Steven Holl

Steven Holl (born December 9, 1947, Bremerton, Washington, U.S.) is an American architect and artist whose built work draws on contemporary theories of phenomenology. Instead of imposing a style on a site, he argued, the site itself should generate the “architectural idea” applied to it.

After attending the University of Washington (B.A., 1971), Holl continued his architectural studies in Rome and London. On returning to the United States in 1977, he established a practice in New York City, where he also served on the faculty of Columbia University from 1981. He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2000.

Holl’s work included large buildings in many cities around the world, among them an addition to and renovation of the Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek (1988; American Memorial Library) in Berlin; the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (1998), Helsinki; the Nanjing Sifang Art Museum (2013), Nanjing, China; and an annex (2019) to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, D.C. Other works concentrated on urban-scale mixed residential and commercial projects in China, notably the Linked Hybrid (2009), a building complex containing apartments, hotels, schools, and restaurants in Beijing, and the Vanke Centre (2009), a “horizontal skyscraper” in Shenzhen, China.

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Among his many honours were the Alvar Aalto Medal (1998), the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for architecture (2002), the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal (2012), and the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for architecture (2014).