As part of a renovation for housing developer Het Oosten, Steven Holl designed
a pavilion to accompany an old brick storage building on the De Singel canal in
Amsterdam. The pavilion offers a multipurpose meeting space for Het Oosten
and other groups in the city.
AS AN ARCHITECT, Holl looks beyond his field for inspiration. His method
is grounded in the reciprocal relationship between sensory perception and
experience. In this way, he does not cultivate a personal style in his works.
Instead, he chooses to approach each project in terms of the context of the
given site: he analyzes the site in terms of its history, its program, and its
environment in order to compose an essential character for the building.
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IN THE SARPHATISTRAAT PROJECT, Holl takes concepts of chance
and openness from the project’s vaguely-defined program and embeds them
in the material and structural form of the building.
He draws inspiration from both science and music by blending the rational
form of a “Menger sponge” with the chance aspect of Morton Feldman’s
“Patterns in a Chromatic Field”. The result is an asymmetrical structure
riddled with rectangular openings.
On the material level, Holl uses perforated copper, aluminum, and plywood
to imbue the building with a porous character that transforms the space
around and within it: light bounces between the inner and outer layer of the
building and creates a chromatic color space. At night, the screens trap light
and create thick blocks of color, and in the morning, moving sunlight casts
more patterns and washes of color.
ON THE INTERIOR, the shifting flow of natural light births
an element of chance. The structure’s porosity and controlled
randomness combine to establish a fluxuating perceptual
experience that reflects the variable nature of the pavilion’s
functional program, which accomodates anything from casual
luncheons to office meetings to weddings and other public
gatherings. Holl’s open design embraces a lack of definition
as the site of both possibility and flexibility.