from the chiasmus archive: May 1st, 2019. "MONUMENTS OF ARCHITECTURE AND CREATORS OF THE TRANSCENDENCE. STEVEN HOLL (PART 1)"

 ( Visual Arts Building at the University of Iowa.  2016 www.architecturaldigest.com/story/steven-holl-leaves-his-mark)

(BELLEVUE ARTS MUSEUM. Bellevue, United States 2001. www.stevenholl.com)

I feel what is important about undertaking the idealism of architecture, is knowing that there are really only two components: modernism and postmodern architecture.  They're not philosophies within structural design, rather imprints of aesthetics that cities, throughout the 20th and now 21st Century manage between the ebbs of flows of capital markets, that in turn builds into both the dynamics of construction and design.  But, it comes with price, literally.  In our currently open monetarist, low interest rate, debt binged world.  Where porous boarders of global money streams trade back and forth between countries, it is what the now current President of America, Donald Trump once portrayed as a financier and developer, in his proposed grand and controversial development schemes throughout New York City.  Is that, it is the financiers, the money changers and asset pushers that finance development.  Not the designer or artist.  The architect, through his or her art, can and in most cases is compromised, if he/she wants the project, they must incorporate the brief offered – even if it means perpetuating bad design.  But, as discussed earlier in this series. The question is still relevant.  What is the purpose of structure?  When we can see the hurriedly and greedy manner to which these buildings are created, retrospectively in their completion, may already be dead.  Structurally defeated by nature and the folly of human greed.  A futility of assuming a future, that may not exist beyond the idealism of developing, in some cases, a deluded vision.  That on the most part is fueled by ego. 

So, caught between a modernist concept and postmodern design, flipping between so called aspects of idealist viewpoints of a city.  To assume that capital growth is finite and that the wealth effect will spread to embrace everybody, much like Socialist ideas of Utopian inspired architecture, that build into brutalist structures with hope of housing the workers and families within a modernized environment. There functionality of removing the aestheticism, therefor curtailing the concept of the art portrayed within structural design. Ended up being slums. The irony now, under widespread monetarism, has incorporated all facets of architectural design as repackaged and refinanced development schemes.  So, the various labeling of building design is now pointless sans an historical namesake.  What is being created today, throughout the world with easily accessible finance, are mostly prefabrications.  That may all end up being slums. We are living within an era architectural stagnation. 

What may appear as a hopeless dilemma, is not an impossibility to overcome.  For the newer architects and designers, beginning their practices within a bubble inundated world of ad continuum projects all sourced within 'stimulus' programs that, so far, has shown no end.  What could assist in redeeming architecture, at the lost of the plagiarist and prefabrication of current building design.  To which the award winning architect Steven Holl has expressed has now transformed into a “weak...” world of design, expressing also that there are a lot of “...bad architects”.  Is a rethinking of that vision.

When I look at Steven Holl's designs, it is his background that holds a testament.  Born in 1947, graduating from the University of Washington later studying in Rome and London.  Then in the late 1970's he starts up an architecture practice in New York City.  And the story goes, that for ten years he slept in his office in NYC throughout the early 1980'[s, showering at the local YMCA.  You can see this in his imprint of commitment, removing the bases of modernism and postmodernism design to something else, unique and powerful – yet very humanist.  As opposed to the starkness a brutalist design. There is a passion here, and strength, but also a fragility.

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(A.Glass 2019)