Architect for ICA speaks at Windmueller Artist Lecture

Samantha Foster
Spectrum Editor

Steven Holl, the architect for the Institute for Contemporary Art, has everything planned, down to the smallest details of having the sounds of falling water near the entrance for the building.
Holl was invited to VCU as the guest lecturer to the 2012 Windmueller Artist Lecture series to discuss his projects around the world and give more details about the ICA.

Dean of VCUarts, Joseph Seipel introduced Holl at the Windmueller Artist Lecture series this past Monday as being “America’s Best Architect” by “Time” magazine and having been awarded the gold medal by the American Institute of Architects, which is the highest honor awarded.

“Steven is recognized for his ability to blend space and light with great contextual sensitivity and utilize the design qualities of each project to create a concept driven design,” Seipel said.
The Windmueller Artist Lecture series is an annual event which hosts prominent professionals in their field to share their experiences in the arts with students and the community.

Holl’s lecture for the series was titled “Scale” and focused on “the ungraspable notion of scale.” Holl said, “When you look at the ocean and you see the vastness of the ocean, or you look at the clouds and see the vastness of the clouds, there is a positive quality of ‘scalelessness.’ … By the way, if you Google the word ‘scalelessness,’ it doesn’t come up.”

He organized his lecture by first discussing his largest projects, including the 3 million square foot public space in Chengdu, China and Simmons Hall at MIT, to the smallest projects, which includes the West Library in Queens, New York and the Chapel St. Ignatius in Seattle. Of the 13 projects discussed, Holl was proud to say that the ICA was in the middle of the list of projects.

The ICA will be 32,000 square foot building and house areas for visual arts, theater, music, dance and film. There will be a 247-seat auditorium, outdoor plazas, a café and a garden. It will be located at the corner of Broad and Belvidere streets, where parking lot QQ is currently located.

“This building has the expression of an intersection, that torsion of that back and forth of Broad and Belvidere,” Holl said. “When you view this building from the street, this building has two fronts, one from the university side, approaching through the garden and one from the street.”

Many people have called the ICA a “gateway to the university from the east,” including Holl, Seipel and Board of Visitors member Stuart Siegel in an official statement.

“The idea is that the campus has a sense of morphology. It has a sense of presence. A vacant lot can be a kind of gateway, where the contemporary art becomes a place where people from the university meet people from the community and vice versa,” Holl said. “(The ICA will be) the kind of inviting place where some strange thing that a young artist is doing makes everyone fill with joy and questions.”

Within the ICA, there will be four galleries, one of which will be 37 feet tall from floor to ceiling. Holl wanted the ICA to have several galleries, despite the original call for designs only asking for two galleries.

“You can have one artist in retrospective in four galleries or four different artists all opening at the same time,” Holl said. “I see the building as an instrument that be used in different ways.”

When Holl was designing the ICA, he researched the history of the area and the layout of Richmond itself.

“We noticed that the train station was once on that site and that it was at a kind of angle, so that gave us the courage to do this shape. Also, the Fan district just somehow embedded it in this corner in this geometric shape,” Holl said.

Holl also considered the historic nature of the architecture already in Richmond. A member of the ICA student committee asked how he expected the modern nature of the ICA to fit in with Richmond.
“It’s complementary contrast,” Holl said. “I believe the best, the highest, is to make authentic history, to restore it, preserve it, even to have the patina on the authentic historic buildings, but when we build things for our time, they should be about our moment and in the best respect to history.”

Holl also hopes that the modern design of the ICA will send a message to the youth of Richmond.

“When we build things about our time and our day, it’s a signal to the youth that the future can be better, especially in the energy levels of the different ways we make things, that the future can be something unknown and promising.”

All of Holl’s designs are done with environmentally friendly materials and are made to be as energy efficient as possible. The ICA will have geothermal heating and cooling, green roofs and will use recycled water in all fountains.

“The possibility that architecture can present a different future from the dependence on fossil fuels. I’m quite sure that we could reach zero carbon in all of our buildings,” Holl said.
Funding for the ICA is coming entirely from donations. As of Sept. 16, funding for the ICA had reached $20 million of the $32 million needed. VCU hopes to break ground on the ICA in 2013 and have it finished by 2015.