Physical Poetry: Tom Kundig

Benjamin Benschneider, courtesy Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects

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Yesterday: The landscape of memory

ONE ROOM VIEW
Chicken Point Cabin, the weekend shelter Kundig designed on Hayden Lake in northern Idaho, has been described as a “little box with a big window.” But what a window. The entire thirty-foot by twenty-foot, six-ton glass wall can be lifted to open the room to stunning lake and sky views. The oversized wheel and pulley Kundig designed (inspired by childhood memories of an art studio gate) is so finely engineered, it can be operated by a child.

It takes an original way of looking at things to think of sawmills as elegant, but there you have it: the yin and the yang of being Tom Kundig. This decorated architect admires the muscular mills and mining operations of his youth in Spokane for their physical poetry. Despite their environmental offenses, he cannot forget the roar and the power of a sawmill under full fire, the harnessing of gravity and water, and the sheer awesome inventiveness of the machines themselves.

The memory of those mighty machines is alive in Kundig’s architectural work today. In the warehouse-space offices of Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects (OSKA), a Kundig sky-door opens hydraulically to the Seattle sky. Fidgety dials and gleaming valves give way to clouds and the cry of seagulls; steel and glass interplay with sunlight and air. This architect’s love for all things scientific and gizmo-like is balanced (and sometimes, literally, counterbalanced) by a love for the natural world.

This year, the American Institute of Architects named OSKA its Firm of the Year, and Kundig is its white-hot star. His work has been widely published in magazines and books, including Tom Kundig: Houses, by Princeton Architectural Press. He is a sought-after designer of homes from Spain to Calgary to Ketchum and is currently at work on larger-scale civic projects, including the Sun Valley Center for the Arts. And in testament to his rising eminence, in 2008 Kundig was selected as the recipient of the National Design Award in Architecture Design, awarded by the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.