Steven Holl: Seven Houses, Luminist Architecture
By Steven Holl, Philip Jodidio (Rizzoli, 2018) Buy It NowCerebral and oracular, Holl’s singular vision infuses Midcentury Modernism’s optimistic geometry with 19th-century Luminist painting’s “clarity of light and immensity of scale.” His wood, glass, metal, and stone residential sculptures invite the outdoors in. Four of the dwellings detailed here are in upstate New York. Rhinebeck’s Ex of In House and T2 Reserve subvert expectations with their compressed asymmetric and spherical spaces and a T-shaped studio, “aimed at human emotions,” that’s so austere it lacks plumbing and heating. The cartridge brass-sheathed Nail Collector’s House hovers above Lake Champlain, its 24 irregular windows based on the chapters of Homer’s Odyssey. In the Catskills, the iron-red Y House is “like a forked stick—a primitive mark on a vast site.” Projects in Seoul, New Mexico, and elsewhere in the US round out this elegant, photo-filled book.