Open House Lecture: Steven Holl and Mireia Luzárraga

For this Spring’s Open House Lecture Steven Holl and Mireia Luzárraga will be discussing the approaches to their work in a conversation with Dean Andrés Jaque.

Steven Holl is a tenured Professor of Architecture who has taught at Columbia GSAPP since 1981. After completing architecture studies in Rome in 1970, the University of Washington in 1971, and graduate studies at London’s Architectural Association in 1976, Holl founded Steven Holl Architects in 1977.

Based in New York City, the 28-person firm also has offices in Beijing and the Hudson Valley. He has realized cultural, civic, academic and residential projects both in the United States and internationally including the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland (1998); the Chapel of St. Ignatius, Seattle, Washington (1997); Simmons Hall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts (2002); the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri (2007); the Horizontal Skyscraper in Shenzhen, China (2009); the Linked Hybrid mixed-use complex in Beijing, China (2009); Cité de l’Océan et du Surf in Biarritz, France (2011); the Reid Building at the Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, Scotland (2014); the Arts Building West and the Visual Arts Building at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa (2006, 2016); the Ex of IN House (2016); the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey (2017); Maggie’s Centre Barts in London, United Kingdom (2017); the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia (2018); the Glassell School of Art and the Nancy and Rich Kinder Museum Building, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas (2018, 2020); The REACH expansion of the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. (2019); Hunters Point Library in Queens, New York (2019); the Winter Visual Arts Center at Franklin & Marshall College (2020); the Cofco Culutral & Health Center in Shanghai, China (2021); the Loisium Hotel Expansion in Langenlois, Austria (2021), expanding on the concept for the resort’s original SHA design for the Loisium Hotel (2005) and Wine Center (2003); and the Rubenstein Commons at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey (2022).

Mireia Luzárraga is Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the Core I sequence at Columbia University GSAPP. She has previously been Dean’s Visiting Professor at GSAPP (2023), Kengo Kuma Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo (2024), and Master Tutor at Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) in Barcelona (2018-2022).

She is founder and principal of TAKK Architecture, a research-driven design office based in Barcelona and New York. Her work focuses on investigating how design can catalyze egalitarian societies through the incorporation of feminism, queer ecologies, and posthuman studies into spatial practices.

Her work has received the Design Vanguard award 2024, the Best Archilover Project award in 2023, the FAD Awards 2023, the COAM award 2022, and the Temps de les Arts award 2022. She has also been a finalist for the Archdaily’s Best Building of the Year awards in 2024, a finalist at the XII Ibero-American Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism, a finalist in the ROOM 2023 awards and a finalist in the FAD awards in 2023 and 2019.

Mireia Luzárraga’s work is featured in some of the most prestigious architecture museum collections worldwide, including the FRAC Center Val-de-Loire, the Vitra Design Museum, the Mak Center for Art & Architecture in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rabat, and the Disseny Hub in Barcelona, and spans both the public and private spheres. Among her notable public clients are the Musée Cantonal de Design et d’Arts Appliqués Contemporains in Lausanne, Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno IVAM, and the Centro de Arte Santa Mónica in Barcelona. In the private sphere, she has undertaken projects for Hermès, Moncler, Vitra, and Swatch.

Luzárraga and her work frequently appear in specialized forums both nationally and internationally, including the Venice Biennale 2023 (Slovenia pavilion), 2021 (Spain pavilion), 2014 (Spain pavilion), the San Sebastián Biennale 2023 and 2017, Design Miami 2023, Salone del Mobile in Milan 2023, the Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2022, the Roma Architecture Festival 2022, the Orléans Biennale 2022, the Maia Biennale in Porto 2019, the Rabat Biennale 2019, and the Oslo Triennale 2016.

Luzárraga has also lectured at various institutions, including the Kyoto University in 2024, the Royal Academy of Arts in 2024, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT in Boston in 2023, the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio in 2023, the University of Applied Arts die Angewandte in Vienna in 2023, the University of Pennsylvania in 2023, and the ETH in Zurich in 2022.

Her work is widely published both nationally and internationally, with notable appearances in Arquitectura Viva, Frame, Domus, l'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, Plot, and AMC. In mainstream press, she has been featured in articles in El País, El Mundo, El Periódico de Catalunya, and Diari Ara.