Idea is, the invisible of this world, which inhabits this world, sustains it, and renders it visible

Merleau Ponty

For Steven Holl, the intertwining of idea and phenomena occurs with the realization of a building as the means for the materialization of the idea force

A methodology of connecting phenomenal properties with a conceptual strategy

Responds to every project by re-evaluating the physical, cultural, historical references of the site-time or program, through which he achieves a ‘limited concept’ that establishes an order, a field of inquiry, a limited principle for each architectural design process

As the body-subject is perceptually situated into the world by inhabiting space and time, a building is rooted into a specific site and situated by inhabiting, ‘the visible and invisible of the site and situation’

By locating the body, ‘at the very essence of our being and our spatial perception’ Holl redefines architectural space as perceived space with reference to the perceiving-body-subject

Steven Holl uses ‘parallax’ as an experiential tool as well as a design tool in which architectural space is redefined with reference to the moving body’s constantly changing spatial perceptions

Merleau Ponty’s main thesis that phenomenology has potential to put the essences back into existence by re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world through the realm of perceptual experiences drives Steven Holl to search for vitalizing these essences through the experiences of architectural forms, spaces, materials, light and colour

Intellectual and Phenomenal

Philosophical Inquiry

Interplays in his thinking on and making of architecture

Utility/Interpretation

Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, explores the essence of being as it resides in the perceptual situadedness of the body-subject into the world

Perception fundamentally ‘acts’ enabling human beings to inhabit space and time

When the body-subject gains access into the world through perception, the world becomes, what we perceive

Architecture

That which begins as an interaction with the formation of an abstract idea, the formation of a concept out of this idea and its transformation into a material, a spatial and formal reality on a physical site

Creating the experiential power of architecture

Intertwining, idea-space-material

Anchoring, physics and metaphysics of site

A path of passage in architecture that leads from the abstract to the concrete, the unformed to the formed. An architectural journey in which the idea-force, phenomenal properties and the site force interact with each other