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In the rapidly changing practice of architecture, all aspects of creativity and production are quickened at unprecedented levels and the standard method of how an architect works is increasingly mediated by technology. This situation generates interesting questions about our built environment and the potential for architecture’s future existence as an expressive art form. Certainly the mediation of the computer is an asset to the architect, but as the human hand is eliminated in the making of architecture, how a building ultimately looks and how it behaves and even feels to occupants is altered. The hand-mind connection achieves subtleties and nuances of color, materiality, light, and space that the computer does not.

For forty years, Steven Holl has presided over a practice that is directly opposed to this seemingly ubiquitous trend towards the digital. Holl’s approach to making architecture is based on the idea that he must continue to work by hand in order to achieve artful buildings. He considers this process the “thinking-making couple” of architecture. Holl creates watercolor drawings at every stage of making a building, from conceptualization to realization. This process happens in the relative solitude of his home in Rhinebeck, New York and in private workspaces in his New York City home and office.

This exhibition explores Holl’s distinctive process of making architecture through eleven of his current projects. Despite the broad geographic range, extending across four continents, and the programmatic diversity from healthcare facilities to libraries, art centers and museums, each of these projects involves the thinking-making coupling of well-functioning architecture.

This exhibition outlines three distinguishing aspects of how Holl makes architecture: thinking, building and reflecting. Thinking focuses on how watercolor drawings, small exploratory models, and material fragments generate the ideas and thoughts that ground each project. Building reveals the process of making architecture through models, sculpture, and in photographs taken during the actual construction process as the particular qualities of space, light, and materials emerge. Reflecting brings Holl’s ideas into sharp focus in a selection of digital films and through his writings and writings about him. This section also considers the process of making, in objects that are microcosms of Holl’s thought.