Steven Holl’s design process.

GA: tell me about your design process-the way you produce architecture… I saw some sketches, early sketches that were already designed in detail. I was very curious about these, because some people start very schematically and then move to detail but it seems to me that you begin from all levels and scales.

Holl: exactly. Any given project is not comparable to the next project; it is unique. The situation is unique, the program is unique, the site is unique, and therefore the idea that drives the design, the force that drives the design has to be generated around that locus of circumstances. In the beginning I intuitively drift. I will write words and sentences make a lot of drawings and sketches…. For example for the competition for the Helsinki Museum…finally all other schemes came all the way back to the first sketch, the first concept. For me it has to be a conceptual strategy that can be clearly articulated, it can’t be just a form or a sketch. It’s a strategy. It begins on these little four by five watercolor pads and worked until the conceptual idea can be completely articulate in words as well as an image, a thought of space, a kind of spatial proposition, and even materials. This is why I can start on the project at any part of it.

We have a model shop where we build models and test the different strategies. In the models, we use materials according to the design concept. For example for the house in Martha’s Vineyard, all model were made of wood sticks. In the Helsinki model for the “intertwining” concept the first models were made in carved plaster or twisted lumps of wax…. The models are not models for presentations, they are working tools to develop the concepts in materiality. The next step is going from the materiality of model to the materiality of construction. The model is an in-between stage. What is a language of architecture? I would say it’s a wide-open, exciting freedom…. In any given project I want to be open to whatever the potentials. I think our lives today could be enhanced by the kind of emotional variety spaces could give- the different kinds of tectonic, material, and light. p22-24