Steven Holl Architects

Steven Holl Architects: Design Excellence and Green Innovation

Steven Holl Architects (SHA) is a 40-person innovative architecture and urban design office working globally as one office from two locations; New York City and Beijing. Steven Holl leads the office with senior partner Chris McVoy and junior partner Noah Yaffe. With each project Steven Holl Architects explores new ways to integrate an organizing idea with the programmatic and functional essence of a building. Rather than imposing a style upon different sites and climates, or pursued irrespective of program, the unique character of a program and a site becomes the starting point for an architectural idea. While anchoring each work in its specific site and circumstance, we endeavor to obtain a deeper beginning in the experience of time, space, light and materials.

Recently completed are the Cite de l’Ocean et du Surf (Biarritz, France), the Horizontal Skyscraper - Vanke Center (Shenzhen, China), the Knut Hamsun Center (Hamaroy, Norway), the Herning Museum of Contemporary Art (Herning, Denmark),and the Linked Hybrid (Beijing, China). Scheduled to open in 2011-2012 are the Nanjing Sifang Art Museum (Nanjing, China) and the Daeyang Gallery and Guest House (Seoul, Korea).

Steven Holl Architects has been recognized with architecture's most prestigious awards and prizes. The Horizontal Skyscraper-Vanke Center received an AIA 2011 Institute Honor Award, a 2010 AIA NY Honor Award, a 2010 Green Good Design Award, and a Good Design is Good Business Award. The Herning Museum and Knut Hamsun Center received an Athenaeum Architecture award and the the Linked Hybrid was named Best Tall Building Overall in 2009 by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH)

Steven Holl is a tenured faculty member at Columbia University where he has taught since 1981. In July 2001 Time Magazine named Steven Holl as America’s Best Architect, for 'buildings that satisfy the spirit as well as the eye.' Awards include the 2012 AIA Gold Medal, the 2010 RIBA Jencks Award, the first ever Arts Award of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards (2008), Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (2003), the Smithsonian Institute’s Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture (2002), the French Grande Medaille d’Or (2001), the prestigious Alvar Aalto Medal (1998), the Arnold W. Brunner Prize in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the New York American Institute of Architects Medal of Honor (1997).