Steven Holl, the award-winning architect behind such acclaimed buildings as the 2007 "lens" expansion to Kansas City's Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, is having a welcome turn in the spotlight thanks to a survey of his recent European and Chinese projects at the 16th-century castle of Acaya in Lecce, Italy. Titled “Su Pietra,” the exhibition — running from July 10 through January 15 — is an ambitious detailing of Holl's design process, with displays ranging from drawings and building models to 3-D animations, with images of his postmodern structures cast onto the castle's ancient stone walls via high-definition projections.

An architect whose sensitive designs often play with feints of lighting and minimalist touches to all but disappear into their surroundings, Holl is something of a futurist naturalist — an approach that can be clearly seen in his European projects. In Hamarøy, Norway, for instance, the architect's 2009 Knut Hamsun Center — a monument to the country's controversial Nobel Prize-winning author and Nazi sympathizer — is a block of black wood topped by reedy plant life, resembling an angular chunk of obsidian growing out of the landscape. The Herning Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark, on the other hand, is an ethereal complex of broad white surfaces that sits, almost hovering like a low cloud, in the midst of a field. 

The Chinese part of the exhibition, meanwhile, revolves around the themes of urbanization, multi-functionality, and sustainability. After launching his Beijing office in 2006, the architect and his partners Li Hu and Chris McVoy have built up one of the most sought-after international firms for new landmark projects in a major Chinese city, creating structures known for their shifting views, malleable spatial arrangements, and dynamic use of water and air to create micro-climate outdoor public areas.

The best-known of these was Holl's first project in China's capital city, the 722,000-square-feet Linked Hybrid complex, which consists of eight towers linked by a ring of sky bridges. It was chosen as the “Best Tall Building” of 2009 by the Chinese Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats. Then, in Shenzhen, the Vanke Center — dubbed “the horizontal skyscraper” — stretches for 200,000-square-feet, a span as long as the height of the Empire State Building, offering a 360-degree view of the surrounding tropical landscape.