The EwingCole Lecture: Steven Holl

The Department of Architecture welcomes Steven Holl, principal at the New York-based firm Steven Holl Architects, who will give the EwingCole Lecture titled Porosity/Fusion.

For this talk, Holl revisits Questions of Perception, the 1994 text he co-authored with Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Juhani Pallasmaa, in which Holl explores the phenomenology of architecture through eleven “phenomenal zones”: enmeshed experience; perspectival space; of color; of light and shadow; spatiality of night; time, duration, and perception; water: a phenomenal lens; of sound; detail: the haptic realm; proportion, scale, and perception; site, circumstance, and idea. Incorporating recent projects by Steven Holl Architects realized after the book’s publication, Holl recasts the “phenomenal zones” and connects new built works with these original concepts.

Holl was born in 1947 in Bremerton, Washington. He graduated from the University of Washington and pursued architecture studies in Rome in 1970. In 1976, he joined the Architectural Association in London and in 1977 established Steven Holl Architects. Considered one of America’s most influential architects, he is recognized for his ability to blend space and light with great contextual sensitivity and to utilize the unique qualities of each project to create a concept-driven design. He specializes in seamlessly integrating new projects into contexts with particular cultural and historic importance. Holl has realized projects both in the United States and internationally including the Chapel of St. Ignatius, Seattle, Washington (1997); the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland (1998); Simmons Hall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2002); the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri (2007); the Horizontal Skyscraper, Shenzhen, China (2009), the Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Herning, Denmark (2009); the Linked Hybrid, Beijing, China (2009); Cité de l’Océan et du Surf, Biarritz, France (2011); Reid Building at the Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, Scotland (2014); the University of Iowa, Visual Arts Building, Iowa City, Iowa (2016); the Lewis Arts complex at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey (2017); Maggie’s Centre Barts, London, United Kingdom (2017); the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia (2018); the Glassell School of Art for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas (2018); The REACH, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington D.C. (2019); Hunters Point Library, Queens Public Library, New York (2019); and the Nancy and Rich Kinder Building, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas (2020). He received the 2016 VELUX Daylight Award in Architecture, the 2014 Praemium Imperiale International Arts Award for Architecture, the 2012 AIA Gold Medal, the 2010 RIBA Jencks Award, and the first ever Arts Award of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards in 2009. Holl is a tenured Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. He has also taught at the University of Washington, Pratt Institute, and the University of Pennsylvania.

The EwingCole Lecture Fund was established in June 2002 to support the annual EwingCole Lecture, which provides the Weitzman School with the opportunity to invite distinguished architects to campus.

If you require any accessibility accommodation, such as live captioning, audio description, or a sign language interpreter, please email news@design.upenn.edu to let us know what you need. Please note, we require at least 48 hours’ notice. If you register within 48 hours of this event, we won’t be able to secure the appropriate accommodations.