Steven Holl Architects Presents Su Pietra at the Castle of Acaya in Lecce

LECCE, ITALY.- Steven Holl Architects presents Su Pietra, an exhibition of recent projects in China and Europe, which is being held at the Castle of Acaya in Lecce, Italy. The exhibition illustrates the design process of Steven Holl Architects, from conception to its current form, documenting the collaborative process of model making, drawing, and animation. In the exhibition, Steven Holl Architects’ recent projects merge with the early-16th-Century Castle of Acaya, with high-definition projections being cast onto the stone walls. It will be presented through January 15, 2011. The Castle of Acaya is located in the Lecce Province, Apulia region of southern Italy.

The exhibition focuses on Steven Holl Architects’ recent projects in Europe and China. While the Chinese projects – the Horizontal Skyscraper in Shenzhen, Linked Hybrid in Beijing, and the Nanjing Museum of Art and Architecture – explore the macro scale of cities through the lens of architecture, the European projects show a vision of the preservation of natural landscape, as with the Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Knut Hamsun Center, Loisium Alsace, and the Cité de l’Ocean et du Surf in Biarritz.

The exhibition focuses on Steven Holl Architects’ recent projects in Europe and China. Photo: Iwan Baan

As China experiences one of the world’s largest urbanizations in history, the Chinese works explore the creation of collective urban space – as opposed to object buildings. Rather than monofunctional buildings, these new hybrid buildings incorporate rich programmatic juxtapositions. At the micro scale, the European projects aim at shaping space, and investigating the phenomena of light and tactility through material development and experimentation.

In addition, a series of stone sculptures has been created by Steven Holl specifically for Su Pietra. Complementing the exhibit’s projections “on stone,” Holl’s sculptures combine modern forms with an historic medium. Manufactured in Lecce and rendered from digital files sent from New York, his sculptures also demonstrate the possibilities of global collaboration.

Steven Holl Architects has realized cultural, civic, academic and residential projects both in the United States and internationally. Steven Holl Architects is a 48-person architecture and urban design office founded in 1976, and working globally as one office from two locations; New York City and Beijing. Steven Holl leads the office with partners Chris McVoy (New York) and Li Hu (Beijing). Most recently completed is the Vanke Center mixed-use complex (Shenzhen, China), also known as the Horizontal Skyscraper; Linked Hybrid (Beijing, China); the Knut Hamsun Center (Hamarøy, Norway), and the Herning Museum of Contemporary Art (Herning, Denmark). Currently in construction are the Nanjing Museum of Art and Architecture (Nanjing, China), Beirut Marina (Beirut, Lebanon), Cité de l’Océan et du Surf with Solange Fabião (Biarritz, France), and the large mixed-use complex in Chengdu, China: the Sliced Porosity Block. In 2007 Steven Holl Architects opened the highly lauded Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, Missouri). Recently the office has won a number of international design competitions including the new Glasgow School of Art (Glasgow, UK), the Hangzhou Oxygen Masterplan (Hangzhou, China) and the Hangzhou Music Museum (Hangzhou, China). Steven Holl is a tenured Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.