"Steven Holl – Drawing as Thought," an extensive exhibition of the American architect's original watercolors, is now on view at the Tchoban Foundation Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin. It reveals insights behind some of Holl's key projects and design methodology. The selected drawings range from early unbuilt winning competition entries to some of the latest visions now under construction in Europe and the United States. Occupying the museum's two levels, the show opened on February 6 with a conversation between Holl and the museum's founder and architect Sergei Tchoban, as well as addresses by Kristin Feireiss, the exhibition's curator and founding director of the next-door Aedes Architecture Forum, and Diana Carta, an architect and scholar from Rome. The show, which can be visited until May 4th, is accompanied by a catalog that states, "The work of internationally renowned US architect Steven Holl is distinguished not only by his extraordinary buildings, with a focus on cultural and public structures such as museums, art centers, concert halls, libraries and universities worldwide, but also by his artistic oeuvre, which today comprises more than 50,000 sketches, black-and-white drawings, and watercolors. […] While exhibition visitors will only encounter a small portion of his extensive body of work, each drawing should be explored and studied individually, in keeping with Holl's intent."
Having missed the opening and the opportunity to see the show in person, I asked Steven Holl to discuss it with me over a video call, touching on the key projects now on display at the Tchoban Foundation and the role of watercolors in his design process. Holl spoke from his home and archive in Rhinebeck, New York, surrounded by tall stock shelves filled with hundreds of intricate study models that initially brought his painterly visions into the third dimension. It is particularly apt for Holl's drawings to be shown in Berlin, the city where he told me his career really began. It was the 1988 competition for the design of the city's Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek (America Memorial Library). Besides Holl, among the invited young avant-garde American architects included Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi. Holl's winning scheme was not realized, but it put him on the map, leading to an invitation to compete for another important although unrealized project—Palazzo del Cinema in Venice in 1989. Describing that project, the architect told me, "Cinema is an idea that could drive design in architecture. I made the building about time, architecture, and cinema."
Holl spoke about his early watercolors, which were all black and white, in opposition to and as a protest against the colorful projects designed by such Post-Modernist architects as Michael Graves and Robert Venturi. I asked him to talk more about America Memorial Library, which he described as "a global interchange between cultures," the idea expressed in a bridge structure that jumps over the original 1954 Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek robust building slab, a device that can be traced in Holl's projects before and after—from the 1986 Porta Vittoria competition in Milan to Linked Hybrid residential complex completed in Beijing in 2009.
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The Museum for Architectural Drawing Explores Steven Holl’s Design Process Through Drawing in Berlin, GermanyIt was ultimately the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (1992–98) in Helsinki that changed Holl's life. The architect pointed out, "After Kiasma, I had an office. Up until that time, I was just a professor." He spoke about the origin of the term Kiasma in the text "The Visible and the Invisible" by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, referencing chiasma or intertwining. It inspired him to express the idea architecturally. There is no "ch" in Finnish; thus, the spelling was changed, and the museum adopted the architect's concept as its official name, Kiasma. Holl won an international architectural competition in 1993. His scheme was selected out of 416 anonymous entries. When the building was completed in 1998, it became one of the most talked-about realizations of that time.
We then discussed the architect's unique design methodology. He explained, "I religiously am working on watercolors. Only half the time, it is a building. A building can happen intuitively after the drawing has emerged." He first thinks of space, light, materials, colors, and atmosphere. Plans, forms, and facades come later. One of the buildings presented in Berlin is Maggie's Centre in London. It was designed based on Neume notation. "There is a thing within a thing within a thing," he explained. He also spoke of his habit of building models out of the same materials as his finished buildings. In the case of Sarphatistraat Offices in Amsterdam, study models were built in brass and copper. Holl also discussed his inspiration behind The REACH, the 2019 extension to the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., and the unfortunate cancellation of the latest addition planned just before President Donald Trump installed himself as the Center's board chairman and nixed the project.
Our conversation ended with Holl's conviction that art drives architecture. He mentioned several innovative architects practicing in China today, including Yung Ho Chang, Zhu Pei, and his student Li Hu of Open Architecture, who used to work at his New York studio. "Architecture is marginal," Steven Holl admitted, "But as long as such architects are practicing, there is hope," he concluded. "There is hope," he repeated convincingly.
Steven Holl (b.1947, Bremerton, Washington, USA) established STEVEN HOLL ARCHITECTS in New York City in 1977. He graduated from the University of Washington in 1971, which included a study abroad program in Rome. In 1976, he attended the Architectural Association in London. Holl is a Professor at Columbia University. His books include Anchoring (1989), Intertwining (1996), Parallax (2000), Idea and Phenomena (2002) and Luminosity/Porosity (2006), among others. The architect's most prominent buildings include The REACH expansion of the Kennedy Center (Washington D.C., USA, 2019), the Linked Hybrid mixed-use complex (Beijing, China, 2009), the Bloch Building addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, Missouri, USA, 2007), Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (Helsinki, Finland, 1998), and St. Ignatius Chapel at Seattle University (Seattle, Washington, USA, 1997). Steven Holl received the 2014 Praemium Imperiale, the 2012 AIA Gold Medal, and the RIBA 2010 Jencks Award. In 2001, Time Magazine named Holl "America's Best Architect" for his 'buildings that satisfy the spirit as well as the eye.'
Vladimir Belogolovsky (b. 1970, Odesa, Ukraine) is a New York City-based curator and critic. He has been running his Curatorial Project since 2008. He graduated from the Cooper Union School of Architecture in 1996. Belogolovsky interviewed more than 500 architects and authored 20 books, including Imagine Buildings Floating Like Clouds, China Dialogues, Conversations with Architects, Harry Seidler: LIFEWORK, Soviet Modernism: 1955-1985, and Architectural Guides Chicago and New York. He curated exhibitions in more than 30 countries, including at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2008, 2014, 2025) and Buenos Aires Architecture Biennial (2017, 2019, 2024).
