Tracciando l’orizzonte. Steven Holl e gli interni di Casa Cohen

The apartment the American architect Steven Holl designed for Andrew Cohen in New York in 1983 has an interior horizon. Beyond its general plan organization and the specific solutions provided by the tailored furnishings and carpets as well as the pivoting walls, which reveal the beginnings of his research on the so-called «hinged space», Holl decides to trace the horizon line on the interior walls of the apartment. He arranges a thin horizontal metal band at the height of the point of view of a standing man. After that, he uses a cerulean tint for the upper part of the wall and the beamed ceiling, and a sand tint for the lower part, with the tiled floor just a bit darker. A central watercolor perspective of the living room is made to presents the project to his client. In order to accentuate the narrative fiction, the perspective horizon of the drawing coincides with the fictitious horizon depicted by the strip. In this way, the internal horizon of the apartment is aligned with the external one, visible through the large window on the left, dematerializing the physical boundaries of the apartment and triggering metaphorical and narrative interpretations of the interior space. The interior appears intentionally broken into two sections that exhibit a shift, due both to the design of the pivoting panels of this early experiment of hinged space, and to the color plaster chosen by Holl, who creates a different lighting between the two halves. This horizontal bipartition turns the apartment into a naturalistic representation of a fantastic landscape with a theatrical flavor, inhabited by abstract organisms sculpted in form of furnishings or traced onto the carpets. This article describes and analyzes this space in relationship with the architectural interior perspective tradition, Steven Holl’s intents to focus on the visual perception and his practice as a draughtsman, which is central to frame his early designs and the importance of the horizon as a narrative and dynamic device.