opening at the museum since pandemic restrictions were loosened. 

The showcase is on view until August 22, 2021, from where it will then move to the House of Arts in Ostrava in early September. The exhibit is organized by the Steven Myron Holl Foundation and curated by Nina Stritzler-Levine. It originated in 2018 at the Samuel Dorsky Museum in New Paltz, New York.