Light Is Again Steven Holl’s Chosen Medium, Wielded To Change the Way We Perceive Architecture in a Pavilion for Het Oosten

Architectural Record, October 2000

Common to the work of a number of architects today is a desire to liberate architecture from the stasis of conventional construction. They want to dissolve its substance, to allow it to react in some way to a world that is understood by people in a different, less material-bound way. They seek contemporary architectural metaphors that speak to the more virtual and less place-based ways in which the fundamental transactions of life are now occurring.

Steven Holl thinks of his headquarters for Het Oosten as offering “a phenomenological experience of space,” one intended to change the way the viewer perceives architecture. Like other contemporary architects (Daniel Libeskind comes to mind), Holl has looked at mathematical and artistic systems that can be applied to make, as he puts it, “a thought-to-feeling” bridge via architecture. The medium he uses in these explorations is one common to the visual arts and architecture: light. To use light in architecture is old news, but its most gifted masters have orchestrated its effects–carving what we see out of the contrast of light and shadow, evoking a sense of mystery. Holl first shaped architecture to give substance to light in the unlikely confines of an office interior within an anonymous New York City building, the headquarters for D. E. Shaw [June 1992, page 114]. Apertures with layered, back-painted surrounds split daylight into its constituent colors and refracted it into glowing beams. Light became even more palpable in the St. Ignatius Chapel, in Seattle [July 1997, page 40]. Here, metaphorical “bottles” gather light through tinted glass, which is further shaped by refracted planes of paint. Depending on the presence of sun or the time of day, they alternately spread Jello-bright beams of precisely delineated color across the rough-troweled walls or appear to fill the space with a soft mist of blended tone.

To take light as the substance of architecture is, in the context of Amsterdam, to beg comparison to the masters of the medium, painters like Vermeer and Jan van Eyck, whose awe-inspiring works were reliant on the region’s limpid sunlight. And yet as Holl’s new pavilion comes into sight across the Singel canal, the viewer is instantly struck by its unique power. It is a simple cube, punched with what look like random openings. Subtle washes of gray-green color move across the surface, while dabs of bright orange and fluorescent green wink on and off. As one looks closer, the very borders of the cube eerily blur.

This pavilion, along with the restored building that adjoins it, offers the client a singular architectural image at a time of fluidity in its corporate identity. This apparently paradoxical combination is exactly what the company wanted. Het Oosten builds and manages both social and private-sector housing in Holland. With state involvement rapidly waning in the once heavily protected arena of housing, the nonprofit company found it had to transform itself to survive in a fast-changing business environment. Although it had staked out a new niche building in-city housing and live/work spaces for artists, changing tastes and evolving competitive pressures made predicting the future–and predicting the way the company will be structured–an iffy proposition.

Housed in an inadequate building on the outskirts of the city, the company purchased a turn-of-the-century U-shaped structure. Built as a mere warehouse for military medical supplies, the building had the nobility and detail of a neoclassical palace. It was not an obvious choice for a constantly reorganizing company. “We wanted a building that was strong architecturally,” explained Leo Versteijlen, Het Oosten’s head of project development, “but one in which we could move people around without having to constantly alter the building itself, as we had to in our previous headquarters.”

Holl, with Rappange & Partners, a local firm specializing in historic preservation, cleared away dropped ceilings and layers of office partition in the old building, revealing an elegantly proportioned interior that permitted considerable flexibility for rearrangement and growth. Making the building a suitable and adaptable workplace primarily involved cleaning and restoring interior surfaces and updating the mechanical systems. What did not fit within the old envelope was a large dining area; the company wanted such a space that could be readily converted for a variety of activities, from meetings to informal receptions to public performances. It was here that Het Oosten, with its involvement in innovative housing architecture (the WOZOCO housing, by MVRDV, being the most daring recent example, see July 2000, page 141), asked Holl to develop an addition that would give the company a unique and visible identity. “We’ve learned in our housing projects that buildings must speak to people emotionally to succeed,” says Versteijlen. He saw the connection in Holl’s work through “beautiful handrail details and stair details. He makes an ornament out of a simple door.”

Holl’s working method was inspired by such mathematical constructions as the Menger sponge, which, through the systematic removal of part of its volume, had the paradoxical result of increasing its area. He also was influenced by Morton Feldman, a 1950s avant-garde composer who developed a new musical language by defining parameters within which chance would dictate the music produced.

The resulting design visually resembles a Menger sponge and is in part the result of Feldman-esque chance operations. Before such a cerebral idea could be made real, however, Holl and Het Oosten had to convince authorities on two city design-review panels that the pavilion would be a worthy replacement for the boiler plant and smokestack that dominated the waterfront elevation of the former warehouse. (The whole building had been designated a historic landmark. Holl did not think these elements could be successfully adapted.) He designed the new pavilion with a separate access, so that it, and its waterside plaza, could be open for public use after hours. Korhammer described the sensitive design and public intention of the addition as key to the “helpful and enthusiastic” reception the project received from city officials.

Holl constructed the pavilion by mounting a skin of prepatinated, perforated copper panels 30 inches outside the solid, stuccoed wall. Another scrim of perforated plywood panels was mounted a similar distance inboard of the interior plaster. Patches of colored, reflective paint were applied on the solid exterior surfaces and back-painted on the interior plywood. “We subjected the color to the same chance operations, and it began to develop its own nature,” Korhammer explains, just as the Feldman pieces did. The variation in the green painted-on “patina” of the copper, along with the moiré patterns that appear and disappear according to the angle of the viewer, visually dissolve the surface and volume of the exterior.

Inside, with the aid of carefully placed electric fixtures, light delineates the architecture, as shadows move around the space and the penumbra of colors grows or weakens in intensity according to the seasons, the weather, and the time of day. At times light bouncing from the canal and from a small lens of water maintained on an area of ground-floor roof add rippling reflections to the building’s ceiling and walls.

The company says Holl’s poetic use of light and his attention to detail and materials make the emotional connection for users. Versteijlen recognizes that Holl did not design a singular, complete statement, but an open-ended one. As seemingly individualistic and willful as this project is, the use of both a mathematical and a musical system bespeaks an unease with artistic intuition. Holl is willing to give up some artistic prerogatives to see if another approach reveals a new language. The jury is out on that for now. Het Oosten, however, is undoubtedly “phenomenological,” an ephemeral and ever-changing structure that mirrors our dynamic era.