Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects, by Paul Goldberger
Excerpted from “Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects: Architecture, Art and Craft,” published by Monacelli Press. Released in 2003.
The movement of Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects from the fringes to a more conspicuous position in American architecture in a sense parallels the progress of Seattle itself. The city in which the firm bases its practice had meant little to the national cultural picture until a few years ago; though it was widely viewed as one of the worldlier backwaters, a backwater it was in the view of the rest of the country – that is until the software industry gave it vast capital, the grunge rock movement gave it a sense of trendiness in music and the explosive growth of locally-based Starbucks made Seattle seem like the incubator of a new American lifestyle.
Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen has no desire to become a mass-market product. But if its city seemed for a long time like a place that was pleasant, reasonably sophisticated and largely irrelevant to broader concerns, something similar could surely be said about architects’ work. It was consistently intelligent, visually appealing, and did not seem particularly connected to the issues that dominated the national architectural dialogue. But the firm’s architecture, like the city itself, now seems more pertinent. Strikingly, it is not so much that the firm has changed as it is the architectural debate, which has shifted in the last few years and come to focus, far more that before, on the issues that have been motivating these architects all the while. Their work, like their city, has come to feel more like a part of the mainstream.
This is important to say at the outset because Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen are not “regionalists” in the sense that their work engages directly from certain aspects of a region and seems attuned primarily to the priorities of that region. If the relaxed ease that they seek in their work could be said to be characteristic of Seattle, their devotion to detail and their commitment to modernism are no more closely tied to Seattle than to any other locale. Their determination to integrate nature into their work, and to think in terms of a combination of natural materials and highly refined ones, does seem to connect to traditions of their region, yet it also recalls, perhaps even more emphatically, such influences as Scarpa and Kahn. Is it the rise of Seattle that is making Olson Sundberg’s work seem more familiar and more central to architectural concerns today, then, or is it the vast wave of Scarpa-esque architecture that has appeared everywhere? We can no more definitively answer that question than we can say whether the ubiquity of Starbucks reflects a Seattle sensibility or the realization by people everywhere that the Italians know how to live.
Yet Olson Sundberg – let me say it again – is no architectural Microsoft, no large corporate presence. Nor does it seem desirous or even capable of becoming one. To the extent that the firm represents Seattle, it is an earlier Seattle, which took a certain pride in coming slightly late to the trends, not in inventing them. In the final analysis, what characterizes the work of Olson Sundberg is a commitment to a particular kind of modernism that can be described in terms of context, urbanism, accommodation and even collaboration with the work of the artists and craftsmen, and an attempt to balance the expression of natural materials with an expression of technology.
This is an experiential architecture, not a theoretical one. It is grounded in reality, not in abstract dogma, yet it seeks the transcendent, every bit as earnestly – perhaps even more so – then architecture that is built on pure theory. It is the way space, texture, light, materials actually feel that motivates these architects, and it is their skill at manipulating these elements that gives their work the rigor and strength it possesses. This architecture is marked by a sense of a self-assured and sensual presence, shaped by light, texture, materiality and scale.
All of this yields a body of work that is consistently understated, but woe be to the observer who believes that this makes it modest. This is architecture that does not seek to dazzle, but neither does it seek to disappear. If Jim Olson, Rick Sundberg, Tom Kundig and Scott Allen, the four design principals, eschew a certain glitz in their architecture, they hardly wish it to fade into the woodwork. There is a quiet assertiveness to all of Olson Sundberg’s work, and assertiveness is at least as important as quiet in this equation. The notion of comfortable monumentality, which so much of the time in American architecture is an oxymoron, precisely captures what Olson Sundberg at their best represent. It is visible in virtually all of the firm’s projects, from those that are relatively small in scale, such as the jewel-like apartment Jim Olson designed for himself and his wife atop an old Seattle building, to such grand houses as the sprawling Gallery House in Seattle, where an extraordinary collection of postwar American art is housed in a stretched-out, one-story masonry villa that recalls such diverse influences as Wright’s Ennis House in Los Angeles and Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. The house is serene and warm, which is a significant achievement at its grand scale – one might say that the surprise here is not that it is monumental, but that it is comfortable. In Olson’s own apartment, it is the other way around – in these small, tight spaces, monumentality seems the impressive thing to have achieved, not comfort. But with a carefully wrought sequence of open and closed spaces, a two-story light well penetrating the overall volume, works of art integrated into the overall architecture and a precisely framed vista extending the small living space into the Seattle skyline, Olson has managed to bring monumentality into the province of intimacy.
Olson Sundberg’s work is unquestionably modernist in its sensibility, and yet the qualities that define it do not all connect to the twentieth-century modernism – indeed, some go against its grain. Modern architecture, after all, has historically tended to be indifferent to sensuality, which is a key element in all of Olson Sundberg’s architecture, and modernism, particularly after the early years of the International Style, has usually interpreted understatement as a sign of blandness, not strength. Modernism generally has paid not much more heed to the idea of context, and as a rule it has stood aloof from the principles of traditional urbanism. To believe in modernism and to believe equally in the importance of a building’s relationship to its surroundings would have been considered, not too many years ago, to have been at least a logical contradiction, if not a compromise of modernist principles. Resolving all of these contradictions, and demonstrating that modernism can yield a coherent and civilized cityscape that is nonetheless powerful and visually rich, has been one of Olson Sundberg’s missions, beginning with the concrete condominium structures in downtown Seattle with which the firm first achieved note nearly two decades ago and continuing through the larger houses and institutional buildings, such as the Frye Museum, that have been built in the last few years.
And while modernist doctrine always made much of the notion of collaboration between architects and artists – a key tenet of the Bauhaus catechism – in reality this idea has been expressed mainly by the commissioning of artists to create pieces that punctuate the work of architects. True collaboration, or accommodation by architects to the demands of art, has been rarer than the rhetoric would suggest, which makes Olson Sundberg’s consistent support for the artists and craftsmen, and apparent willingness to design their buildings in a way that accommodates the needs of artists’ work notable in and of itself.
It should almost go without saying at this point that in an age in which most architects actively seek to achieve the identity of a “look”, Olson Sundberg’s work eschews simple similarities. Certain principles are evident from one building to another, as is the absence of direct historical replication, but consistency is not the same as a packageable style. Indeed, a single, easily identifiable style is something that these architects not only do not have but seem actively to discourage, as if its presence could be taken as a sign that their firm was not sufficiently cognizant of the widely varying demands that are inherent in different clients’ programs, sites and esthetic preferences. They seem determined to prove that consistency of belief need not yield similarity of visual appearance – and that it is possible to produce a coherent body of work that does not look precisely the same.
Thus the firm has tended to attract clients who are themselves reasonably self-assured – the sort of clients who, while they may not have known precisely what they wanted, certainly knew, in Louis Kahn’s lovely phrase, “what they aspired to.” Most of the firm’s residential clients have a strong visual sensibility; many are collectors, and almost all of them are relatively mature. Olson Sundberg is not the firm to which newly-rich software kings bent on French Renaissance mansions turn, and it is not likely to be any more appealing to the clients at the opposite end of the spectrum, the ones who haven’t the slightest notion of what they want. These architects seem to take a certain pride in respecting and accommodating to the programs and private dreams of their individual clients, and they give every impression of being most comfortable with those clients whose dreams have already begun to coalesce into a particular set of ideas to which the architects can give physical form. The firm is determined that the business of residential design be a collaborative process. Traditionally their first presentation to the client is not a design but a collage, made up of pictures the clients have provided of favorite objects and places, supplemented by Olson Sundberg’s additions of a few symbols and images that, to the architects, represent the goals of the project. In one case a client prepared a collage herself, and presented it to Tom Kundig, who professed delight; another client gave Kundig photographs of moss and rocks as a way of defining to the architect what she felt her esthetic sensibility was. (“I found that incredibly inspiring,” Kundig later said.)
It should come as no surprise, then, that the firm could design, within a relatively short period, houses as different as the City house, a sumptuous structure of pale yellow stucco in an old, settled residential neighborhood of Seattle; the Bluff house, a tight tensile building of concrete, wood and glass perched over Puget Sound in a north Seattle neighborhood; and the Studio house, a loft-like structure of concrete, metal and glass in a somewhat newer suburb east of the city. The three represent a movement from relatively conventional architectural form – a kind of modernist interpretation of an Italian villa, designed to set off a highly personal collection of contemporary art, local crafts, including glass, and classical art – to a sleeker, more nimble composition geometries, very much oriented toward a spectacular view; and then finally to a hyperindustrial house in which a cool and highly technological sense is elevated to a level of monumental grandeur. The evolution, from the most conventional piece of architecture to the least, happens to be chronological. But that is something of a coincidence; there has been no retreat over time in Olson Sundberg’s work from the familiar elements of architecture, and the significant differences between these three houses come much more out of the firm’s eagerness to respond to the particular demands of very different clients.
Indeed, at more or less the same time the last house was being designed by Tom Kundig, Jim Olson was designing a large house and gallery for a couple in Denver to house a large and diverse art collection with the specific mission of fitting comfortably into the urban context of one of the city’s older, downtown historic districts. The Red house is faced in red sandstone, with an upper level of glass and metal. It is spare, yet hardly minimalist, and while it asserts a clear position away from the trend toward building in historic districts by replication of traditional details (it even avoids brick), the structure’s scale, the richness of the materials and the complexity of texture on the façade all indicate a considerable degree of sympathy to the historic steetscape. It is a design that bespeaks a rigorous discipline, and a considerable degree of attention to the particulars of the site, of program, and of clients.
It is particulars, in the end, that interest Olson Sundberg most, and that define its architecture. That is evident in such unusual projects as the spectacular white screen designed in collaboration with artist Ed Carpenter for St. Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle, an abstracted version of a rose window that shimmers with light, bringing a spare hint of Gothic tracery to an eccentric, almost industrial cathedral interior; or the Frye Art Museum, where the programmatic demands of a unique museum had to be combined with public functions to create a strong civic presence; or the Meadow House, a private house on an open hillside site in suburban Seattle that manages at once to be a strong sculptural form and a deferential presence on the landscape. In each of these projects there is a sense that light, texture and shape have come together in a way that emerges out of the specifics of the problem at hand; no formula could yield the solutions that the architects have come to here. So, too, with the house that in many ways sums up the firm’s approach best, the Bluff House on Puget Sound, where the warmth of wood, the sleekness of metal and the firmness of concrete join together to create an exquisitely detailed, nurturing structure that is utterly serene, intimately connected to its waterfront site, and yet sharp and precise in a way that the most classic modernist buildings always have been. Do Olson Sundberg create the softest hard-edged buildings around, or the hardest soft ones?
Whatever, there is a richness to all of this architecture, a determination to probe modernism to find its soft, emotional underbelly, that brings all of it together. For all the differences between, say, the Bluff house on Puget Sound and the City house in Seattle, it is clear, looking at all of the firm’s works, that they emerge out of the same place, with a unifying design sensibility. What they share, in the end, is a balance between crispness and sensuality, between hardness and softness, and the eloquence of this balance is the quality that explains Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen best of all.
Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects, 2001.