To the exhibition of Steven Holl at the Tchoban Foundation in Berlin
Watercolor paintings belong to the unmistakable handwriting of American architect Steven Holl. Holl came up with this visualization of projects long before the advent of computer technologies and has preserved it even in today’s digital age. The personality of Steven Holl has been known to the transoceanic professional audience since the mid-1970s, when in response to the magazine Oppositions (published by Peter Eisenman and Kenneth Frampton on the East Coast of the USA), he began publishing the magazine Pamphlet Architecture together with San Francisco bookseller William Stout, offering a platform for emerging architects and theorists.
Holl actively participated in architectural competitions throughout the 1980s, but his name began to resonate more on the international stage only after the completion of the residential building Nexus World (1989-91) in Fukuoka, Japan, where he was invited by the metabolist legend Arata Isozaki, and after winning the competition for the Museum of Modern Art Kiasma (1992-98) in Helsinki, where he collaborated with Finnish theorist Juhani Pallasmaa.
By the end of the 1980s, Holl managed to win a highly competitive competition for the expansion of the Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek (1988-89, original authors F.Bornemann and W.Kreuer 1952-54, reconstruction F29 Architekten 2014) in West Berlin. However, the timing came a quarter of a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and after turbulent political changes, the project was postponed (before that, Holl had become fond of the city during a joint visit to divided Berlin with Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi in the fall of 1988, when they had to cross the Checkpoint Charlie to view Schinkel's Altes Museum). This Berlin project can now be revisited after more than three decades at the exhibition Drawing as Thought (Kresba jako myšlenka, Drawing as Thinking) at the Museum of Architectural Drawing operated by the Sergei Tchoban Foundation. Sergei Tchoban not only practices architecture but also collects architectural drawings from the 16th century to the present, but he also draws and exhibits himself. While New Yorker Holl exhibits in Berlin, there is reciprocally an exhibition of Tchoban's drawings ongoing until early July at the New York Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture.
Holl's exhibition is divided across two floors. The lower floor is dedicated to early and mostly unrealized projects in Berlin, Milan, Venice, and Helsinki. The lower room is subdued in gray tones of large format ink paintings. The upper floor then offers newer realizations and upcoming projects, including a concert hall in Ostrava. The room is illuminated by colorful watercolors measuring 5” x 7” (12.7 x 17.8 cm), of which he has created over 50,000 throughout his career. Unlike other Holl exhibitions, such as we could see four years ago in Ostrava, the Berlin exhibition focuses purely on watercolor drawings. In the smallest of the three exhibition rooms, a short film is screened that illustrates Holl's working method, allowing us a glimpse into a wooden pavilion (with a footprint of 1.8 x 2.1 m) overlooking the thirty-acre Round Lake near the town of Rhinebeck. The calming water surface reminds him of the view from his childhood home in the American Northwest. In this small wooden object, cut off from all networks, the initial sketches for Holl's projects are created. The pocket-sized sketchbook allows for drawing during spare moments anywhere while traveling.
If you do not manage to visit the Berlin exhibition before the beginning of May, the Tchoban Foundation has published a more than two-hundred-page publication that captures all the exhibits accompanied by texts from Steven Holl, Sergei Tchoban, Italian theorist Diana Carta, and curator Kristin Feireiss (co-founder of the architectural gallery Aedes), who passed away on April 20, 2025, at the age of 82. We thank her not only for this exhibition but for the hundreds of other architectural events she managed to create with her collaborators (initially Helga Retzer and later Hans-Jürgen Commerell) over the past 45 years.
More information >
Holl actively participated in architectural competitions throughout the 1980s, but his name began to resonate more on the international stage only after the completion of the residential building Nexus World (1989-91) in Fukuoka, Japan, where he was invited by the metabolist legend Arata Isozaki, and after winning the competition for the Museum of Modern Art Kiasma (1992-98) in Helsinki, where he collaborated with Finnish theorist Juhani Pallasmaa.
By the end of the 1980s, Holl managed to win a highly competitive competition for the expansion of the Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek (1988-89, original authors F.Bornemann and W.Kreuer 1952-54, reconstruction F29 Architekten 2014) in West Berlin. However, the timing came a quarter of a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and after turbulent political changes, the project was postponed (before that, Holl had become fond of the city during a joint visit to divided Berlin with Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi in the fall of 1988, when they had to cross the Checkpoint Charlie to view Schinkel's Altes Museum). This Berlin project can now be revisited after more than three decades at the exhibition Drawing as Thought (Kresba jako myšlenka, Drawing as Thinking) at the Museum of Architectural Drawing operated by the Sergei Tchoban Foundation. Sergei Tchoban not only practices architecture but also collects architectural drawings from the 16th century to the present, but he also draws and exhibits himself. While New Yorker Holl exhibits in Berlin, there is reciprocally an exhibition of Tchoban's drawings ongoing until early July at the New York Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture.
Holl's exhibition is divided across two floors. The lower floor is dedicated to early and mostly unrealized projects in Berlin, Milan, Venice, and Helsinki. The lower room is subdued in gray tones of large format ink paintings. The upper floor then offers newer realizations and upcoming projects, including a concert hall in Ostrava. The room is illuminated by colorful watercolors measuring 5” x 7” (12.7 x 17.8 cm), of which he has created over 50,000 throughout his career. Unlike other Holl exhibitions, such as we could see four years ago in Ostrava, the Berlin exhibition focuses purely on watercolor drawings. In the smallest of the three exhibition rooms, a short film is screened that illustrates Holl's working method, allowing us a glimpse into a wooden pavilion (with a footprint of 1.8 x 2.1 m) overlooking the thirty-acre Round Lake near the town of Rhinebeck. The calming water surface reminds him of the view from his childhood home in the American Northwest. In this small wooden object, cut off from all networks, the initial sketches for Holl's projects are created. The pocket-sized sketchbook allows for drawing during spare moments anywhere while traveling.
If you do not manage to visit the Berlin exhibition before the beginning of May, the Tchoban Foundation has published a more than two-hundred-page publication that captures all the exhibits accompanied by texts from Steven Holl, Sergei Tchoban, Italian theorist Diana Carta, and curator Kristin Feireiss (co-founder of the architectural gallery Aedes), who passed away on April 20, 2025, at the age of 82. We thank her not only for this exhibition but for the hundreds of other architectural events she managed to create with her collaborators (initially Helga Retzer and later Hans-Jürgen Commerell) over the past 45 years.
More information >
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