Steven Holl

• 

  passages September 2017

  Vito Acconci

  VITO ACCONCI was already a mythical figure in New York’s teeming avant-garde scene when I arrived there on New Year’s Eve in 1977. I was bringing with me my collection of Avalanche magazines—one, the Fall 1972 issue, was devoted to Acconci and featured a picture of him on the cover, holding a cigarette to his lips and staring straight into the camera.

  Many of Acconci’s early pieces were featured in that issue. Following Piece, 1969; Blindfolded Catching, 1970; Control Box, 1971; and the infamousSeedbed, 1972, among other radical works, had propelled him to what felt like the front lines of

• 

  passages June 06, 2016

  Zaha Hadid (1950–2016)

  ON JANUARY 26, 2016, Zaha sent me a text saying, “Stevie Wonder, we must meet to celebrate forty years of friendship.” I hosted her and Thom Mayne at my apartment in the West Village two months later, on March 16.

  I am still in shock over Zaha’s sudden departure from this world. I loved her deeply and valued our friendship beyond words. Here are a few projects in chronology:

  1976–77
  The Launching Place—Unit 9, the Architectural Association London: Malevich’s Tektonik was made to sing, bridging the Thames. . . . Birds were astonished. Elia Zenghelis, Rem Koolhaas, and I lunged forward in our jury
  

• 

  passages March 06, 2014

  Arthur Danto (1924–2013)

  “Ontology is the study of what it means to be something. But knowing whether something is art belongs to epistemology—the theory of knowledge.” –Arthur Danto

  ARTHUR DANTO, who departed us on October 25, 2013, was the greatest philosopher of art of our time. Faced with the immense range of artistic practices that define our historical moment, it is all too easy to surrender to a pluralistic, “anything goes” approach. But Danto was able to apply his deep, encyclopedic knowledge of history and philosophy directly to the art world in unprecedented ways, and in doing so he illuminated multiple

• passages Summer 2013

  Richard Artschwager

  STEVEN HOLL

  I LOVE TO WORK in the haptic realm and I’m very invested in the rich, authentic materiality of things like wood and concrete, so I hate plastic. I have to admit, then, that in some ways I disliked the first works of Richard’s that I saw, which were his Formica furniture pieces. I hated the idea of a sculpture just being this big Formica thing. But as I kept looking, I was forced to reconsider. Richard used what I thought were disgusting materials, but his wry, iconoclastic sense transformed them. In a way, his work is about inversion: Everything you think you know gets turned on its

• 

  print October 2012

  TRADING SPACES: A ROUNDTABLE ON ART AND ARCHITECTURE

  Trading Spaces a roundtable on art and architecture Art and architecture meet more often and more profoundly today than ever before—from public art to the art-fair tent, from the pavilion to the installation. But if the interchange between these fields offers a host of new possibilities for structure, space, and experience, it also makes reflection on their status more urgent. To chart this complex constellation of interactions, Artforum invited critics HAL FOSTER and SYLVIA LAVIN; artists THOMAS DEMAND, HILARY LLOYD, and DORIT MARGREITER; architects STEVEN HOLL and PHILIPPE RAHM; and curator HANS ULRICH OBRIST—a group whose pioneering work marks the front lines of art-architecture exchange—to engage in a conversation moderated by Artforum senior editor Julian Rose.

  JULIAN ROSE: While many agree that there is an unprecedented level of interchange between art and architecture today, there is surprisingly little consensus about what, specifically, these interactions entail or where they actually take place. Which models of interaction between art and architecture are most significant, and where can we begin to locate them?

  STEVEN HOLL: Architecture is an art—the premise of a division is specious.

  THOMAS DEMAND: I do think there is a clear difference between the practices, though. Every time I’ve ever worked with an architect, the collaboration was based