ABSTRACT
The related conditions of translucency and luminosity have been definitive themes in the work of Steven Holl, who writes, “The idea of trapping light or building out of blocks of light is something I’ve long been obsessed with.”1 Indeed, Holl’s body of work, dating back to the late 1970s, clearly shows the numerous results of this fascination.2 More recent designs for large-scale cultural institutions built around the world—beginning with the Kiasma Museum (1998) in Helsinki and including the Nelson-Atkins Museum (2007) in Kansas City and the Nanjing Sifang Art Museum (2012) in China—have focused, in part, on the development of innovative glass building skins that deliver the “trapped light” of Holl’s obsession.3 However, a smaller and perhaps lesser known project, located in Holl’s home territory of New York City, offers a particularly instructive case study of this pursuit. The Higgins Hall Insertion (2005) in Brooklyn, designed by Steven Holl Architects, houses the Pratt Institute School of Architecture and includes a distinctively translucent building envelope that infuses the interior with natural light and glows from within at night. It is also the project which most directly recalls an earlier twentieth-century building that has undoubtedly been influential to the work of Holl and other contemporary architects similarly engaged with translucency—Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre of 1932. This chapter will present an analysis of the unique enclosure systems of these two buildings, their material innovations, and the ways in which the condition of translucency is deployed to address concerns both practical and poetic.
