Steven Holl

New York architect Steven Holl had not been to Newport Beach for 24 years, he told his listeners at the start of a lecture Monday night in UC Irvine's Beckman Center. His last visit was a post-high school surfing adventure during which the powerful waves pulling against his paddling suddenly made him feel his life was about to end. The obligatory anecdotal opener was oddly revealing.

Lebbeus Woods, an experimental architect who inspired colleagues and architecture students with radically inventive designs and installations that evoked futuristic worlds and cityscapes, has died. He was 72. Woods died Tuesday in Manhattan, according to the architect Steven Holl, a longtime colleague of Woods who confirmed his death by email. The cause of death was not made public. Although Woods' designs were rarely constructed, they were considered widely influential and were exhibited in museums around the world, including a recent show at New York's Friedman Benda Gallery.

Architects today tinker with theory, not the spirit. But Steven Holl's Chapel of Saint Ignatius, perched on the dreary urban hills above the city, delicately suggests a modern take on a primitive mysticism. The diminutive 6,100-square-foot chapel sits between a parking lot and a nondescript pedestrian road on the Seattle University campus, a 5,800-student Jesuit college just east of downtown.

At his blog Hello Beautiful!, architecture writer and public radio fixture Edward Lifson has been asking the following question: "If Barack Obama were a building, what building would Barack Obama be?" In response, one of his readers suggested Steven Holl's spare, luminous 2007 addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Mo. ("not flashy, but . . . new and fresh"). Another nominated the 2004 main branch of the Seattle Public Library by Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture ("forward-looking, intelligent, jazzy, cool")

Lebbeus Woods, an experimental architect who inspired colleagues and architecture students with radically inventive designs and installations that evoked futuristic worlds and cityscapes, has died. He was 72. Woods died Tuesday in Manhattan, according to the architect Steven Holl, a longtime colleague of Woods who confirmed his death by email. The cause of death was not made public. Although Woods' designs were rarely constructed, they were considered widely influential and were exhibited in museums around the world, including a recent show at New York's Friedman Benda Gallery.

At his blog Hello Beautiful!, architecture writer and public radio fixture Edward Lifson has been asking the following question: "If Barack Obama were a building, what building would Barack Obama be?" In response, one of his readers suggested Steven Holl's spare, luminous 2007 addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Mo. ("not flashy, but . . . new and fresh"). Another nominated the 2004 main branch of the Seattle Public Library by Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture ("forward-looking, intelligent, jazzy, cool")

Seattle's St. Ignatius Chapel would probably serve the needs of Heaven's Gate, but I'd like to hear architect Steven Holl (or critic Nicolai Ouroussoff) explain how it reflects even a trace of Roman Catholicism ("Mystic Meets Modern," March 30). Cardinal Mahony, take note. RICHARD L. MOYER Los Angeles

After eight years and $94 million, the expansive new addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., opens to the public Saturday. The Bloch Building, designed by New York architect Steven Holl, flanks the venerable Nelson-Atkins on its east side, spilling glass and metal next to the museum's original 74-year-old main hall.

The five finalists selected this week to compete for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art renovation and expansion design have all attracted international attention. Steven Holl's Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art opened in Helsinki in 1999. He is now working on the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., and an undergraduate residence hall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The popular image of the winery remains the picturesque European chateau, but a growing number of winemakers around the world are seeking a fresh approach. Architects are being challenged to rethink the winery as a bold contemporary expression of tradition and innovation, agriculture and technology, production and hospitality.

Architects today tinker with theory, not the spirit. But Steven Holl's Chapel of Saint Ignatius, perched on the dreary urban hills above the city, delicately suggests a modern take on a primitive mysticism. The diminutive 6,100-square-foot chapel sits between a parking lot and a nondescript pedestrian road on the Seattle University campus, a 5,800-student Jesuit college just east of downtown.

New York architect Steven Holl had not been to Newport Beach for 24 years, he told his listeners at the start of a lecture Monday night in UC Irvine's Beckman Center. His last visit was a post-high school surfing adventure during which the powerful waves pulling against his paddling suddenly made him feel his life was about to end. The obligatory anecdotal opener was oddly revealing.

SAN FRANCISCO - On the morning of Oct. 30, as New York surveyed the damage left by Hurricane Sandy, word began to spread that Lebbeus Woods, the experimental architect known for his dystopian and densely layered drawings, had died in Lower Manhattan at the age of 72. Woods' death, it turned out, was wedged into the watery and windblown space on the calendar between the arrival of the hurricane and Halloween. It was almost as if he'd drawn it up himself. As a new exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art makes clear, Woods was most at home in precisely that kind of shadowy and forbidding landscape.

FORMER KNOLL International designers Nan Swid and Addie Powell were accustomed to the notion of architects designing furniture. The next logical step, they figured, when forming Swid Powell in 1983, was to commission tableware from post-modern designers such as Robert Venturi, Hans Hollein and Charles Gwathmey.