This fly-through animation of Steven Holl's design for a new Visual Arts Building at the University of Iowa was created by 3D design students at the school (+ movie).

The animation was created by a team of students and university professors at the School of Art and Art History, which will move into the new structure once it's complete, together with American firm Steven Holl Architects and BNIM.

The movie takes viewers on a journey through the interior, beginning at the bottom of a long ramp on the ground floor and panning upwards, showing the different levels that the studio describes as "shifted layers where one floor plate slides past another."

It then shows the view back down this ramp towards the entrance, where some of the curved glazed courts that cut into the rectangular building can be seen.

The film then travels up the stairs to the top floor and along a corridor to a light-filled gallery, showing off the channel-glass lightwells and daylight filtered through perforated stainless steel panels.

The view into different areas of the building across the central forum is explored next, before flying across the void to another gallery and terrace on the other side.

Positioned adjacent to the existing award-winning Art West Building by Steven Holl, the Visual Arts building will relocate teaching spaces from a 1936 building that was badly damaged when the campus flooded in 2008.

The new building will be used by students in the ceramics, sculpture, metals, photography, print-making and 3D multimedia departments. It will also feature graduate student studios, faculty and staff studios, plus offices and gallery space.

Construction began this week and is due for completion in 2016. Read more about the design of the building in our earlier story.

Other projects we've published by Steven Holl include an athletics facility for Columbia University in New York, an art museum with an illuminated glass tunnel in China and a cluster of five towers around a public plaza, also in China.

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