Parallax

Steven Holl is probably a pretty cool architect. With its clean, racy curves both inside and out, his recent Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (and biggest project to date) in Helsinki looks like an artfully cut-out chunk of a late '50s sports car, or better yet--given its minty-blue tones and au courant materials--a huge iMac. His very intimate Chapel of St. Ignatius in Seattle (about which he published a previous book, The Chapel of St. Ignatius; he's also put out Anchoring and Intertwining), with its exterior reflecting pool and beguiling interior play of light, curves, and color couldn't be more iconoclastic for a Catholic house of worship, yet it exudes a queer grace in the same spirit as Le Corbusier's famous Chapel at Ronchamp. And surely the banks of Boston's Charles River have never seen anything like the dormitory complex Noll has designed for MIT--the model of which, included here, promises a multicube city unto itself with an intricate, discontinuous fa ade of overlapping grids and screens, so radical in concept that it defies written description (or a really good one, at any rate).

And yet the reason why the very chicly designed Parallax (with a list price of $40, it's probably the world's most expensive cardboard-covered book) only probably affirms that Holl is a cool architect is that there are simply not enough full-color photographs of his completed work here to tell. Holl is a very conceptual architect, and most of the pages here contain what he refers to as his "liner notes" on his projects--leaden, humorless meditations on such themes as "chemistry of matter," "pressure of light," "strange attractors," and "porosity" as they relate to his work. Beyond that, there's a profusion of computer renderings, simple sketches, and tiny black-and-white photographs of small portions that, alas, also do very little to illuminate his work for the reader.

What little color photography is offered here is excellent, going a long way even in its paucity toward suggesting why Holl has already created a stir (and you can click on our unique Look inside this book! link below the cover image to get a sense of it). Just one limited shot of even a modest project like his 1996 Ikebana House in Makuhari, Japan, seizes the eye with its almost astonishing manipulation of color, texture, and curvature, leaving the beholder hungry for more. If you're already familiar with Holl's work and really curious about his scientific-minded musings on them, you'll appreciate Parallax. Otherwise, keep your fingers crossed that in the next book of his work, Holl shows more and tells less. --Timothy Murphy