How can music lead to architecture? The American architect Steven Holl offers an example. He spent several weeks working with a team of employees on a competition design, occasionally working late into the night. He shows a sketch: a mass of small, edgy forms are scattered seemingly at random around the floor of a valley. The visible forms are the skylights of an underground building, and their layout is based on a musical analogy. The brief was to design a musical centre in the lovely, unspoiled valley of Sankt Gallen in the German Alps. It was an almost impossible place to build, Holl explained in his office in New York. The requirement was for walk-through spaces suitable for experimental music performances, although apart from that everything was more or less open. The real constraint was the landscape, the gorgeous setting, so pristine that it would be practically criminal to build something new there. “It was quite a headache, because I didn’t want to make little wooden buildings to go along with those neat alpine chalets. Going only partly underground wasn’t very appealing either because the result would be too much like a bunker.”

“Three days ago I reached the point of making my first sketches, which are based on the composition Stimmung of the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. It is a work with a definite place in music history. Stimmung is a piece for six amplified voices, and it has been described as the first composition based entirely on vocal harmonics. Overtones play an important part in yodelling and the acoustics of the alpenhorn, so in this respect Stimmung has a connection with the popular culture of the valley. The word Stimmung can mean several different things. It can refer to the tuning of voices or instruments, but also an inward ‘tuning’ of the soul. We decided to apply a version of Stockhausen’s ‘moment form’, a method which treats the music as a succession of distinct moments instead of the familiar structures of classical music. Rather than treating the building as an object, or as a pattern of a few objects, we proposed making an aleatory field of 51 ‘moments’, matching the number in Stimmung. The landscape will infiltrate the building, so that it is no longer an object but a field which blends with the location.”

You have often expressed an interest in music as a source of inspiration during the twenty years. How do you see music and architecture being connected?
“Painting and sculpture are forms of art you can turn your back on; but architecture surrounds you, in the same way as music surrounds you. Music is about time, and architecture is also about time. You move through a sequence of spaces as you move also through a musical sequence. There are many potential analogies, for instance the tone rows of serial music. A given sequence of tones can be inverted (turned upside down) or retrograde (reversed in direction). It is like hearing a retrograde row when you pass through a building in one direction and then return in the opposite direction. Once you have experienced the primary sequence of spaces, you notice how it overlaps with the reverse sequence as you walk through the building in the opposite direction. A similar idea plays a part in my Kiasma Museum in Helsinki. It has twenty-five galleries each of which is a very distinct space with a different type of natural lighting, the top space being the most brightly lit. The sequence and the direction of passing through the spaces makes a big difference to how you experience them. In my first sketches of the building, I used watercolours to show the overlapping sequences, and that helped me understand what I was looking for.”

The movements of people are almost impossible to predict, so for most purposes they are effectively random. Does the element of chance figure in your designs as it does in some forms of contemporary music?
“Each building is different, but yes, randomness has played a part in my architecture. Our addition to the Singelgracht building, which we designed for the housing developer Het Oosten in Amsterdam, has a partly aleatory design. The design is based on Morton Feldman’s musical composition Patterns in a Chromatic Field. We threw dice to decide where the openings would come. The idea was to have randomly chosen rectangles of colour. We made a die with a different colour on each face, and another with numbers that referred to the sizes. There was nothing in the program that dictated the overall shape of the building. It had to be very open, just a volume where people could meet. I thought of the Menger Sponge, a fractal solid produced by cutting an infinite sequence of ever smaller holes in a cube: holes within holes within holes. A Menger Sponge is identical in the plan, section and elevation. A real building, of course, cannot be a perfect mathematical figure. There are all those entrances and axes that have be allowed for.”

So you looked outside the programme for the concept of your design.
“We always do. I read the brief, I listen to the clients and then I try to forget everything they said. They come to us with what they think they want, and I give them what they actually need. Usually that is more, not less, than what they were asking for. In Beijing, for instance, they requested eight towers all isolated from one another. It’s a common way of building in Beijing these days, gated communities with no services. We gave them a complex of eight towers with a visual and urban interaction, with connecting passages at the base and skybridges at the upper levels. The complex includes amenities and is open to the public.”

Is music always a source of inspiration for your designs?
“No, not necessarily. I am currently doing a project on Fifth Avenue in New York and it has nothing to do with music. Another ongoing project is a housing development in Haiti; we are proposing a high-density project outside the city. It will have independent building services, because the water mains were completely destroyed by the earthquake. This project has nothing to do with music, except in that Haitian people love to make music. There is no time for sophisticated ideas on a project like that.”

Your projects always have an underlying idea or concept. Does that govern the whole design or is it just a starting point?
“I am almost obsessive about following the concept. I never show a client an alternative plan, and I never give a client optional extras like corporate architects do. Stimmung has 51 moments, so our design of the musical centre had to have 51 moments: not 52 or 49, but 51. I always stick to the idea. It’s also essential for the client to be committed to the same idea. That applied to the Chapel of Saint Ignatius at Seattle University, where I proposed putting seven bottles of light into a stone box. We were in the middle of the project when the university’s building and planning department told us we were going above budget. They wanted to take a few bottles out. But my client, Fr. Jerry Cobb, was sitting next to me and objected. There are seven days, he said, so there shall be seven bottles of light. If ¬we hadn’t been committed to the same idea, he would have had nothing to say to the guy from the building department. He dissuaded them from ditching the best part of the design. In the end, we shrunk the building instead; everything was just a bit tighter. Every project has its nay-sayers, but Father Cobb believed in the idea and so did I. Architecture can be hard, very hard.”

Do you require your idea to be legible in the final design? Is a narrative aspect of any importance to you?
“The idea is a heuristic device. It drives the design, it guides the design, but it is not a rigid structure that defines the design. Being able to read the idea in the final design gives a building character, but it does not have to be literal. Some people criticize me and say I make conceptual art. But conceptualism says that the idea is the artwork, and that is not at all what I am doing. The idea is not the architecture: the architecture is the real space, the material and the light.”

Do you mean the idea is like the libretto of an opera, the starting point for the music but in the end it is secondary and the musical composition takes over?
“That’s right. Wittgenstein wrote that philosophical ideas are like ladders: when they get you somewhere you can¬throw the ladder away. You know the design is good when the idea, the structure and the material all line up. Then it gets really beautiful.”

On one hand you have a passion for tactility, the tactile qualities of materials. And on the other hand you choose strategies that lead to a dissolution of materiality, for instance the way you treat light. Can you explain why?
“For me, light is to space what sound is to music. The experience of architecture, the overlapping perspectives, is the equivalent of spatial acoustics in light. With a piece of music, you can have a score, the rhythm, polyphony: some kind of structure; and then there is sound that executes it and brings it all to life. Otherwise the music remains an abstraction. The same applies to architecture. There is the spatial concept, the conceptual strategy – say the integration of lenses into the landscape, the fusion of architecture with landscape and urbanism; but none of that is really alive until you infuse it with light.”

Steven Holl has often said that an architectural design should be a reflection of the site and its specific history. Every site and situation is different, in his view. He never carries a style over from one site to the next, and starts every time from scratch. Still, the concepts do not derive solely from the site or the architectural requirements. His musical and literary ideas are, rather, relevant to the site, to the client and the program. They are not alien concepts superimposed on the design, but ones which arise from contemplation of the site. The 51 moments of Stimmung, for example, have a profound bearing on the site of the musical centre.
The Stretto House near Dallas is another good illustration. “A couple asked me to build a house for them and, above all, for their art collection. They showed me a site but it was too tight. So they drove me to two other potential sites, one of which had a stream and a dilapidated timber house. I said I liked it, and two weeks later the couple decided to buy the house and tear it down. But it wasn’t easy to find a good idea for the design. The Dallas vernacular is one of concrete blocks and metal roofs, so I was in favour of using those materials. I like metal roofs and the toughness of concrete blocks, although I wanted to use them in a new way. I made a stack of sketches and a lot of models, but I couldn’t get it to come together. Six months went by. Then I showed the site to a student who had been at the Julliard School of Music and asked him what composition this site, with its stream and weirs , reminded him of. He said “Béla Bartók, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, 1937. It is about overlap, about strata.”
Back in the office I worked on that concept. I got a recording of Bartók’s work, listened to it and read the score. Its four movements alternate between a heavy and a light character. The instrumentation is also divided into heavy and light, with the percussion and the strings on opposite sides of the stage. There was the germ of an architectural idea: heavy and light. Why not? One side would built of concrete blocks, while the other would be lightweight, made up of thin steel lines. It could have four movements, which would relate to the four dams. So I designed the house in analogy with Bartok’s composition”.