This publication offers a view of Steven Holl's spectacular buildings, with a particular eye to their sculptural expressiveness, the materials used, compositional elements and way light is handled. Essays by Dietmar Steiner (director of the Architekturzentrum in Vienna), Yehuda Safran (professor at Columbia University, New York) and Wolf Prix (architect, Vienna) shed light on the process of moving from idea to phenomenon, from the first sketch - in this case from Steven Holl's water-colour drawings - to construction.
Steven Holl's architecture does use sensational and eye-catching images. It is also not reticent architecture, radically refusing to adopt any pictorial quality. It is architecture that requires individual perception to slide in gently, and makes it possible for that to happen. The publication emphasizes a very reflective form of architectural creation: this sensual and individual perception of space reveals the link between idea and phenomenon