Anchoring to Place: Building the Site

Unlike music, a construction is intertwined with the experience of a place. 41 The tools that Holl uses –research of the vernacular, the “limited concept”, proportion, and attention to details - are only means to establish, develop, and enhance this phenomenological linkage between building and site. 42 Context is embodied in his work. Thus, Mario Botta's polemic phrase, "building the site", assumes a certain character in Holl's architecture, wherein landscape, type and building method are synthesized into a new challenging whole. 43 One of the fundamental principles that underlies his architecture is the anchoring of the building in its site, although, like the Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza, he believes that the architect has as much responsibility to challenge the site as to harmonize passively with its form, since “architecture does not so much intrude on a landscape as it serves to explain it.”44

Ideas cultivated from the first perception of the site, meditations upon initial thoughts, or a reconsideration of existing topography became his framework for invention. 45 For the Stretto House, the concrete dams and ponds on site constituted that framework. After "recycling" the site and retaining much of the existing landscape, the house was set on a sloping ground and gently terraced down the hill, while it was constructed by small dams, rectangular and introverted blocks. 46

As a literal dam operates as a barrier that restricts the flow of water, likewise the “spatial dams” of the house restrict the flow from outside to inside and from one space to another. The spatial transitions, rather than occurring at the massive dam-like walls, take place between them, stitching together the staggered, sheared sections of floor. 47 In that way, Steven Holl’s intention is for the floor to seemingly “hug the site, layering the house into the topography”, allowing the house to relate to its environment by resting on the ground and rising towards the sky, and to be experienced as a spatial distillation and abstraction of the stepped ponds of water that run parallel to it in the landscape. 48

Figure 20: Elevation showing the stepping landscape

,5; El Croquis SL, El Croquis 172, 1st ed. (El Croquis) 9. 41 Steven Holl, Anchoring, 3rd ed. (Princeton Architectural Press), 9. 42 Steven Holl, Anchoring, 3rd ed. (Princeton Architectural Press), 6. 43 Ibid. 44 Steven Holl, Anchoring, 3rd ed. (Princeton Architectural Press), 8; Steven Holl, Anchoring, 3rd ed. (Princeton Architectural Press), 9. 45 Steven Holl, Anchoring, 3rd ed. (Princeton Architectural Press), 9. 46 Steven Holl, Stretto House (The Monacelli Press, Inc.), 7. 47 Robert McCarter, Steven Holl, 1st ed. (Phaidon Press), 92. 48 Steven Holl, Anchoring, 3rd ed. (Princeton Architectural Press), 6; Robert McCarter, Steven Holl, 1st ed. (Phaidon Press); Korydon Smith, Introducing Architectural Theory (Routledge), 366.

Figure 21: Own diagram indicating with blue colour the "pools" of activity and with grey colour the "dams" restricting the flow

Figure 22: The mysterious flooded room at the North end Figure 23: The cast-glass fountain at the entrance

So much architectural critiques as people visiting the site appraise how sync the building is with nature, with an individual comment mentioning that “everything seems to flow.”49 This partly relates to the phenomenal attributes of nature, especially water, which are engaged when inhabiting the house, from the "frozen" water of the cast-glass fountain at the entrance, to the mysterious flooded room that merges with the largest of the spring-fed ponds at the end of the sequence. Both become the centre of two sequences of space, one from the landscape and site, the other from the aqueous space of the architecture, which Juhani Pallasmaa says is “essentially an extension of nature into the man-made realm.”50

49 wsmith94. (2020). Stretto House. [online] Available at: https://wsmith94.wordpress.com/2015/02/03/stretto-house/ [Accessed 18 Feb. 2020], n.p. 50 Juhani Pallasma, Eyes of the Skin (Wiley Academy), 41.