Steven Holl has always insisted that architecture begins in the hand before it rises from the ground. Every morning, before the digital day intrudes, the Rhinebeck-based architect paints a watercolor—an act of intuition and inquiry that, over five decades, has produced thousands of luminous sketches. Together with the models and drawings housed at the Steven Myron Holl Foundation in Rhinebeck, these watercolors form the living record of an imagination in motion.
That record comes vividly to life in Architectural Archive (2025), a new short film by Spirit of Space premiering October 20 at 5pm at Upstate Films’ Starr Cinema. Narrated by Holl himself, the 25-minute documentary offers a rare inside look at the Foundation’s evolving campus—30 acres where art, architecture, and ecology meet. The screening will be followed by a discussion with members of the Foundation. Admission is free.
The film pairs six of Holl’s projects—from early conceptual studies to mature masterworks—with footage of their built counterparts, shot by Spirit of Space over the past two decades. The result is less a retrospective than a meditation on continuity: how a line drawn in watercolor can find its echo in concrete, light, and shadow half a world away. “Every drawing,” Holl has said, “is a search for the idea that architecture can hold the spirit of a place.”
Founded in 2010, the Steven Myron Holl Foundation is both archive and experiment. The net-zero building that houses Holl’s extensive collection of drawings, models, and daily paintings isn’t a mausoleum of past work but a laboratory for ongoing inquiry—a place, in Holl’s words, “where the archive is not static, but living.” The site hosts residencies, exhibitions, and programs that invite artists, students, and thinkers to engage architecture as a cultural practice rooted in the Hudson Valley yet in dialogue with the world.
Spirit of Space, the Chicago-based film collective behind Architectural Archive, has long specialized in capturing the experiential side of design—the way buildings sound, breathe, and occupy time. Their ongoing collaboration with Holl dates back to 2012, when they filmed his Chapel of St. Ignatius in Seattle and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art expansion in Kansas City. Here, their lens turns inward, toward the process itself: the drawers of graphite sketches, the shelves of delicate basswood models, the morning light spilling across Holl’s worktable.
If architecture is often experienced as a finished object, the film reminds us that its truest form may be found in process—in the messy, searching, iterative work that bridges dream and reality. Holl’s archive, seen through Spirit of Space’s patient eye, becomes an index of that passage.
The premiere will also include a preview of Hudson L-House by Xavier Wang, a short film documenting the construction of a new Holl-designed residence nearby. Together, the two films trace a continuum between paper and place, showing how the ideas incubated in Rhinebeck reverberate through the physical landscape of the Hudson Valley.
Holl, now 77, divides his time between his Manhattan studio and the Rhinebeck archive, whose pastoral setting mirrors the organic logic that has long guided his work. As he told Upstate House earlier this year, “Architecture begins with the site—with the light, the landscape, the spirit of the place. The drawing is just the first way of listening.”
For visitors to Upstate Films on October 20, Architectural Archive offers a chance to listen too—to glimpse the quiet rituals behind some of the most lyrical buildings of our time and to see how a Hudson Valley hillside has become the beating heart of a global architectural imagination.
