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Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen AIA Firm Award | |
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Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen AIA Firm Award Among the many buildings that the firm has produced in its 38 years are such acclaimed projects as the Pike & Virginia Building (1978) and the Frye Art Museum (1997), both in Seattle, and numerous small, elegant houses and cabins that blend refined sensibilities and utilitarian materials, including Delta Shelter, a weekend cabin near Mazama, Washington (2005); Chicken Point Cabin, near Hayden, Idaho (2002); and House of Light (2006) in Bellevue, Washington. Principals Rick Sundberg, Tom Kundig, Scott Allen, Kirsten Murray, and Alan Maskin lead the team alongside Jim Olson. Many have enjoyed a long history together. "We feel honored to have been given this award," says Olson. "It is for all of us who work together in our office, and it makes us want to try even harder in our commitment to the art and craft of architecture." The firm is known for its attention to craft and detail. "Their residential work in particular reveals a fascination with craft and the material properties of architecture," wrote Mark Robbins, dean of the Syracuse University School of Architecture, in a recommendation letter for the AIA award. "Levers, racks, gears, out-sized hinges, and wall-size shutters improbably glide into place to frame sublime natural vistas," Robbins continues. "The dual American obsession of industry and nature are summed up immaculately in the smallest folly." Conventional wisdom says that this should come at the scale of single-family homes. "I think it is a misconception," says Tom Kundig, who believes craft is also possible in larger projects. "Clearly a 37-story building has a lot of 'just building' to it," he explains. "But at that scale there are any number of opportunities to refine the level of detail at the human level — door handles and other parts and pieces that humanize a larger building that without those components could lack some soul." Home Craft The firm's roots in designing cabins and other vacation homes can be traced back to the Olson Cabin, which actually pre-dates the firm. Jim Olson originally designed it in 1959 as a tiny bunkhouse just 14 feet long by 14 feet wide (4.3 by 4.3 meters), located on a tiny wooded island in Puget Sound, west of Tacoma. Renovations in 1981, 1997, and 2003 added several interconnected rooms. The enlarged home continues to yield to the lush natural surroundings through its soft, subtle pastel hues and simple wood. The house feels modern, but very much of the earth. The living room's large window offers views of the water and Mount Rainier beyond. The Olson cabin both exudes its own sense of unified composition and embodies the larger sense of the firm Jim Olson founded, one that embraces contemporary technologies, materials, and methods in architecture, in a manner that also draws on the past without caricaturing it. The more recent Delta Shelter (2005), a cabin located in a floodplain near Mazama, Washington, consists of a steel box on stilts that rises three stories from a footprint only 20 by 20 feet square (six by six meters) to overlook a river. Showing a faintly Japanese influence that is common to Pacific Northwest modernism, the house also blends indoor and outdoor spaces through huge expanses of glass and large openings. One 18-foot- (5.5-meter-) tall set of steel shutters can be opened and closed using a hand crank. Another residential project, The Brain (2002), is a small freestanding home addition in Seattle intended to foster the creative work of the filmmaker client. The garage, that everyday birthplace of invention, served as the inspiration, but instead of cars or junk, The Brain is a library and place of intellectual stimulation. The bunkerlike cast-in-place concrete box form includes a steel mezzanine along the north wall, and all interior structures are made using raw, hot-rolled steel sheets. While the firm takes pride in now completing larger-scale projects, the architects leading Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen seem to view small projects as a way to preserve the fundamentals of design. "We always want to keep doing houses and cabins," Kundig says, "because they're great labs for risk-taking." Building Urban at Pike Place When completed in 1978, the mixed-use Pike & Virginia Building was the first contemporary building to rise in Seattle's Pike Place Public Market Historic District in half a century. Conceived as a concrete frame holding a series of glass boxes, the structure fits easily next to industrial buildings and the early-20th-century farmer's market. "In many ways, we probably learned more from doing that one building than almost any other," Rick Sundberg says of creating the renovated, mixed-use structure in its high-density urban setting. "I don't think of it consciously, but it taught me a lot about context and texture, about building urban, and about scale. That didn't come out of my education in the late Beaux Arts tradition." "Years later, I think [Pike & Virginia] was at least as important was the Frye Art Museum," continues Sundberg, who has been with the firm since 1975. "That's for me personally, but every bit as much to the firm. It was a seminal project for us, and it was successful." >>> Discuss this article in the Architecture Forum...
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