Hudson Yards-based architect Steven Holl is poet, painter and preacher all in one. A little mad scientist, too. Holl (pronounced whole) might just be the most creative no-guts, no-glory designer of buildings in the world now, and the latest genius to call New York City home.
I don't use those words lightly, New York City or genius. Almost immediately, Holl changed my perception that this backbreaking profession is largely populated by stuffy, egotistical, two-faced politicos compromising their ideals to buy private airplanes and pat each other on the back, perpetuating mediocrity while average citizens like us hardly bat an eye at or step a foot inside their work.
But that won't buy either of us a MetroCard. The best thing about Holl is that he cares enough about every person walking the face of the Earth to design structures with them in mind. In other words, he is what architects were meant to be — there for the public good.
Columbia University Athletics Building, due in 2012.
Ultimately, they work for us. Their structures are there to change how we live and how we think, and it's up to them to push real estate developers (who seem to care less these days) to design buildings and plazas that make our cities better. Forward-thinking developers, universities, city planners and art commissions hire Holl for that. People who admire buildings love him for it. In the age of pretty condos, New York needs a dose of Holl now more than ever.
We're getting one. Finally, after 33 years in the city, Holl's first two full-scale buildings — a public library on the Long Island City coastline and an athletic center for Columbia — are less than two years away.
"First and foremost, I want to design inspiring spaces people want to be in," says Holl, who came to New York City on New Year's night in 1977 with a round-trip ticket from San Francisco and never left. "If you're lucky enough to build public spaces, then you have a responsibility to the people who use them. Architecture should be a complete experience, like music, art or poetry. You go in silently and take it all in."
New York helped teach Holl that. For his first 10 years in the city, the Seattle-born Holl slept in a bed above his office door at 650 Sixth Ave. Just like any artist, Holl had no shower or hot water. He bathed nightly at the McBurney YMCA on 23rd St. It shaped him.
"I'm sure I would never have been able to develop the intensity of thought anywhere else in the world but New York City," says Holl. "Only in New York do you have this density of crazies off the deep end obsessively working at something. It could be art, music, fashion or science, but they are doing it. Now, that's energy to feed off."
An interior hallway at Simmons Hall at MIT, where each of the 350 dorm rooms have 18 windows
Working from an 11th-floor office with a staff of 30 overlooking the Hudson River, Holl's firm builds minicities in China. Their Horizontal Skyscraper in Shenzhen stretches as long as the Empire State Building is tall, floating 50 feet above a public park designed by his firm.
An undergraduate dorm at MIT changed the way students live and study,bathing them in light, a common theme in Holl's work.
He's designed houses, places he calls "small universes of space, light, views and inspiration," from passages in "Moby Dick" and notations for a Hungarian musical composition. He built himself a rustic escape in Rhinebeck, N.Y., with an art gallery, small pond and a 80-square-foot plywood shack without electricity or plumbing that sits on the shoreline of a 29-acre lake. He goes there to paint. His house is a modern glass and deformed cube extension stemming from a U-shaped stone cottage built in 1952. From his one-bedroom rental in Chelsea, he can see the High Line and buildings by Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry and Neil Denari, all fellow architects.
He despises compromise and he's persuasive, a wicked combination for an architect bent on changing how we live. He once used Rockefeller Center as proof to Asia's biggest developers that they should change their building formula to include public space in a 3 million-square-foot shopping center/office/hotel/residential complex in Chengdu, China. He even waived some of his fees.
More than 380 feet long and 10 stories high, Simmons Hall at MIT has large openings that leave the interior awash in light.
"It's not about money," says Holl, who has had clients raise budgets to meet his designs. "It's about vision. They basically said I could do the vision, but I wouldn't get the money after the budget was gone. We got killed on it, but it's in construction now."
As Holl has built some of the most innovative architectural projects in the world in the past 30 years, he's less known in New York than in China, where his structures are ushering that nation into the 22nd century; Seattle, where he's from; and Helsinki, where he won a major competition to build a modern art museum in 1993. A hard-working New York architect at the time, Holl used a design that employed natural light to illuminate various shaped holes and angles in 25 galleries.
"After that, we were invited to many important international competitions," he says, sitting in his conference room surrounded by models of his work. "Once you do big spaces, and stay bold, people respond. We're fortunate. We've won competitions."
Sitting in a Holl structure, the sense of nature, light, and raw material are constants. Some buildings look futuristic; others are as primal as early man. All, however, are connected to the cultural world from which they hail, and a sometimes not so simple work of art.
In China, where Holl's Beijing office has 19 architects, his work was celebrated at an exhibition in Hangzhou. During the economic downturn in America, Holl's firm completed more than 10 structures in China and continues to work on nine others. 
Linked HybrID in Beijing has eight skyscrapers connected by bridges and surrounding pools of water.
His Linked HybrID in Beijing is an unforgettable, eight-building structure surrounding a cineplex along a still body of water. The skyscrapers connect via lighted pedestrian bridges on the structures' 12-18th floor. The idea is to raise the streetscape. Always considering green building as part of the design, Holl and his team placed 655 geothermal wells below the building's foundation.
"They are much more ambitious in China," says Holl. "They want to create new experiences for everyday life in their cities. Even their construction firms and engineers want to build complex structures. In most other countries, they say, ‘We can't build that.' When the exhibit opened, the political leader of the town got up and said, ‘I want Hangzhou to be one of the most beautiful cities in the world and the happiest city in the world. To do that, you start with great architecture.' That was amazing. Every city leader should think like that."
Finally, after 33 years, two Steven Holl buildings are coming to New York. One is an athletic center for Columbia University. The other is a 21,000-square-foot library on the waterfront in Long Island City (next to the Pepsi-Cola sign), across from the United Nations. One reason Holl hasn't built in New York is that local developers are concerned with maximizing square feet for pricing purposes, while Holl is concerned with beauty and public good.
Inspiration for Writing with Light House in Long Island came from a painting by Jackson Pollock, whose studio was nearby
Although two of his earlier structures exist in New York — a pavilion linking two older buildings at the Pratt School of Architecture in Clinton Hill and the Storefront for Art & Architecture on Kenmare St. — these new buildings are expressions of his firm's full capabilities.
"Holl's design just leapt off the page," says David Burney, head of the NYC Department of Design and Construction, who with the Queens Library awarded Holl the project. "Libraries today are community centers. This one has a music room for teens, auditorium and computer lab. Holl was conscious of the layout and prominence of the site. This is an inspiring community resource."
Holl speaks about all his work (and others whom he admires) with childlike joy. Recently divorced, he quotes the French poet Rimbaud and listens to Thelonious Monk. Short-listed annually for the Pritzker Prize, architecture's biggest award, Holl knows his work is constantly judged by critics and peers. While that's important to him, he's easily reminded of other vital things in life, like when a monarch butterfly flits outside his 11th-floor window.
"Look at this guy," says a smiling Holl. "They come down from the north, all the way down the Hudson River every year. They go to Mexico, where it's warm. How does that happen? It's beyond science, totally amazing. Now that's poetry."
So are his buildings.
Go to stevenholl.com for more info.