Tom Kundig: Open to the elements

Wish Magazine, The Australian

5 April 2012

Tom Kundig’s fondness for engineering ‘gizmos’, reclaimed timber and
extreme landscapes makes him America’s zeitgeist architect.

As domestic architecture seeks a deeper affinity with nature we hear a lot from architects about the value of place, geography, topography and region. When Seattle-based Tom Kundig uses this vocabulary to describe his work it takes on a powerful resonance, for Kundig's architectural imagination - his imagination full stop - is shaped intimately by place. That place is the American northwest.

Kundig is a principal and co-owner of Olson Kundig Architects, founded in Seattle by Jim Olson in 1966. While the two men share a similar sensitivity towards building and place, Olson's work is the more urbane and conventionally refined. If Olson is vanilla, then Kundig, the younger of the two by a decade and a half, is rust. He favours a distinctive palette of reclaimed wood, concrete and steel, an almost obsessive orientation towards wild, windswept, frostbitten landscapes, and a fondness for bespoke engineering devices, which he calls "gizmos", constructed with the help of craftsmen.

One such device is found at the lakeside Chicken Point Cabin, in northern Idaho. Responding to his client's desire for a house built beside the water and open to it, Kundig conceived a six-tonne steel and glass window that can be opened by a simple hand-operated wheel that turns a driveshaft and a set of gears calibrated like those of a bicycle. The result: a two-storey-high window that can even be opened by the client's six-year-old son. Devices such as these have become such a style signature that they risk becoming gimmicks, Kundig says on the line from Seattle. "Everyone wants one."

In fact they have their genesis in his own story. "I grew up in eastern Washington and northern Idaho," he explains, "and spent a lot of time in southern British Columbia and southern Alberta. Mountain climbing had a deep influence on me, on how I engage with nature, particularly all the gears and pulleys that you use in that landscape."

But the landscape had larger lessons to teach the then 20-year-old Kundig, who will visit Australia next month on a speaking tour. "It's not about getting to the top of the climb in every case; some of the most difficult and most important climbs are not on Everest and the like. It's about how you do it elegantly and efficiently and with style." He has been able, he believes, to translate these qualities into a working method that moulds his tactile, clever and much coveted houses. Of rare and palpable beauty, they are the subject of two pictorial books published by Princeton Architectural Press.

Of course you can climb to the top of a mountain but you only ever overcome the elements momentarily. Extreme landscapes, Kundig believes, impart an essential humility. In the introduction to the first book on his houses, Tom Kundig: Houses, he recounts the story of a night spent on a peak's north face, how he endured the "infinite cold" and a "seemingly endless" wait for "the painfully slow, but merciful sun" to rise.

"If you're really sensitive to what you've just been through you realise that, by the grace of God, you just got out of there without being hurt," he tells me. "It gives you a sense of your position in the world and in that natural landscape." His work, perhaps as a result of such hard-won humility before nature, is at once sculptural and pliable; hard and soft. Whether it's a jewel-like writer's cabin on the northwest coast's San Juan Island or The Pierre, a concrete and steel structure embedded in a rocky outcrop on nearby Lopez Island, his houses, huts and cabins draw attention both to themselves and the landscapes which frame them. These structures may be small objects in large landscapes but they achieve a unique psychological and material spaciousness: nature is at once subdued and embraced. The threshold between out-there and in-here is artfully blurred.

Kundig's parents immigrated to the US from Switzerland in the 1950s. Though his father was an architect, young Tom was deeply ambivalent about the profession during its years of overweening hubris. "When I was growing up there were very few architects that I would consider touchpoints," he recalls. "Possibly that's the result of being around architects. It made me skeptical. I thought they were pompous, so full of themselves. Certain kinds of architects and their architecture are so self-important that, frankly, I find them unappealling."

Everything changed when he encountered the work of an Australian architect via an open book on his father's work bench. That architect was Glenn Murcutt. "I was struck by the work. It really resonated with me that someone on the other side of the Pacific Ocean was working in this vein. It was not like the architecture I'd been used to. It was completely accessible, beautiful, and at the same time rational and poetic."

To this day he counts the discovery of Murcutt as a turning point on his path to architecture. In his private pantheon, the Australian Pritzker Prize-winner's homes are the equivalent of Le Corbusier's celebrated church at Ronchamp, the Parisian Maison de Verre, and the work of Italian Carlo Scarpa with its distinct regional timbre. Two other Australian architects Kundig feels a deep affinity with are Sean Godsell and Peter Stutchbury. Binding the Australian trio and himself, as if into an informal trans-Pacific school, is a nuanced response to big skies and natural, open landscapes. "When you grow up in a place like Australia, that landscape is pretty overwhelming," Kundig offers. "That is your deal."

Stutchbury, who met Kundig at an architecture symposium in Canada recently, believes his work is "genuinely inventive" and singles out for attention his gizmos. "They may be confronting, or physically demanding. But they are an essential part of the nature of the building; of its work engine. What's more these mechanical systems are very physical, hands-on. They connect us with something we used to be, in contrast to the lazy, thoughtless hands-free zone we're moving into. Now here's an area of domestic architecture that hasn't really been explored before."

Although a number of Kundig's clients are what he describes as "force of nature" women of great individuality and presence, there is a pragmatic and masculine stamp to much of his work. Well before he was able to climb a mountain he found himself, as a West Coast child, in an environment shaped by the mining industries of an earlier age. "I remember watching with fascination the mining and logging industries," he says. "They're all gone now, gone somewhere else. I still recall these machines on the sides of hills and even today you find a lot of heavy machinery from the extraction industries abandoned. They retain a poignant, mysterious sculptural quality." The allure of this rusted industrial archaeology is not simply romantic, nostalgic or poetic. He was fascinated as a child with the physics of transporting "big things" with man-made devices: "It's just the way I'm wired."

This orientation to the physical world and to its manipulation through durable structures and ingenious devices, is powerfully felt in his architecture. But so, too, are more ethereal, mystical qualities associated with the Eastern philosophical tradition. During the searching years of his 20s, when he was studying architecture at the University of Washington in Seattle (he has both undergraduate and masters degrees from there), Kundig was drawn to Robert Pirsig's cultish Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and The Wisdom of Insecurity by the Zen populariser Alan Watts.

A book that was to have a profound influence on his development as an architect was Japanese author Junichiro Tanizaki's essay In Praise of Shadows, and its influence is especially felt in his Shadowboxx house. This occupies a remote and exposed bluff above an 18m drop to the ocean with a view of the Olympic Mountains, while behind it the land rises towards a thicket of trees. The exterior cladding is allowed to rust and blend into its terrain while the interior floors and ceiling are of reclaimed wood; the walls of polished steel. A steel chimney pipe centres the house, providing a structural support and a fire around which the owners gather when the temperature drops and the wind rips in through the straits. In a guest room at one end of the house, Kundig has designed one of his gizmos: a bathhouse roof of considerable heft that opens like a cigar-box lid by means of a steel counterweight, two steel pivot hinges and two pairs of lifting arms.

"It was completely intentional with Shadowboxx that there was a nod and a wink to Tanizaki's little book," he tells me. "I gave it," he adds with a laugh, "to the owners." On the downside the dark-hued house is so saturated in shadow that, in Kundig's view, it has never been adequately photographed.

Kundig's rustic-chic aesthetic has deep roots in the American northwest and bears the distinctive metal-plate stamp of its industrial traditions. But it travels well, too. To date, he has also built in Manhattan's East Village, Hawaii and Spain, and the growing popularity of his work suggests he will soon be working farther afield. He is, he confesses, "a little nervous" as his career crescendos. "People start expecting you to do what they've seen and it's easy to do that, very comfortable."

When clients request a piece of gizmo magic the architect is at pains to point out that, while he's happy to oblige, "the only way it's really going to happen is if it emerges as a response to a problem. Otherwise it's a decoration." The challenge he has set himself is to avoid the trap of slickness and stasis, to continue to evolve and to grow; to remain open, a little like his characterful houses, to the breathing world.*