january-2012

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PRIVATDESIGN
‘Mountaineering and architect ure have
many parallels – they’re about solving the
problem in as clear and economic means as
possible – it’s not about getting to the top’
Forty-Five
Left: outdoorsman and
architect Tom Kundig is
a believer in collaborative
eff ort rather than
individual genius
Seattle suburbs. Set up in 1968 by Jim Olson
(Kundig joined in 1986), the fi rm is now
90-strong, and combines a disarmingly
modest approach to networking and a
no-frills approach to hiring. ‘We’re not a
meet-and-greet kind of fi rm – we don’t do
the country club scene, we’re not golfers,
we’re not the socialising type,’ Kundig says,
and his fi rm explicitly ‘only hires people
willing to do everything from design through
to construction’. Arranged as a collection of
small ateliers, Olson Kundig has dozens of
jobs on the board, ranging from tiny cabins
to sprawling estates, apartment buildings,
stores and galleries. Each project is in the
hands of a small team who will see it through
from design sketches to the fi nal nail.
Retreats, vacation homes and cabins
loom large in Kundig’s portfolio; the spirit
of the frontier, the beauty of isolation and,
above all, a sense of getting away from it all.
Th ese range from the modest Gulf Island
Cabin in British Columbia to the expansive
Highlands House in North Carolina, which
stalks through a wooded site on a forest of
precise steel columns. Th e cabin on Gulf
Island is a single room, secured by a sliding
sheet of steel taken straight from a mill,
with an outdoor shower and a kitchenette;
it’s pared down but still luxurious in its
generous relationship with its surroundings.
Kundig drew early inspiration from a
small project designed by his father’s
employer, the Seattle architect Royal Alfred
McClure, in 1960. Th e McClure Cabin
stands on the shore of Lake Coeur d’Alene,
stark in its wall-less simplicity, like a
defenestrated, rusticated version of the
Farnsworth House, or Th oreau housed by
Pierre Koenig. ‘I was an outside kid and this
was literally just a small platform basically for
going outside.’ In more recent times, he has
developed a strong affi nity with like-minded
architects around the world. ‘Th ere’s a sort of