page_title: Steven Holl
section_title: Early works
hierarchical_section_title: Steven Holl / Works / Early works
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Das finnische Museum für moderne Kunst Kiasma in Helsinki. English: Kiasma, Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland Suomi: Nykytaiteen museo Kiasma, Helsinki
context_page_description: Steven Holl is a New York-based American architect and watercolorist. Among his most recognized works are the 2019 REACH expansion of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the 2019 Hunters Point Library in Queen in New York, the 2007 Bloch Building addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, and the 2009 Linked Hybrid mixed-use complex in Beijing, China.
context_section_description: Holl won first prize in the Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek International Library Design Competition in 1988, an expansion and renovation of the 
  American Memorial Library in Berlin. In February, 1989 Holl's work was exhibited in a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.  MoMA later purchased twenty-five works by Holl for the museum's permanent collection. In the 1992 competition for a new contemporary arts museum in Helsinki, Finland, Holl's entry, entitled "Chiasma," won first prize out of more than five hundred international entries.  The museum opened to the public in 1998, having permanently adopted the name "Kiasma," the Finnish translitteration of "chiasma."
  In designing the Chapel of St. Ignatius (built 1994-1997), Jesuit chapel at Seattle University, Holl addressed the campus's need for green space by siting the chapel in the center of a former street and elongating the building plan. New green campus quadrangles were formed to the north, west, and south, and a future quadrangle is planned to the east. The plan of the chapel won a design award in the American Institute of Architects of New York. Holl designed the Chapel around St. Ignatius's vision of the inner spiritual life, "seven bottles of light in a stone box", by creating seven volumes of different light. Each volume represents a different part of Jesuit Catholic worship, and has differently colored glass so that various parts of the building are marked out by colored light. Light sources are tinted both in this way and by indirect reflection from painted surfaces, and each is paired with its complementary color.
caption: Kiasma, Helsinki, 1993-1998
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