Design Spotlight: Tom Kundig

The Brain. Designed by Olson Kundig.

Tom Kundig, award-winning architect and principal/owner and founder at internationally acclaimed design practice Olson Kundig, developed his love for country music while on the road. It was driving to remote locations to go mountain climbing and skiing that his acoustic world expanded beyond the classical sounds he’d grown up with. “Neil Young, Jerry Jeff [Walker] and the Old Outlaws,” he starts running off his list, “and Emmylou Harris – her voice breaks my heart every time I listen to it.” Born in 1954 in Merced, California, he was raised in Washington state by an architect father and furniture-dealer mother. His parents, however, gave him more than just an aesthetic appreciation for spatial design and the skills and know-how to create architectural structure. They also gave him his love for music. “Both my parents are from Switzerland, so classical music was always a big deal in our household,” he explains. “We had a turntable and a reel to reel, and the old war horses were played almost every day.”These old ‘war horses’, he explains, are a wide range of classical compositions, opera from Mozart and Puccini being favourites, as well Beethoven’s Symphony No.9. His immersion in classical music led him to pick up the violin when he was in second grade, which he played until his senior year in high school. “It taught me hypersensitivity to what it means to hold an instrument, play it, and understand it,” he explains. Elements fundamental to a later life centred around another kind of instrument: the built environment.

Kundig’s work is particularly unique within the contemporary architecture landscape due to its precision-focus on the multidimensional aspect of experiencing space. The interplay of light, movement and sound are as intrinsic to his designs as the act of creating an aesthetically or spatially-pleasing environment. Clients come to Kundig for these elements, as well as his unique ability to imbue new structures with a deep sense of place. Projects in remote locations are acutely tuned to the environments they occupy, whether they be geographical or historical. 

‘The Pierre’, a cosy retreat tucked into a rocky knoll on one of the San Juan Islands in Washington state, disappears from some angles into the boulders fortifying its surroundings. ‘Studio House’ incorporates the skeletal remains of the ruins that were replaced by his own designs. ‘Chicken Point Cabin’, a house on the banks of Lake Hayden, Idaho, has embedded in its design an oft-referenced feat of kinetic engineering: a 20 x 30ft window that is opened by manual hand-crank that opens up like a ginormous garage door on to the banks of the lake.

8899 Beverly Boulevard. Designed by Olson Kundig. Photography by Joe Fletcher.

Tom kundig. Photography by Elizabeth Rudge

It’s this type of James Bond-level “gizmo” (as he terms the engineering inventions he develops for his projects) that has made his work so widely revered. Born of the ‘hot rod’ culture he grew up within (the act of modifying and personalising your own car), the idea of adding and subtracting to a living space over time, of allowing it to grow and change with you, is particular to his work as an architect and designer. But it’s the grace with which these techniques are employed, like pirouetting dancers in an architectural ballet, that gives his buildings their magic. What is heavy, complex and requires great skill appears magnificently effortless.

When these elements all come together, something happens that Kundig likens to experiencing music. “Sometimes you walk into a place and you can hear it,” he explains. This is often most obvious in spaces literally designed for sound, such as chapels, which are “so perfectly quiet you can hear the building, it sort of becomes an instrument.” But as a trained architect he says he can also understand that sound before it’s even been rendered in physical form. When looking at floor plans, it’s like a musician looking at a piece of sheet music, and like “when you're listening to music and it all makes sense, it all fits together, and it feels right.”

Having worked on architecture designed for listening, Kundig is no stranger to building for auditory experiences. In the 1990s, he designed ‘The Brain’ in Seattle, Washington, a studio space designed to enhance the experience of listening to music in order to ideate film. He’s also led renovations on sacred spaces, such as St. Mark’s Cathedral, Seattle, and been involved in projects built for sound and vision, like the Sky View in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Yet architecture, Kundig says, is fundamentally concerned with acoustics, no matter the project. “All buildings are deliberate sound boxes,” he explains. Plus, the reactivity, the conversation that is characteristic of improvisational music, is used by Kundig as a metaphor for designing as a practice. “The act of designing a building, particularly a house, is a conversation, with the client, with the climate, with the landscape, with the culture, understanding where those vectors come together – it’s like jazz.” 

Kundig’s relationship with music runs deep. “Music has always been a big part of my life,” he explains. “It’s always been in the background, in the studio, when I was working at [the artist] Harold Balasz’s fabrication shop or working on a hot rod.” When asked about his relationship to the act of actually making music in his studio or in his home, however, he is humble. “My wife, she's a hell of a pianist – we have a grand piano in a very small house that she will play,” he says. “Me, I just like the adventure of listening.”

8899 Beverly Boulevard. Designed by Olson Kundig. Photography by Nils Timm.