Word: holles
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When curators at New York City's Museum of Modern Art were preparing the current exhibit of the work of Steven Holl, the architect did not just settle back and wallow in the flattery of the high Establishment. Instead, Holl -- who is opinionated, uncompromising and, concerning architectural details, fussy to the point of fanaticism -- turned opinionated, uncompromising and fussy...
...demanded that MOMA mount only black-and-white photographs of his work because he believes color photos encourage an appreciation of the merely picturesque in architecture. He insisted that some of the walls of the gallery be covered with rough plaster, like many of Holl's own interiors. And he demanded that certain salient details -- a basswood-and-airplane silk screen from a Manhattan apartment, for instance -- be built right into the exhibit's walls. Fortunately, the museum indulged him: the result (on display together with a handsome exhibit of Emilio Ambasz buildings) is the liveliest MOMA architectural show...
...Steven Holl's precise, highly wrought store and apartment interiors are austere and dreamy, a combination of effects not regularly encountered outside of Japan. The attention to surface detail is almost excessive. Glass panes are sandblasted and etched with miniature geometric murals. When Holl has room to move around (for example, in his designs for a retail and residential building, as yet unbuilt, at Florida's Seaside), his work seems sublime rather than precious or cramped...
...high-tech doodads and joke furniture of today. The other is a reformist urge. When not fashioning playthings, designers turn grave, producing furniture and other objects that are neo- Puritan, high-minded. The severe geometries of Frank Lloyd Wright's turn- of- the-century interiors and Steven Holl's beautiful side chair (1984), for example, can have an almost oppressive sobriety. As playfulness alternates with the more austere, missionary vision, the American cultural personality seems like a preacher's child, frisky and slaphappy on Saturday night, dour and repentant Sunday morning. In the battle for America's aesthetic soul...
...Irish bricklayer grown wealthy as a contractor, certainly did not qualify as aristocrats in Philadelphia. Nor did Grace, the princess of an amusement park, ever qualify as a Main Line aristocrat there despite her popularity in the city. But she behaved like a lady, and thus in Holl wood she seemed not quite real, not quite an illusion. The picnic scene with Gary Grant from To Catch a Thief-worked because this flickering imbalance of perception carried over to the screen. It seemed deliciously shocking (but deliciously believable) that there were breasts and legs beneath her summer frock...