Distanced in time and space by a little over one hundred years and the width of a street, the creative architectural practices of Steven Holl Architects and Charles Rennie Mackintosh engage on the slope of Garnethill. The original Glasgow School of Art building evidently has a new neighbour, the ‘Reid’ Building. This exhibition chronologically charts the design development of the ‘Reid’ Building and depicts the driven voids of light, the circuit of connection, the circulation which encourages the notion of “creative abrasion” and the reversed construction method of thick skin/thin bones as in Mackintosh against thin skin/thick bone of the ‘Reid’ Building. Steven Holl’s use of watercolour sketches, or in his words ‘drawings with a wet brush and charcoal’, investigate and visualise the compositional form, appearance and spatial qualities of the interiors and the facades, in particular the sourcing and the controlled interplay of natural light.
Like Mackintosh before him, Holl exploits the expressive luminosity of this medium in small sketchbooks but unlike Mackintosh’s gentle, geometric precision in his recording of flowers, interiors and landscapes, Holl’s is a more vigorous, though highly considered, use of watercolour which is freer and obviously quick in evocatively capturing the intended coalescence of space, form and light.
DRAWING ON HOLL ran from February 08 2014 – March 23 2014 at The Glasgow School of Art in Glasgow, Scotland. Then, from January 11 2015 – February 12 2015, the exhibition showed at the Architectural Association in London, England.
