Olson Kundig
Tom Kundig, owner and design principal of Olson Kundig, talks about architecture, avalanches, and artists.
This interview is part of The Second Studio Podcast hosted by FAME Architecture & Design.
Dragonfly in Whitefish, MT - Photography ©NicLehoux
This week David and Marina are joined by architect Tom Kundig, owner and design principal of Olson Kundig to discuss his childhood amongst artists and architects; mountain climbing, skiing, and a near-death experience; his philosophy and positive outlook on life; the practice and his partnership with Jim Olson; architectural processes, tools and his experience with materiality; opening a New York Office; and more. Enjoy!
MB: Tom, tell us a bit more about where you are from and how you got into architecture.
TK: My dad was an architect so I was growing up around architects and, in particular, artists. I think probably the artists had more influence on my career than the architects. In fact, it was pretty clear early in my childhood, I did not want to be an architect. I actually left for the university not wanting to be an architect. That was possibly one of the last things I was interested in pursuing. I was more interested in the hard sciences, whatever that means, and physics in particular was an interest, in geophysics.
DL: Why would have that been the case? There's always the joke that if you have a parent who's an architect, they're very likely going to try their best to deter their kid from becoming an architect. Were you pretty aware and understanding of what your dad did and what kind of architect was he?
TK: He had a classic architect background. Started with relatively small projects, and residential projects and they grew to civic projects and larger-scale projects. Both my parents were from Switzerland, so I'm actually a Swiss citizen, which has had an interesting impact on my career. I was born in California. This is after World War II, of course, and Europe is in this rebuilding mode, and it's a very chaotic moment in time. Everybody was interested at that time in what was America about. So a lot of Europeans would take some time out of their lives, move to America and see what they thought. And that's why I was born in California.
Then again, my dad was an architect here in America working for firms. Usually, in the early fifties, you would get work because of the relatively difficult sort of work, especially in the architectural realm. You tended to migrate to places that had large military bases because, during the Cold War, there was a lot of energy that was being put into the military base. My parents initially moved to Salt Lake City then I was born in California, near a military base in Merced, California. Then they moved to Spokane, Washington, which is in eastern Washington in northern Idaho. That's really where I would say I grew up. I was around architects my entire life. We did move back to Switzerland for a bit, I was about five years old until about six and a half.
Then they missed America, so we came back. The reason I resisted architecture was, I think because I was around a lot of artists and I found the two cultures mutually dependent on each other. But I was really attracted to the character and the culture of the artists more than the character and the culture of the architects. I found architects, frankly, a little bit entitled and not particularly fun to be around, but I found the artist as a kid a lot of fun to be around. Ultimately one of those artists became a mentor to me. I was around some really amazing artists, they all sort of congregated around this funny little corner of the United States. There was just a huge influence.
I knew I would never be an artist, I think you learn that early on. There's sort of a mindset, a culture, or an agenda of an artist that I don't particularly have. This is a long answer to why I became an architect… at some point that art spirit, was really, it remains and was really important to me as a kid. But also there was a rational part of my agenda and architecture is in fact, an old quote, “the intersection between the rational, the poetic”. So I found myself oddly like a magnet going back into architecture during my university years, and I couldn't be happier.
DL: It's funny to hear your description, from when you were a child, of the perceived differences between artists and architects. During the 1950s, the average architect who worked in an office… was a very different scene back then. It was all white shirts, maybe a blue shirt, and all the same color tie, and obviously a lot of men and male-dominated. A very different kind of vibe.
The Pierre in San Juan Islands, WA - Photography ©DwightEscheliman
MB: Has your opinion about artists and architects changed since? Do you still feel like architects are mostly entitled?
TK: That would be a dangerous question to answer, but I think like in any profession, you find your core colleagues and I just have really close friends in architecture across the country and around the globe. We do share a DNA or an agenda. It feels fantastic. The question is a good one though because I do think you should, as an architect, really in a way, work outside your realm of architecture, because in fact, architecture at its core… you're a voyeur of culture. You're interested, you're a person that's curious about life, you're curious about what the situation is.
And if you're too focused on the architecture group, it's almost like speaking the same language to the point where you forget that there are other languages. Architecture is about every language, you know, and that's why you want to go to all sorts of cultures, all sorts of professions, and all sorts of clients. If you're doing your work, if you're doing effective work as an architect, you're actually using that knowledge that you've gained just with all these different experiences.
DL: Sometimes it is difficult for the average architect to have that mindset, or to feel that way, or to operate that way because it can at times be a very restrictive kind of profession with the building code, the budget, etc… all these very pragmatic, real, and serious things can easily weigh down on a person. It's easy to just have all those many problems become the full scope of the vision.
TK: A hundred percent agree. I have a term for it, I call it “skiing the trees”. I grew up skiing. Skiing was a very important activity for me as mountain climbing was very important as a kid. I remember somebody once said, “If you ever want to understand somebody's personality, go skiing with them.” It's a great recommendation because of how a person gets ready for a ski day, how a person skis during the day, and how they make their choices, It's really interesting to see the different personalities emerge. My favorite kind of skiing, or I'll say it's fantastic to go down a crystal, you know, open bowl of fresh powder and do figure eights or do a series of very tight turns.
In my generation, that was really important. But honestly, my favorite type of skiing was skiing the trees or skiing the gullies which was more like jazz in a sense. You are trying to ski between the trees and you don't know when these trees are coming up. It's like you're dealing with a conversation with the forest in a sense, and that's an overstatement, but you don't have a set path. You're trying to figure out how you can get through. I think that's actually a beautiful journey to not see these obstacles as problems. A tree is an obstacle, but the way you get around those obstacles, that's when the innovation happens. That's when the “aha” moments I think, happen in a career.
“A tree is an obstacle, but the way you get around those obstacles, that’s when the innovation happens.”
DL: We definitely want to hear about some of those obstacles but sticking with the skiing analogy, you were talking about reading personalities when you ski with somebody. I am just curious, what would be some things you would recognize from somebody when they ski or what does it mean if they fall over?
TK: I’ll talk about the extremes. There's the person that everything is neat and tidy and perfectly choreographed. It’s perfectly sort of set up and that's one extreme, you know, perfect, everything is precise. Then there's the other personality, which I probably tend more to, I almost get bored immediately doing that kind of repetitive precise pattern. I'll want to work my way over to a situation where I'm actually trying to dig into whatever talent there might be, or whatever skill there might be, to sort of solve the ski problem in front of me. If there was a bush, a tree, a gully, a little cliff, or something like that, navigate that. That's when my sort of energy level and my sort of focus immediately, is into solving that problem.
DL: Sometimes I feel like architects tend to be more like the first person you described. Everything must be perfectly aligned and exact… precision is important but at the same time, I wish that, and maybe I'm criticizing myself, I were freer like an artist, to just think totally weirdly outside the box and not think of everything as a perfect puzzle that has to be perfectly resolved.
TK: That's exactly right. It's not about being sloppy, it's about actually still being precise, but it's about letting yourself go in a sense, like the inner art of the inner game of tennis or something like that, where you're thinking sort of outside yourself in a way, and you're so skilled at what you do that you can. If you sort of release the tightness of those ropes you will discover things and be able to find ways that will be hugely important to the project. That's one reason I frankly like working with all sorts of different clients and all sorts of different projects, all sorts of different climates, and cultures, is because each one of them provides a set of idiosyncratic circumstances. And to your point, David, that's context to me.
When we talk about context and architecture, that's what it is. That particular solution, that particular building, that particular moment can only happen at that moment in that place during those conversations with that client. That's one reason I try to, in my career, have as many small projects as large projects and let the small projects inform the large projects and vice versa. It's almost like when you mountain climb, you have a rack of hardware and all of it is designed in a way that it can become a tool. After years of doing architecture, you have basically a rack of tools that solve a problem. You don't really know at the outset you want to get to the top of a route or a mountain or whatever, but you don't know really how you're gonna get to it. You don't know what the context of the climate's gonna be, the context of the climbing partner possibly, the rock, the ice, or the snow conditions but you have these tools, and you can use those tools to solve the problem safely. I think that's what architecture is all about.
DL: It's a beautiful description. One of the questions that we always ponder is, “How does one convey that to a client, who a lot of times wants some measure of assurance at the beginning (which makes total sense)?”. A lot of times clients want even more assurance than the architects can provide because the process is at times more like jazz or going through trees or using whatever tool. You know, we have to start and see.
TK: That's an interesting question because I do think a client that hires an architect is already halfway there. They're already risk-takers. They're already hiring a group of people in a situation. They don't even know what they're going to wind up with so they're already willing in a way to climb a mountain because you want everything to be positive, but you know, you're always set up with challenges. You're already a personality that has an agenda that's willing to take risks. If you're looking for ultimate reassurance that the route is set and there won't be any issues, positive, negative because everybody of course is trying to avoid the negatives, you should be looking to balance out the negatives with the positives, because the positives of working with an architect are unbelievably higher then the ordinary. If you want to homogenize the risk to a certain level you're going to end up with a more ordinary result. People that hire architects want extraordinary results.
“People that hire architects want extraordinary results. ”
DL: So back in college, you initially were studying to be a geophysicist, which is quite fascinating. Did you switch during that time?
TK: I sure did. I figured out really quickly, I was not the most clever person in the class in geophysics and it was just, who knows how we all make decisions as we mature and as we kind of grow. I think it was a naive decision or not a decision… may be a naive direction on my part. I was a mountain climber and a mountain skier, so I loved the mountains. I loved the science of geology and the physics of how the tools worked and how the landscape was changing. I just found it, and I still find it completely fascinating, but it isn't necessarily my driving talent.
I wouldn't have guessed that being an architect was a wise career move but I found myself taking art classes to sort of balance the science classes and taking an architecture class. I just sensed there was a comfort and an understanding of what I was reading and what I was learning and what I was doing.
MB: So what did your dad say when you told him you were switching majors?
TK: He did say, “What are you gonna do for a living?” and of course, he was laughing and I was laughing. Totally fair. As you know, it's a tough commitment. If kids tell me, “I want to be just like you and whatever”, I go, “Oh, wow. You know, for whatever reason I've been lucky. I've worked really hard and all I can recommend is, yes, do make a choice to become an architect. But there are so many heartbreaks along the way”. There certainly were in my career, there is so much commitment and time commitment, physical and emotional. It’s like being an actor, an athlete. You have to just throw yourself into it completely. It's an amazing profession and you get to work with these unbelievable clients, with these unbelievable agendas and these unbelievable places. Frankly, is it a better profession to just experience life out there? I don't know if there is.
If you're an architect, you have to be curious about life. You have to be interested in what's happening out there. You have to ask the questions. And here you're working with all these different clients a lot of them at the leading edge of their professions. What an opportunity you get to look a little bit behind the curtain at that profession, at that lifestyle. It's completely fascinating and of course, with that understanding, that knowledge, then you can bring that back into your own hopefully richer design, and development agenda. You just have a bigger and better understanding of the world, of the landscape, of the universe.
Bilgola Beach House, Sydney Australia - Photography ©RoryGardiner
DL: I'm kind of wondering if some folks are thinking, that all sounds amazing and they agree with it, and I do as well, and that's why we're all doing this, but also, you're Tom Kundig! You’ve reached success so maybe it's easier for you to say these things and feel this way now because you've gotten to where you are. That's an indirect way of asking the question, “What were some of the times in your career that were difficult?” You mentioned heartbreaks or obstacles.
TK: I still have the heartbreak moments and I'll admit I've been really fortunate. I've worked hard, and as you know, you work hard for your luck. Yeah. I think that's true in architecture, and I've been lucky and I've worked hard. There were so many moments as a young adult working in a profession that was kind of way larger, in different areas that, I didn't know where I was going. I didn't really know how it would work out, but there was something that was part of my DNA, and that is I love adventure. I don't mean like you're doing a solo trip across Northern Africa or something like that, although that's kind of terrific.
I was taught by both my clients, a close climbing partner, and the artist I grew up with, that life is short and life is an adventure regardless of what you're doing, and you should just be optimistic and energetic about how you engage it. That's easy to say sometimes when you're right in the middle of just a really tough spot. We all have tough spots all the time throughout our lives. It still is something you can fall back on. If you've done that enough to realize that you come out of these tough spots, you learn something from it, and it actually leads to something better, maybe impactful.
At this point, there have been enough successes that I am lucky, and I really do have a moment in my career, where things are easier, not necessarily easier to generate. I still think design is a hard process. It doesn't come that easy to me, but I have to work hard at it.
In fact, there was a moment in my life when I was 16 years old when I had a basically near-death experience with an avalanche in the Canadian Rockies on a winter ascent. It all worked out of course, and we got out. It scared the living hell out of me. I was only 16 years old. I still think about my parents if they had any idea, really. They had heard it happened, but really how close it all was. Well, that was a moment where I just knew terror at its core level. I would sometimes think, “Well, things are bad, but things were really bad back then”.
It just puts things in perspective. Because of the geophysics background or physics background, when I get sort of all wound up with local politics or personal politics or whatever, I'll think, “Oh, wait a minute. Think about the cosmos. Think about our moment. You know, just put it in perspective”. I think that's really important to hold onto because it is a short life. You don't have that much time. You just grab a hold of it and have a good run at it. And boy, what a privilege to be alive!
DL: The avalanche. Can you tell us a bit more about that? Because that's not a common thing to have experienced!
TK: You know with Swiss parents, of course, the mountains were really important in our lives. As a young 12 year old we took a family trip up to the Canadian Rockies. And I just remember seeing some climbers just leaving the parking lot to go climb North Face at Edith Cavell. I didn't know it was Edith. I knew it was Edith Cavell, but I didn't know the importance of the climb. I was just fascinated with it. Some kids are fascinated with the music and some kids are fascinated with other things, other agendas. I was just fascinated with that because the mountains were already important for skiing.
I just became enamored with the idea of climbing. I was lucky to grow up in a community that had a couple of the best mountain climbers in the world. I would watch their careers, their climbing careers, professional careers stuff they would do. I found it beautiful. I found it fascinating. I went with a couple of those climbers to the first winter ascent of Mount Athabasca in Central British Columbia, it was something like minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit when we approached the mountain and the sun came out and hit the top of the mountain. Literally, probably half the mountain came down on us and I was on a rope and I was running off to the side with the lead of the climb. At the last minute, the avalanche turned and only hit us sort of peripherally. I think we kind of passed out in a way because of the situation. It took two or three of the people in our party down part of the mountain. It was a very lucky moment and we all got out safe, thankfully. I climbed until, probably my mid-thirties and, and skied until probably my late forties, I'm just too busy now working and traveling. I miss the mountains. I work in the mountains, so it's good to be in the mountains, but I'm missing actually being in the mountains.
DL: The artist that you had mentioned a couple of times if I'm not mistaken, is Harold Blaze and according to our quick research, you had worked with him. He is a sculptor and he works in metal, and that was actually prior to joining up with Jim Olson?
TK: I grew up with Harold's family probably from about the age of five up till now. I would be out at their compound and I would see not only his metal sculptures, his concrete sculptures, his wood sculptures all his inventions. He was kind of a wild man, and he was always innovative and audaciously innovative, frankly. The way he made things and what he did. I could tell he was a creative force that was special, and it was just hilarious and wonderful to be around all the time. He was a force in nature. I don't know if I've ever met anybody that's worked harder in their life against all odds in a way. And yet he still had an optimistic spirit on so many levels.
He was a mentor to me, to work hard, be creative, and just have fun at what I do. So most impactful for me was probably his desire to take risks and use his tools to make risky stuff or take materials and push the materials to their limits. I grew up with steel. I'm very comfortable with steel. That obviously had a huge effect on my career. A lot of the work, especially my mid-career work was a lot in steel when people were not really working in steel. That became really an important part of my success because I was working in a medium that people had avoided or just not thought of when it was very natural for me.
His agenda was always to engage the materials. It’s really important for him as an artist that he actually understood the material science of the thing that he was building even if it was instinctual or intuitive. I hope that comes out in my work, I learned to actually really have a deep understanding of the materials that we were working with, and let the materials in a way guide the decisions, the design decisions. So they become rational decisions. Because again, architecture is the intersection between, I believe poetry and the rational and the tectonics or the science of materials.
Rio House, Rio de Janeiro Brazil - Photography ©MairaAcayaba
DL: I think it'd be very difficult for an office to get to your guys' level, to do the kind of intricate, custom, unique steel details, the mechanical and moving elements, the non-moving elements, and all of that without having a pretty serious background and understanding of the materials as you describe. There's sort of a question that comes up more and more recently, of architects knowing less about construction broadly, and less also about specific materials and the nuances of how they work. Everything's on the screen, it's all CAD, it's all abstract. There seems to be friction there, right?
TK: A hundred percent agree. And I don't wanna be the old guy, I was doing this 30, 40 years ago, but it's an interesting conversation. I do have obviously a lot of opinions and what we drew by hand and there was a tangible, visceral sort of relationship to I think what you were doing on the drawing board. You had this sort of amazing peripheral sort of vision. And the problem with the screens is that you're basically focused on this part and you're forgetting about the site. The ability to really have meaningful floor plans as an example, is a bit of a lost art, to tell you the truth.
It's really natural for me to look at a floor plan, look at a section and an elevation, and assemble. It's just because I've been doing it for so many years, it didn't come naturally to me initially. I really had to work hard at being able to put together a plan section elevation, and I really had to understand how to read a floor plan. I had a little bit of a music background, and I would be with friends that were really good musicians and they could look at a sheet of music and they heard it. When I look at music, I'm following the bars and the notes and I have to sort of follow the menu in a sense. In a weird way, what we do as architects is we're composing music because that's what a musician does, or a composer, they're making marks on a piece of paper that has some sort of reference to a built thing.
“If we’re really doing our job, you can actually hear the music of your drawings.”
So if we're really doing our job, you can actually hear the music of your drawings. It's an interesting moment when I can look at the floor plan and it's like listening to music. It's not like you're hearing a melody, but it's like listening. It’s emotional. I've been noticing is it's harder and harder for us to find that sort of architectural moment that you can just feel it. If you go into a Kahn building or LeCorbusier, you just feel it when you're in the architecture, when you're actually in the building. They are soulful buildings. It's kind of rare now to find that in a modern building, and I don't know, I'm speculating it may be the process of how we imagine these buildings and make these buildings work.
DL: Talking about meaningful floor plans, do you mean that poor floor plans don't have the music?
TK: We don't experience necessarily a building as a floor plan, but we experience a building and what that means is you’re in a 360 experience. Even though your eyes are in front, you're still feeling it behind your head and around your head. We're dealing with this two-dimensional medium, which is a floor plan, a section, an elevation, and maybe some details or whatever. Those are just instructions. Those are really not architecture yet, but when it gets built, it is architecture. It's just like the music, when that music is played off, the composition, the marks and measures that are the music and a building finished is the music and how it's used. Just like a composition, you can actually feel the music in a floor plan or at least I think I can.
DL: So you had linked up with Jim Olson, and you joined his office in the eighties, Is that right?
TK: Correct. It was 1986, I came down from Alaska, lived a couple of years up in Alaska, and had my own firm with a good friend. It was, of course, that was a dream for me. I was up skiing and mountain climbing and doing architecture. I was pretty much in dreamland during a very interesting time in Alaska's cultural history but had to come back to Seattle. I was thinking you know, where am I going with my career? Because again, I was pretty serious about mountain skiing and mountain climbing, but it was pretty clear that was not going to be a profession I was going to end up in. I was in a transition and it was a moment in time where it worked out beautifully. I was always impressed with Jim’s kind of relentless position that he took in architecture.
When I came back down from Alaska, it was very deep into the postmodern style. Honestly, I had a problem with it. There was a moment where I actually thought I wasn't sure I was particularly interested in just immersing myself in this kind of style. I worked for other firms and I was watching this guy Jim Olson, who was doing his own thing. It was a modern architecture with his own take on it, and that's really important to me, that you really want to bring your own personal DNA into a situation and mix it with the clients and colleagues and whatever.
But his DNA was this, what he felt was important modern architectural agenda. What I found impressive about it was that it was not particularly seen as a popular style, but he just felt that it was important and he was relentless about following his own lead on that. I was almost more interested in his character than I was in his architecture if that makes sense. I thought this just felt right to be in the same office working for a personality that was true and authentic to his own inner agenda. Couldn't be happier! He's 84 years old and I couldn't be more proud of him. He's still working almost as hard as he used to.
MB: So how did that work out? You just cold-called him one day and be like, “Hey, Jim you want to meet up?”
TK: Yeah. In those days it was sort of like that. I didn't even know if they were hiring. In fact, it turned out that they really weren't hiring. It was a horrible time to be in architecture. The economics were just a disaster at that point. I think that was the years of interest rates at 12 to 18%. Obviously, those are difficult times. But I gave him a call and if I recall, he said, “We're really not hiring, but we'd like to just meet with you”. I met with them and they said, “Wow, we really shouldn't be hiring you, but we'll hire you”. I don't even know if I had necessarily anything important to show at that point, but I think for Jim, it's hiring a personality. I was more interested in his character than I was in his architecture, and I think it was the same for him.
Rio House, Rio de Janeiro Brazil - Photography ©MairaAcayaba
DL: You're very well known for single-family houses for sure. There's a certain kind of aesthetic, style, approach, manner, or philosophy that gets expressed aesthetically. There's a focus on materials and using materials and honoring them. I was wondering, when did that manner of architecture become more crystallized for you guys? And if that was truly a blending between you and Jim, or how did that come around?
TK: Oh, the mechanical stuff and the steel stuff actually came from my agenda. I think Jim has a different take and a different interest level, in that sort of device or that sort of materiality or maybe aesthetic agenda. I became a licensed architect when I was 24 years old. I had done whatever… and I did say to my dad, “You know I'm licensed, but honestly, I don't quite feel like I'm an architect” and he agreed because being licensed doesn't mean you're, you know, really an architect. Everybody has their own moment in their career when they've truly become an architect. For me, that was probably about 37 years old, something like that, where I had harvested my experiences growing up in an extraction industry area of Northern Idaho, Eastern Washington, and worked with an artist that made pulls and gizmos and things like that to move very heavy sculptures, just using his arm muscles and my arm muscles and leg muscles. Just using physics basically. I found it completely fascinating.
I was coming out of mountain climbing, doing the same thing, material science, and physics, just really engaging the nature of nature in many ways. So all of a sudden there was a moment where I would look back at the work I was doing back then, it was a little flory, if that makes sense, it didn't feel complete. You had a flash point or so, but it was a studio house where I walked in. It's a place that just means so much to me at the core. It's not reactive, this one felt like it came from the core. And since then, I've used my youth and my history growing up around artists, growing with architects, mountain climbing, mountain skiing, and traveling adventures and that's my library. It felt right. It felt like looking, like listening to a floor plan. You hear the music and I could feel the music in that project, again, it was a culmination of a lot of that stuff. I have colleagues that support our own idiosyncratic directions. I grew up in a hot rod culture. So I would see, the machinery, that was going to be important to my career. If I'm kind of in a place that's feeling stuck or whatever, I just think back you know, what would a hot rodder do?
Everybody has a background that can be meaningful to their work and it's soulful, frankly, because it really is part of your history. It was what you experienced, you can just bring that out and make it important to the architecture you're working on. That's when I thought I became an architect, is when that moment became authentic, you know, became real, to my core.
DL: All of that though… having the awareness, the skillset, and the intent is one thing, but being able to express it is a different thing. For an architect, it’s design skills, but also execution in terms of construction. As a practicing architect, there are a lot of thoughts that I have when I see your guys’ work and one of them is, “They've gotta be collaborating with some really, really, really good fabricators and contractors”.
TK: I kind of grew up on a construction site, working on a construction site. I was actually a laborer so I was kind of affected by how difficult it is to actually build these things. I was not in any leadership position to understand how to make it, I just was labor. But it had an impact on me. I understood that these people that I was working around were really working hard and they were deeply indebted in a way to the result. To this day I love talking to subcontractors, people that are actually fabricating and I'm interested in what they're doing and how they're doing it. There's no way I would have the skill to be able to do it.
I'm curious about, “Well, why are you doing it that way? What are you doing?” And when they understand that you're actually interested in what they're doing, they'll share an idea or a thought that is hugely impactful to a design, to a detail. There are so many details on projects I've worked on that I could attribute to a conversation I had with a craft person, either in their shop or out on the site. It came from a conversation and you have to have those conversations. The craft of these buildings, the hard craft, and let's be clear, to be a builder is to be a craftsperson.
Of course, we've had conversations about design-build, especially with the digital fabrication agenda, which of course takes fabrication out of the hands of the individual making it. So there's a whole conversation about the changing fabrication systems. It becomes maybe more of a possibility that a firm that's generating the digital information can actually take the digital information, the planning, and sort of manipulate it into a digital fabrication agenda. That’s probably the future. I don't think it's here yet.
Phil Turner is the genius that I get to work with on these gizmos. I was starting to bring up these ideas of big moving window walls or whatever. Well, I wouldn't know how to deliver that until got introduced to Phil Turner, who was an exhibit designer, and a fabricator/ He's a genius and he knows how to assemble something—how to make something—and fabricate using just ingenuity and innovation. So if I came up with a hair-brained idea and I knew enough about physics and or enough about systems it could actually be delivered by Phil.
Rio House, Rio de Janeiro Brazil - Photography ©MairaAcayaba
MB: You guys started as a fairly small office, and you are now over 250 people in two pretty big cities. Was that always the plan? I feel like oftentimes a lot of offices grow either intentionally or unintentionally and that one of their goals is to grow, maybe to expand the portfolio, maybe to do bigger projects. It seems to me, based on your guys' work, that it's not so much about that. It seems like it's maybe more about refining the craft and actually growing the design skills than those aspects of the profession.
TK: I think your summary feels absolutely right. There was never a plan to grow to any scale like this, it’s kind of shocking. If you came to the office, you would immediately recognize we're not a vertical sort of hierarchical office. Some of us have been around and we're in a position to make a decision that has global impacts in the office but it was always colleagues working together and we saw some success and that led to other opportunities. Your point is spot on. I think we just are adventurers at heart if all of a sudden an opportunity came along that was an adventure, we'd be really interested in it and doing it.
So all of a sudden these adventures are coming in and you wanna do them all because they're so interesting and fascinating. We worked really hard on those adventures, they keep coming in and at this point, we have to choreograph, how do we actually deliver?
DL: Just for some kind of background information and stats, how many people do you have at the Seattle office and the New York office?
TK: That's actually a really good question. We always felt we would never do branch offices. My dad's firm had branch offices and he came to me and said, “Do not do a branch office because you do a branch office that all of a sudden your branch office is in competition with the main office”. So we and I heard it from other architects that gave me advice. So we really avoided branching out. And again, we're doing work around the world: New Zealand, Australia, Asia, Europe, the East coast, South America, and all over North America. About two years ago during the pandemic when everybody was supposedly leaving New York or there was this like an Exodus right out of cities and whatever, we looked at each other and we said, you know, now's the time to move into New York because everybody is leaving.
We always said, “Well, they're doing this, maybe we should do something a little bit different”. Not that we're just looking to do something different, but just investigate what might be interesting about doing it differently. Of course, New York is a center for all of us and a fantastic city. We just felt like now we have to make a commitment as urbanists, as architects, we have to make a commitment to one of the major cities in the world. We've already made a commitment to Seattle. So we took a risk and we had no idea where it was going, but we felt it was important to show some solidarity in a weird way, in a small way. How could you turn your back on New York? It's intentional that maybe we have 12 people maximum in New York. We kind of call it an outpost, not a branch office. It's like a studio that just happens to be a couple of thousand miles away, but it's really intended not to be a center.
DL: It'll be really fascinating to see x number of years from now how the New York office evolves and how it changes in tone or doesn't change. You know, the other thing that's fascinating with the 250 people and the growth, and maybe some of this was covered already, is that when you look at the work that you guys produce and the office starts small and grows big, you would almost assume, “Well, maybe this office is very micromanaging because the work is so detailed and so personal and all these great marks”.
TK: It's really true that all projects are led by one of the owners. Now we just made nine new owners, it used to be five of us and it just recently changed. In order for us to actually deliver terrific work, the owners actually have to be working harder than anybody else in the office and actually be involved in the projects, deeply involved in the projects.
I think the technical phases are really important cuz if you understand technical and construction administration, you can take that experience and make rational decisions at the design, at the design phase. Which, which I do believe is still true. So when you work with me on a project, at some point I have the privilege of drawing the last line, or this is what I think we should present, doesn't mean that the ideas don't come from everybody else in the firm. That's the way it works here, best idea.
As an example, I was totally resistant to the idea of being the design architect and then working with an architect of record. We've been the architect of record in the past. I was kind of the main point of contact with Steven Holl for St. Ignatius Chapel on the Seattle University campus. So we did the CDs and the construction administration and all of that. God, it was an honor to work with Steve. He was my professor at the University of Washington for a quarter. I was lucky and got to know him and of course the project's fantastic. But I always thought you needed to do the scribbles and do the CA, but that’s being challenged now. I'm a little unclear I think on how I feel about that at this point. Now we do work in Europe and Asia where we can't be the architect of record, language barriers, and governmental regulations. We're almost forced into an AOR design architecture role. I think the future is that we might be more design architects working with an architect of record. On some of these bigger projects, we were a hundred percent architect, design architect, and architect of record, as an example on the LeBron James Nike building. We did everything on that building and that was, I thought, really important to do, but that may be one of the last ones.
Idaho Residence in Bellevue, ID - Photography ©TimBies
MB: Is it easier to have these two roles split into two different offices when it's not somebody's home?
TK: I think it's a fair comment. Maybe I'm being naive and overly romantic, but I just wish these bigger buildings had the same sort of souls that you can generate in those small packages. Because even if it's residential or if it's commercial but small, everybody puts their head into it and their spirit into it these larger projects. The teams are large-ish and it becomes more of not chaotic, but you just are remote from some of the decisions. You always have to be self-critical, and you learn from all these projects just as we learn from the residential arena. One reason we stay in the residential arena is that they are small projects and they are really highly detailed and idiosyncratic. And those are our research and development, then we can really take risks. If those risks work with the client then we can take some of those agendas into the larger commercial work with some successes.
MB: Is there a specific type of project or location that you haven't gone to work on yet that is on your wishlist?
TK: I get that question often and I have a hard time answering because I've been working on so many cool things, in so many cool places. I would always say always it was super important for me to work on a sacred space. I was lucky to work with Steven Holl on Saint Ignatius Chapel, and I wasn't the lead designer on that project by any means. And, but to be involved, in something that was so spiritually important to the community, and I'm not Catholic, but you knew you were working on something that was spiritually important to the community. We're just now finishing a project for Unity, and it's a sacred space. We did a project in St. Mark's Episcopal cathedral here in Seattle, and it's a sacred space. I think the only continent I personally haven't worked on, I've certainly traveled in, is Africa. Of course, I'd love to work in Africa, but we've done projects on every other continent. So it's kind of a boring answer because I don't know if there is one.
DL: Talking about large and small projects, you briefly mentioned that sometimes mentally it's difficult to jump from one scale to a completely different one. From what I've seen there are architects who are very good at doing large projects—they have big gestures, diagrams, and big cultural critiques that come with those—and then there are architects on the other end who produce the best of the best houses, let's say single-family houses, even large ones. But when either of these two architects starts to get to the other side, it falls apart. With small-scale architects, their larger work has no order to them and large-scale architects have no poetry in their houses. From my knowledge, there are a handful of architects or offices who do both scales really, really well, and you guys do that. I was wondering if the office progressed from small to large-scale projects. How did you manage that larger scale and how can you be successful at both?
TK: I wish I had the magic formula. It's tempting for an architect to be cynical and if you're working on something large or working on something small if the team is cynical, the project isn't poetic. But if the team is engaged and excited I think there's something that happens with that building that takes it out of the corporate realm if it's a large building or the soulless realm, and it becomes a building that has more meaning. You can see it in the residential arena when sometimes a larger architect will do a residential or a larger firm that does large work will do a residential project. They don't understand what it means. What's the sort of personal space realm? How do people actually move and flow through a space? What's comfortable, and what isn't comfortable? It is just all personal, almost genetic vibrations in a way. It's intuitive. To your point, yes, some architects that work at a very large scale, can kind of come up with a very important diagram or idea that is so seductive as a drawing or as a competition entry that if you're a judge or a juror and you know how to read a scheme, you might be able to sort of gather what the real poetry, the small scale, the nano poetry is. But if you're not, that one hit that's a pop song. It's like Miles Davis, all the undertones, the overtones, that's happening in the foreground, in the background. That's the architecture that really works. I think there are some big works out there where the firm has that kind of optimistic sort of you're working on something important. You're working on something that is all about optimism and culturally important and you're excited about it. So you're just the force of your focus and the force of the team just abuses the architecture with that spirit. I think on large projects, it's really hard to carry on that kind of spirit because you're working on it for two or three or four years and it's exhausting. It's like running a marathon. I think on a smaller project, you can be more of a sprinter.
MB: Going back to Studio House, was that the house that we talked about previously where you realized what your architectural DNA was really?
TK: Yeah, it was. What's the best way to describe it? You know, I came out of academics, I came out of school and I was working for more corporate architects and had my own firm up in Alaska and for what you know, did some okay things. There was a moment when all of a sudden, back in school, actually, when I was in working in Switzerland at that point, believe it or not, Carlo Scarpa wasn't that well known. He had sort of disappeared a little bit from the map. Even Maison de Verre wasn't even that well known. I had a mentor, who is a mentor to a lot of us, and she was frankly just a genius, with a complicated personality, but she told me, “You should look at this”. There wasn't that much published, but I remember looking at it and thinking, “Oh my God, you know, there was, something that spoke to me”. And then more or less, at the same moment, Maison de Verre was emerging. This may come as a surprise to both of you, that at some point they weren't really part of the conversation. You know, it's almost like you dug them up in a way I dunno if that's an exaggeration, but it certainly was for me. All of a sudden I was aware of them and it impacted me. So if you look at Studio House, you can see, and the stuff before Studio House, you can see all of a sudden, and this is the important point I'm trying to make.
Those two architects, their work gave me permission to do what I felt was right. It wasn't like I wanted to stylistically copy them or be derivative, but it was like the thing that kept me from really engaging what was important to me internally was there was a barrier there for some reason. And their work in a way gave me permission. The studio house came along at the right time, and I was working with a craftsperson that was kind of in the same spirit. God, it was just a fantastic moment.
Collywood in West hollywood, CA - Photography ©AaronLeitz
DL: Final question. What is your favorite building?
TK: How am I supposed to answer that? I will admit that a lot of architecture impacts me. If I'm in Charlotte or you know St. Petersburg or whatever, it's impactful. There are projects out there that you just know, “This a masterpiece” but there are, I'd say, two pieces of architecture no, three, where they brought tears to my eyes, which is not an emotion I normally get in architecture. The first one was, and I didn't think I was going to like, it was Ronchamp.
Back in the seventies, I was with friends in a car going through the French hillside and it was foggy and foggy. All of a sudden we came out of the fog and because we were wondering “Where is this place?” and there it was. It just stunned me, stunned me silently. That was really one of the first moments.
The second one was right after Zumthor’s Vals were built. Somebody said, “You gotta go see Vals”. It was just barely done. So, because I'm Swiss, I went up to Vals, and I went into the spa, and we were there alone. It stunned me. I just felt like, “Oh, I'm not worthy”, this is unbelievable.
A third one just happened recently maybe five years ago. We were in Mexico with some friends. Somehow, they got us into seeing Baragan’s Chapel in Mexico City. I just sat there because no one was there except for a couple of nuns. I sat in a pew and all of a sudden I realized there was something moving off to the left because there was only one cross, all of a sudden I felt like something was moving, but I really wasn't aware of it. All of a sudden, I realized Baragan had set up a shadow of a cross coming across, and literally tears were just streaming down my eyes. And I'm not Catholic. It was just architecture. It was just really a very special, special moment. So those three, I mean, God, there's so many. Yeah.
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Tom Kundig, FAIA, RIBA, is an owner and design principal of Olson Kundig. Kundig has received some of the world’s highest design honors, including a National Design Award in Architecture from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, an Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and an election to the National Academy as an Academician in Architecture. Kundig has also been awarded the AIA Seattle Medal of Honor as well as a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Washington. Known for his contextual approach to design, Kundig emphasizes the primacy of the site. His buildings are a direct response to place, often serving as a backdrop to the built, cultural or natural landscapes that surround them. Tom’s current projects include homes across North America, Asia, Europe and New Zealand; adaptive reuse projects for a host of different functions; and hospitality projects in the United States, Austria, China, Costa Rica, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea and more.