During a recent media day at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., Steven Holl seemed as eager as the visiting journalists to see the latest progress on a $200 million addition he designed.
But while the internationally renowned New York architect took snapshots and savored the approaching completion of one of the largest and most complex projects of his career, Holl acknowledged that his main focus has switched to Denver.
In December he was selected from among five finalists to design a $127 million courthouse as part of a $378 million justice center on West Colfax Avenue between Delaware and Fox streets. Construction is expected to begin in June 2007.
On the morning of the media day, Holl finished another in a series of watercolors related to the courthouse. The architect creates the loosely rendered drawings as he conceives and refines ideas for his buildings.
“I’ve produced maybe 35 or 40 conceptual studies,” he said. “I’m just trying to get my brain around the project.”
While he has not settled on an overall concept yet, what is sure is that whatever Holl devises, it will be in no way conventional. And it will likely push the envelope of technological possibility.
“I don’t know how radical a design he will come up with,” said Marc Wilson, director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum. “This was radical and untested in every possible way – the use of materials, engineering – none of it existed. We had to invent everything.”
The biggest challenge was finding a way to construct the five glass-walled lenses or lanterns – translucent towers that rise like submarines’ sails from the 840-foot-long, grass-roofed addition that hugs the gently sloping topography.
Specialized builder
In the end, it turned out that just one firm in the world – Lamberts Glasfabrik in Germany – was capable of fabricating the towers’ 16-inch-wide glass planks, which had to be strong enough to withstand variable winds and other vagaries of Midwestern weather.
Engineers also had to find ways to structurally realize the building’s graceful if emphatic asymmetry. The mix of rectilinear and curved lines crisscross, merge and diverge, forming constantly surprising spaces, no two the same in size, shape or feel.
“This is one of my projects that I’m enormously proud of,” Holl said, “because there was never a compromise, and that’s hard, because architecture is such a fragile art.”
But if the art-museum addition is the quintessence of a Holl building, the architect is quick to say that Denver residents should not expect a courthouse that mimics it.
“It’s totally different,” he said. “It’s a 34-courtroom building. It has enormous demands circulation-wise. Security demands. It’s in a different city.
“The only relation is philosophical, and that is the movement of the body through space, which is important to me, the experience of architecture from the eye and the body moving.”
In Kansas City, every aspect of the addition was designed to respect the existing 1933 neoclassical building. The two structures are connected below ground so that all four facades of the original building are untouched and unimpeded.
Holl will have no such constraint in Denver. While he is likely to acknowledge the east-west axis of neo-classical buildings that include the State Capitol and City and County Building, he is looking at many other aspects of the landscape and built environment as well.
A running constant through all Holl’s projects is shaping space through natural light. He wants it to have a presence in each of the 34 courtrooms in the Denver courthouse as well. The big question: Just how to pull this off?
“We’ve been working at the project from the micro and the macro at the same time,” he said. “Rather than have an a priori idea for the whole thing and try to jam things into it, we begin with the micro, with the space of the courtroom and think about it and work on it.”
A related notion is placing as many of the public spaces around the outside of the building to take advantage of the light and mountain views; judges’ chambers and administrative spaces would be grouped inside.
“There’s a lot of waiting that goes on,” he said, “and in those places is the key to the pleasantness of what this facility would be. So, I said, why not turn the building inside out?”
Following the wishes of city officials, Holl is looking for ways to make the courthouse environmentally sustainable, including the possibility of a wastewater-recovery system, rooftop garden and windows that open.
“Why not?” he said. “It’s a big public building, but can’t we break the mold of the ’60s and get natural, fresh air into the justice center?”
Much of Holl’s fascination with light comes from growing up in in Bremerton, Wash., across the Puget Sound from Seattle. His parents still live there in the first house he designed, in 1974.
“The Pacific Northwest is a place with big bodies of water and the great change in the light atmosphere from winter to summer,” he said. “It’s like Helsinki in the sense that in the winter, that sun is really low and it’s like gold if it comes out.”
When he was a child, he and his younger brother were constantly constructing things, including a two-story treehouse and underground clubhouse.
“I’m like 6 years old, and we’ve already built three buildings,” he said. “It was innate. It was in the blood.”
In the early part of his career, Holl made a name for himself more as a teacher and theoretician, but in 1998 his much-acclaimed design for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki changed all that. Three years later, Time magazine named him America’s best architect.
Today Holl is in demand all over the world. Under construction in Beijing is the innovative Linked Hybrid. A kind of city within a city, it features eight residential towers linked on the 20th floor by a ring of walkways with cafes and other businesses.
The architect’s firm has a staff of about 30 people in New York and eight employees in a branch office in Beijing, and Holl said he has no desire to expand it further. He wants to be able to put his direct imprint on every project.
“For me architecture is very important … and precious and I want to make as much as I can of it and not squander the chance,” he said. “That’s why doing the Denver project is a huge responsbility, because it is a big building and therefore will take a lot of attention and needs to be nurtured through all the ups and downs of the program process.
“But it’s a great city – Denver. Beautiful city. Three hundred days of blue sky. The mountains. The whole environment. It’s something unique, like this project is unique to Kansas City.”
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-820-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
