The Bellevue Art Museum stands distinctly amid the sprawl and conventional design of downtown Bellevue.

After years of having a museum cloistered in the top floor of a mall, directors focused on several ambitious goals. They wanted a more touchable art museum, one that encouraged participation and embraced a diverse menu of science, art and technology.

They also wanted to break the Bellevue boilerplate with a building that would grab attention and serve as a noncommercial civic hub.

New York-based, Bremerton-bred architect Steven Holl needed no prodding. He is known worldwide for the value he places on finding a metaphor to guide design, and for how faithfully he will stick with that metaphor once he's found it.

As usual, Holl (pronounced Hall) began by painting. He paints every day, always first thing in the morning when his mind is uncluttered. He carries a 5-by-7-inch notebook so he can paint on airplanes and in hotel rooms. Sometimes he paints building spaces, other times abstractions. Where Frank Gehry, the architect who designed Paul Allen's Experience Music Project, uses scribbles, molds and computer programs to create sculptural shapes, Holl uses watercolor to explore critical elements such as light, space and volume.

When museum official Diane Douglas said she wanted the museum to be at the "intersection of art, science and technology," Steven Holl, above, found inspiration in a physics gesture that illustrates the path of an electron in a magnetic field.

Holl, 53, also is a student of science and found a spark for the project in the physics gesture known as the Right-Hand Rule, which he demonstrates by spreading thumb, forefinger and middle finger to point in different directions. To him, the gesture represents strong forces moving in opposite ways but belonging to the same system - like the seemingly different disciplines the museum embraces.

While Holl painted, his assistants poured rubber cement in latex gloves. Then they cut off three fingers, chopped off tips and played with the shapes. They made a series of small, often bizarre models with stumpy digits.

Eventually, the fingers molded into what became Holl's ultimate concept:"tripleness." When the museum opens next month, visitors will walk through three narrow, curving galleries that stretch across the rooftop like fingers. There will also be three tiers, three distinct uses (to create, explore and learn about art), and three types of natural light. The building is clad in three basic elements: red-stained concrete, hand-sanded aluminum panels and the glass of its huge windows and skylights.

The building is the result not only of an ingenious concept but optimism that Bellevue is crawling toward an urban identity. At 36,000 square feet, the museum is dwarfed by parking lots and neighboring buildings that sprawl and rise. What it lacks in size it makes up in idiosyncratic presence.

On a prominent street corner at Bellevue Way Northeast and Northeast Sixth Street, it will stir attention and debate, something museum officials and supporters felt was due.

The $23-million project is a relatively small job for Holl, whose firm works all over the world. But it closes an important loop, for it is just one block from where Holl, in the summer of 1967, held his first drafting job while a sophomore at the University of Washington. He left the region after graduating in 1971, frustrated by how much building there was and how little of it practiced what he considered architecture.

Bellevue was the last place he imagined himself working in again.

"One of the special things about this particular project - a kind of secret joy I get - is working in a town I had criticized so heavily because of how badly it was being developed, with big parking lots, no pedestrian quality and suburban sprawl," he said while visiting the construction site. "Now it is becoming urbanized, a big city. And here I am, building right to the street."

SEATTLE ARCHITECT Alan Sclater had never met Holl, but knew enough about him to know he would be the right person to design the museum. He knew Holl was an artist himself, an architect lauded for the care he applied to smaller projects, and a Northwest native.

So Sclater sent the museum's advertisement for architects to Holl's office. Coincidentally, Holl was flying to Seattle the next day to spend time with his parents in Manchester, near Port Orchard, and to check the status of his first public project in the region, the Chapel of St. Ignatius on the Seattle University campus.

Two days later, Holl called Sclater from Manchester and the two decided to team up and apply.

However, when the day came in late summer of 1997 for the museum's selection committee to interview its four finalists, Holl couldn't leave New York. Prospective clients from Ohio were coming to his New York office that day. The Ohio people wouldn't cancel and neither would Bellevue.

So with the help of Sclater, Holl did something he had never done before and hasn't done since: He participated in a teleconference job interview. The committee sat in a conference room watching as one monitor showed Holl speaking and another displayed projects he described. Because of the long-distance connection, his mouth and words were slightly out-of-sync. He couldn't make eye contact with the interviewers or read their body language. Holl was sure, Sclater recalls, that it had been a disaster.

Instead, he connected from 3,000 miles away. Museum Director Diane Douglas said the decision was not hard.

"We felt his creative process was so much akin to what we were trying to teach and what this museum was all about," she said. "In a sense, it fit that we were working with an artist, like we always do."

It didn't hurt that Holl's career was exploding right then. He long has had a reputation within architecture circles as a deep thinker and for winning prestigious design competitions. He is a tenured professor of architecture at Columbia University, an author of a number of well-received books in the field and had developed a series of notable projects, several in Europe and Asia.

As Bellevue made its selection, Holl was being praised internationally for both his signature work, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland, and the Chapel of St. Ignatius, which had just opened.

After examining the Bellevue site, interviewing staff and patrons and learning the museum's program, Holl began searching for a concept.

In designing the Seattle chapel, he studied Jesuit writings, ritual and belief. He developed a concept, or metaphor, of "seven bottles of light in a stone box." Part of the genius behind the building is how natural light enters in varying volumes and through different colored filters to create a powerful mood. Each light corresponds to a part of Jesuit worship.

For the Bellevue museum, he focused on finding relationships between art, science and technology. The first thing Douglas and other museum representatives saw when they traveled to Holl's Manhattan office that December were stacks of his watercolor paintings and a series of stumpy models, including the glove-inspired ones.

Eventually, they saw diagrams exploring three concepts of time: linear, cyclical and what Holl calls "mythical time."

"Islamic theologians wrote of a time that is not continuous flow," Holl said, "but a galaxy of instants."

He used those concepts to help develop different natural lighting schemes for each of the three rooftop galleries he had in mind.

Holl's assistants used a computer program to model the extent and effect of natural light in the building during various times of the day. For more exact ideas, they built large models and put each on a platform they could tilt to reproduce the effect of time of day, season, clouds and rain.

As a Northwest native, Holl paid special attention to our light, which can range from subtle to stingy.

The first building Holl designed in the region was his parents' home on the shore of Manchester Bay. He did the work for free in the mid-1970s, but it took six drafts and his threat to not do any more before his father, Myron, finally approved the design. It is a relatively small house with sweeping curves and jutting forms, a stairwell that runs from the basement to the top floor and a huge, free-standing block fireplace.

"When people ask me what, if anything, I've regretted," Holl says, "I tell them I made my mother's kitchen too small. It's been 25 years and it's still too small."

Myron and Helen Holl have been married more than 50 years and have owned the property almost as long. The family's summer cabin is still on the site and serves as a guest house when Steven or his younger brother, Jim, a New York artist and teacher, visit. Inside the cabin are desks for both sons; their paintings and drawings cover the walls.

As a kid, Holl build several three houses and forts, some underground. About a year ago he built a rough rectangular box of a building at the edge of his parents three-acre parcel. It looks like a fort with a convex skylight shaped vaguely like a periscope. He uses it as a getaway studio.

Holl painted this rendering of his parents' cabin on the shore of Manchester Bay, near Port Orchard, while sitting in a fishing boat. His first job as an architect was designing his parents' home, depicted to the right of the cabin. The cabin still serves as a retreat for Holl and his brother.

Holl, like his father and brother, was a natural artist. He also was good at math and became entranced by the Seattle skyline each time the ferryboat carried him across Elliott Bay. The Space Needle, which he saw at the World's Fair when he was 15, gave him a lasting, optimistic view of architecture.

Myron, 80, is an accomplished draftsman and a perfectionist who boasts that when he digs a ditch you can count on it being straight. For many years, he operated a sheet-metal shop and installed and sold furnaces throughout Kitsap County. Steven helped him, getting a feel for building and an appreciation for pure materials that he still relies on today.

The Bellevue museum is a good example. He chose to dress it in concrete textured to look like wood planks and in hand-sanded panels of marine aluminum. He eschewed ornate trim and called for huge windows, arriving at a building that manages to be both elegant and rough.

Holl was close to dropping out of the University of Washington architecture school in the late '60s because he found so much of the curriculum and teachers uninspiring.

Professor Herman Pundt, who died four months ago after decades of teaching at the university, was an exception. Pundt encouraged Holl toward a more thorough form of study and to spend his junior year in Rome.

"Rome was the first time," Holl said, "that I was truly inspired by architecture."

He lived behind the Pantheon and went inside it every day for several months. He watched light stream in through the opening in the roof and how light and weather changed the interior's texture and feeling.

Prominent Seattle architect Ed Weinstein was the other UW student who studied in Rome that year (and later was on the Bellevue museum's selection committee).

"He was always looking for sources of inspiration," Weinstein said. "He is adventurous, a relentlessly conceptual architect. He is not interested in simply making a building; he wants to make offerings to architecture."

After graduating, Holl interned for a few years in San Francisco, then spent a year studying and teaching at London's Architecture Association. Among the architects there at the time was Rem Koolhaas of Holland, who earlier this year won a competition to design the new Seattle Public Library. Holl was the runner-up.

In 1977, Holl moved to New York and into an apartment in a mostly vacant former department store, which came with a $275 lease and a view of a cemetery. It doubled as his first office. It didn't have hot water, so he joined the YMCA in order to get hot showers.

He didn't have clients, either, but he pretended he did, creating designs after finishing with his half-time drafting job each day. He eventually began teaching at the Parsons School of Design and got his first real commission, a pool house for a student's father.

During those initial years in New York, Holl co-founded an alternative magazine known as Pamphlet Architecture that spotlighted works of young, overlooked architects, including himself.

His career steadily gained steam through designs he entered in competitions, but he became far better known and sought-after when the Museum of Modern Art showed and purchased some of his design work.

Also in 1989, he began teaching at Columbia and published "Anchoring," one of the better-selling architecture books ever. In it, he wrote about "the phenomenological," a sensual, essentially subconscious effect of space and light that he strives for in each project.

Through his teaching and writing, his designs and his increasing body of architecture, he built a solid reputation.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland, considered by many to be Holl's best work, opened in 1998.

For his most acclaimed work, the museum in Helsinki that opened in 1998, Holl's design was selected from 516 entries in a worldwide competition. Museum director Tuula Arkio said Holl's watercolors, included in his anonymous entry, won the job.

"Undoubtedly, any architect who was able to comprehend the nature of the museum spaces in such a manner had to understand a great deal about art," Arkio said. SEATTLE UNIVERSITY'S Chapel of St. Ignatius is situated in a quiet corner of a quiet campus with enough space that Holl could incorporate a shallow rectangular pond at its entrance.

The Bellevue site, by contrast, takes virtually every inch of a tight corner lot along busy, four-lane Bellevue Way. It is directly across from an entrance to the Bellevue Square mall, which used to house the museum. There is a grocery store next door to the south.

Taking up the entire block to the north is a vast hole in the ground that in the next year will grow into a 1.4-million-square-foot complex known as Lincoln Square: office towers, 22 floors of hotel rooms and condos, a sports club, a 12-screen movie theater and retail.

James Cheng, a former UW architecture-school classmate of Holl's, is overseeing the Lincoln Square project. When the two appeared together at a Bellevue luncheon, Holl turned to Cheng and joked, "Why are your buildings always bigger?"

Cheng, based in Vancouver, B.C., answered the question in an interview later, saying Holl simply doesn't want to do mammoth projects that can be cumbersome and compromising.

"He prefers intimate buildings he can turn into jewels," Cheng said. "Steven is an architect's architect, not a development architect. He's an intellectual but not in a cold way. His buildings have warmth, but above all they have integrity."

In designing Lincoln Square, Cheng waited for Holl to choose colors for the museum before choosing his own gray-green, so his massive development wouldn't overwhelm the smaller building.

Color was important because the museum needed a strong presence. Bellevue's downtown palette is full of gray, brown and beige. Holl wanted something warmer and considered yellow and greens before finding red. The aluminum panels have a cool blue tint that plays with natural light.

Holl and museum director Douglas see the museum as a tool more than a building. He calls it an "art barn," a feeling evoked by the rough concrete that has been cast to look like 18-inch wood planks.

The concept of "tripleness" also led to the concept of openness, both in terms of nonlinear thinking and in connecting the museum to its roots as an outdoor arts fair.

Interspersed amid three rooftop galleries are six terraces and courtyards. One, called the Hubbell Terrace, will project images from space. Another terrace is a shallow pool. Another has a lighting system that changes with the presence of visitors.

The museum's main entrance from Bellevue Way stretches two stories high and is lined with glass. Its ceiling will serve as a projection screen.

The first floor of the museum includes a large forum, a cafe, and auditorium. An open and curving 5-foot-wide staircase loops from first floor to the top.

A library and classrooms are on the second floor, along with the "Explore Gallery," designed to teach about the creative processes of artists. The first exhibit will focus on Holl's process in designing the building.

The floors in the museum, other than inside a small auditorium, are black. The walls are simple white plaster.

The Bellevue Art Museum is trying to be a different, more interactive museum. It will not own a collection, instead borrowing from others. It will emphasize participation. Much of its focus will be on classes, demonstrations and making art, including electronic forms. There is space for an artist-in-residence program.

Each of the three rooftop galleries that curl across the length of the building were designed with different types of natural light in mind. The northern gallery has high windows facing north. The center one, shaped like a crescent, contains a long, high window oriented to roughly track the sun's path across the sky. The southern gallery gets fragmented light through a series of skylights.

Holl was mindful of the view from windows of the surrounding buildings that tower over the museum. Originally, he planned to cap the museum with zinc, which he used in Helsinki, but that proved too costly, so he settled on a plastic material painted to match the color of the aluminum panels. The view of the building from above, with curling galleries and terraces hinting at the design's genesis, is perhaps the most provocative. HOLL'S REPUTATION and workload has soared the past six years. His $87 million addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City breaks ground this month and he has domestic projects from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus to the University of Iowa. He was a finalist - and the only American invited to compete - for designing the Center for Human Evolution in Spain.

Yet, he has continued to look for work near his hometown. Besides the Seattle chapel and the Bellevue museum and competing for the Seattle Public Library project, Holl was interested in the Experience Music Project before Gehry was hired and in the recent addition to the Frye Art Gallery.

He plans to attend the opening celebration at the Bellevue Art Museum on New Year's Eve and says it means a lot to him that his parents and friends from school, even high school, will be there, too.

While Holl speaks plainly he writes about architecture with poetic, far-reaching words. In his latest book, "Parallax," published this month, he describes the Bellevue Art Museum and other recent projects in terms of "chemistry of matter" and "pressure of light."

Discussing how a building looks, he said while seated on a folding chair inside the shell of the Bellevue museum, misses the point.

"The feeling of space, light, material is not an academic process. For me, the experience that you get from a building is the measure. It's a feeling. Like how you feel riding on the ferry when the incredible Northwest sunlight washes over Elliott Bay."