Of all the miscreants and rogue males on this list, I wouldn't mind going canoeing with Steven Holl. By all evidence he is a gentleman, with a look and tone suggesting landed gentry who has transcended need for intelligence. But I would not like to experience a moose attack, for instance, with Mr. Holl. Mr. Holl pretends to listen, in a gentlemanly way, but cannot hear you.

And if he asked me to hold my wallet, just for a second, I wouldn't do it.

Credentials:

Holl has a medium-sized reputation among star architects, quietly teaching architecture at Columbia since 1981, and with several major buildings to his credit: the Cranbrook Institute of Science in Michigan, the 1988 Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum in Helsinki, the Chapel of St. Ignatius in Seattle and the Bellevue Art Museum in Washington, and the eccentric and not-as-much-fun-as-it-sounds "Turbulence House" in New Mexico. Time Magazine called him architect of the year in 2001.

Interestingly, Holl develops his building concepts in the medium of watercolors. One of his conceptual books, "Written in Water," is a collection of 365 of his watercolors. Hypnotizing clients with beautiful renderings is a time-honored technique, of course, but that's really as far as Holl ever gets. The technical details, like straight lines, that's for somebody on his staff to think about. He appears to consider himself an artist and to say it as nicely as possible, he is not construction-oriented. He is not to be trusted with large sums of money.

Crimes:

His watercolors make promises he cannot keep. Selling these images, then afterwards trying to make them work, back-loads the whole process of translating these arbitrary and ephemeral gestures into engineering and materials, which virtually guarantees bad detailing, cracks, gaps, expensive improvised solutions to unique construction problems, high maintenance, guessing, aesthetic disappointment, and cost overruns. At the end, his watercolors bear the same resemblance to the finished product as James Brolin does to Pee Wee Herman. By then Holl, of course, is on to the next thing.

Example: the Bellevue Art Museum opened its $23 million Holl-designed facility in 2001, experienced a financial collapse in September 2003, and as of this writing (May 2005) hopes to re-open next month, after an interior renovation to make the space less cold and slightly less ridiculous and more suitable for the display of art, which is kind of what it was supposed to do. And to fix the cracks in the floor. Is there a causal relationship between the failure of the BAM building and the failure of BAM? Sure. Ann Wilson Lloyd, writing in the New York Times thought so too, when she compared it to the supremely self-referential Guggenheim and wondered aloud why we need museums that only display themselves.

Example: the grimly playful Simmons Hall at MIT in Boston. You're likely familiar with it. It looks like a punch card, brightly colored with markers, and cut out into an approximation of three letters.

It's a dorm. People are meant to live in it.

Funny.

Holl says that the guiding concept for Simmons came to him in the bath: porosity. It's frequently mentioned that the concept is porosity, and sometimes pointed out that the finished building does not actually convey porosity since you can't open the fucking windows, but nobody thinks to ask why a dorm hall would convey porosity in the first place. You can joke about porosity being one of MIT's core values, or suggest that Holl mistook 'porosity' for 'poverty', but let's not confuse Holl with George Bush or let those jokes suggest too much sense in this completely arbitrary choice. Holl's arbitrary choices, worked out in construction, led to each individual wooden ceiling panel to be unique and individually designed, and for the non-functional 10 million holes in those wooden panels to be individually drilled, contributing of course to cost overruns. That's what you get when you start with a watercolor. Duh. On a $68 million building there were cost overruns going up to $93 million and a suggestion that MIT was going to pursue Holl legally.

MIT doesn't want to talk about it.

For 350 students, $93 million is an astonishing quarter million per bed. In comparison, the finished Bellagio with all its well-appointed lobby and pool and lavish casino reportedly came in at about $553,000 per bed, and the Bellagio is not a dorm. The Simmons is porous, no. Beautiful like a watercolor, not hardly. User-friendly, ha ha ha ha. Criminally wasteful, selfish, instantly dated, and more than slightly ridiculous, yes.

Holl was also eager to sell MIT all the furniture in the Simmons Hall, his own design, which is full of cheeseholes and is bolted down. If you want your furniture reconfigured into one of the eleven approved configurations, you have one chance to submit a form at the beginning of the semester. Each student gets a number of the 5500 small penal windows designed to keep them from jumping.

Example: as of May 2005 the residents of Kansas City Missouri are trying to pin Mr. Holl down on the question of why his $200 million expansion of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art does not look like the watercolor he promised them.