“Extruded Light, Extruded Structure” is a project completed as part of Steven Holl's studio at Columbia GSAPP.

In the first iteration of “Extruded Light, Extruded Structure,” an analysis of James Stirling’s Leicester University (1963) served as a precedent for the implementation of a volumetric language and composition of forms. The minimal volumetric language in Stirling’s Leicester University project became an instigator for a series of studies on volume, mass and the interplay of light and shadow. Here transparency signifies absence—and is only activated by the presence of the other, a reflection or refraction, the indication of a visitor, or the environment, a landscape. 

The final architectural scheme presents a series of programmatic extrusions that extend to the boundaries of its site—connecting multiple axes of the campus to the project’s central core. In a state of frozen dissonance these protruding elements express Corbusian rectilinearity and directional movement. The core is composed of self-enveloping tectonic shells -- each casted of hydro-cal; they wrap and adjoin into a state of structural equilibrium, forming the stunning simplicity of a cube. Rather than functioning as a point of intersection or confrontation, the core is a space of openness and fluidity—its materiality and figural presence is that of light and air.