Steven Holl

The Imperial House of Japan and the Japan Art Association give yearly since 1989 the Praemium Imperiale to five artists in the categories of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Music, and Cinema or Theater. In 2014 the awards – endowed with 110,000 euros – have gone to the French painter Martial Raysse, the Italian sculptor Giuseppe Penone, the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, the South African playwright Athol Fugard and the American architect Steven Holl. Born in Washington State in 1947, Holl is the author of a large number of works of different character around the world, from the Chapel of Saint Ignatius in Seattle, the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki or the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City – works in which he began applying the principles of what he calls ‘phenomenological architecture,’ based on light and the haptic qualities of space –, to more recent projects, like the Linked Hybrid housing complex in Beijing, the Knut Hamsun Center in Hamarøy, the Cité de l’Océan et du Surf Museum in Biarritz, the Sliced Porosity Block hybrid complex in Chengdu and the Glasgow School of Art expansion.