Kenneth Frampton looks at two recent architectural works by Steven Holl for Domus Magazine. I get it or not. Prometehous, Picasso's Guitar, Holleanism, A Perret and L Barragan, all in there with cameo appearances.
~~~

Prometheus Bound and Unbound
Kenneth Frampton

With the refurbishing, expansion and consolidation of the School of Architecture at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn (1997-2005) and the newly completed School of Art and Art History for the University of Iowa in Iowa City (1999-2006), we have two exemplary pieces from Steven Holl Architects, both largely determined by their contexts, and demonstrating in very different ways the inspired talent of Steven Holl. As I have suggested in the title, these works represent two moods and moments. The first is tightly constrained by the context, that is to say by the adjacent fabric and by an extremely sparse budget; the second is an opportunity for a free and expansive form, accommodating in an all-encompassing sweep the embodiment and representation of a uniquely hybrid academic faculty, combining within one body both creation of art and its interpretation seen as a mutually symbiotic process. In fact it is, I believe, the only remaining faculty of its kind in the United States. While Pratt is hemmed in by two existing buildings in load-bearing brickwork, close to the syntax of 19th-century mill construction, Iowa opens out to an artificial pond surrounded by a park-like interface between the original street grid of the city, a loosely planned university campus and a picturesque, suburban fabric, the latter being set on a bluff outside the limits of both the grid and the campus.

Thus this triangular, left-over, arcadian site appears as a kind of no man's land between the different grains of the surrounding fabric. In the first instance then an ingenious piece of urban infill, in the second a topographic work opening out onto the pond, together with a stand of trees, and turning its orthogonal 'back', containing classrooms and offices, to an access road coming off the suburban pattern and eventually linking across the river into the city.

As far as the Pratt Institute is concerned it is difficult to convey in words the economically heroic character of the work. It is one of those rare interventions that has ended up creating the institution as a new beginning. It has so revitalised the existing brick structures on either side that it now seems as if the Pratt School of Architecture has finally come into its own. Thus one is presented with an eminently functional but also discreetly symbolic building that is equal in terms of its significant distribution of space to any comparable school of architecture in the U.S. In the final analysis the trick has been turned by little more than a few masterly spatial gestures from the hand of a consummate architect; that is to say by the presence of six brilliant moves that may be retrospectively characterised as follows: 1. the literal insertion by way of a tower crane of a six-column reinforced concrete skeleton between the two buildings; 2. the simultaneous expansion of this structural frame with a further bay in the basement that is able to accommodate and embrace the lecture hall; 3. the linking of the lecture hall with the double-height entry foyer via a sweeping scala regia curving down into the undercroft; 4. the provision of split-level studio exhibition spaces, so as to connect the different floor levels of the two adjacent buildings, by a gentle ramp, opening up to adjacent spaces on each floor; 5. the capping of this spatial seam by a monitor designed to admit sunlight in winter and exclude it in high summer; 6. the creation of new elevations faced with vertical glass planks and enriched by a neoplastic 'cut out' in clear glass, held in place by red ochre steel fenestration cascading down to incorporate, in the same syntax, a three-dimensional plate-glass entry cubicle, together with the main entry doors. This is a typical, plastic trope by Holl that has virtually become a signature, c.f. the Cranbrook Science Center or the entry to the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki.

This syncopated setpiece could hardly be more removed from the cacophonic cubistic gesture that is thrown into the landscape outside Iowa City as a kind of 'catalytic' challenge against which and within which one has then to organise the programme as a sequence of dynamic spatial episodes, referential, it would seem, to a cranked generative multistorey stair hall upon which all the various heterogeneous volumes seem to impinge at their respective levels. This is the essential modus operandi of the entire building, irrespective of whether we are talking about the studios on top of the library or the orthogonally stacked classrooms, workshops, offices, and storage facilities, or such semi-public volumes as the library reading room, partially accommodated on the second floor facing out over the pond, or the lecture hall, the sweeping curved container of which seems to make an incidental allusion to Picasso's Guitar sculpture of 1912.

Lastly there is here, as elsewhere, the typical Hollean approach to the continuity of the envelope, with the studio habitually favouring the cladding of buildings, in either glass or metal, more often than not, copper revetment with standing seams, or, as in this case, a special weathering steel comprising a naturally oxidised alloy of copper steel, chromium and nickel, which emphasises the overall sculptural character of the work. As with Pratt there is something about this form, its finish and its placement on the site that suggests that it has always been there; corresponding, one may note, to Auguste Perret’s paradoxical concept of the banal. In short that uncanny combination of vitality with calm that one finds in the finest works of Luis Barragan.