ABSTRACT
AS DEMONSTRATED BY his comment below, Steven Holl has dedicated much of his productive career to exploring the effect of light upon the appearance and experience of his architecture. His buildings for the Institute of Science at Cranbrook (1998), near Detroit, include what he calls a Light Laboratory and his Chapel of St. Ignatius (1997) carries the narrative of seven bottles of light in a stone box. 2 The Higgins Hall Centre follows on from the tectonic appearance of the Cranbrook Light Laboratory but can be considered more relevant as a window opportunity because it is less self-conscious about its role in explaining light and instead presents an authentic intervention within a careful piece of urban architecture. 3 The Pratt Institute is an arts university in Brooklyn and the Higgins Centre houses its school of architecture. The dynamic window assembly forms part of a concrete and red-painted steel insertion that is clad in milky glass planks and is sandwiched between two existing brick-built blocks that have stood since 1868. These blocks were originally conjoined, but the central section was destroyed by a fire in 1996; Steven Holl reused many of the original bricks salvaged from the fire to create the red plinth on which the new insertion now stands.
