Contemporary urban development is increasingly characterized by a reliance on diagrams to convey the rational, statistical point of view. In his new book Urbanisms, architect Steven Holl suggests that urban planners need to realize that the experiential power of cities cannot be completely rationalized and must be studied subjectively. With a selection of urban and architectural projects from his twenty-year practice, Holl stretches urban planning into the domain of uncertainty. Urbanisms presents design solutions for diverse locations including: The School of Art and Art History at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa; Green Urban Laboratory in Nanning, China; Toolenburg Zuid Schiphol, The Netherlands; Fondation Pinault Ile Seguin in Paris, France; and the Master Plan for M.I.T.’s Vassar Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A comprehensive exploration of each project illustrates this much-celebrated and influential architect’s perspective on urban Planning. Steven Holl has been recognized with architecture’s most prestigious awards and prizes and has lectured and exhibited widely. He is a tenured professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture and Planning and has published numerous books, including Anchoring, Intertwining, Parallax, and House.
