THERE IS SOMETHING of a paradox at work in the story of Seattle architect Tom Kundig. Raised in Spokane and northern Idaho, this lifelong northwesterner—who got both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Washington before going to work for what is now Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects—almost makes you think he believes that anything an architect does can onlymake a given landscape worse.
Confronted, for example, with 40 acres in Mazama, a rural hamlet in the North Cascades, and a client who wanted a cabin built on it, Kundig found himself thinking, How the heck am I going to do anything more beautiful than what’s already here? His client, Seattle dentist Dr. Michal Friedrich, was of a similar mind. “I wanted something small and unobtrusive,” Friedrich says, “like a tree house.”
Kundig ended up designing a small, squarish cabin on stilts, with huge windows on all sides, a clerestory, and massive steel panels that slide over all the windows, closing off the cabin completely when it is unoccupied. When the panels slide back to reveal the windows (or, more accurately, glass walls), the building largely disappears— there’s a kind of trompe l’oeil effect that renders a good part of the cabin invisible, as if it were melting into its surroundings. And the panels themselves, covered with rust, further contribute to the cabin’s inconspicuousness by blending into the foliage at certain times of the year.
The near-invisibility is intentional. “If the building weren’t there at all,” Kundig says, “it’d be terrific.” He sees the cabin as an intrusion, a necessary evil planted there to help its occupant experience not the building but the place. “You start to design a place or an experience that supports what’s already there. I mean, doing something in a place like Mazama… you’re there for Mazama, not for the building. And when you’re inside, you want to somehow feel that the building would just be the frame or the background to your experience of the landscape.”
Friedrich says he engaged Kundig for his cabin project because “he takes risks. His suggestions are a little bit off the wall, but he makes them work. And I love the cabin because it’s absolutely not obtrusive—his design is the most blendable with the landscape you could hope for.”
Kundig’s reverence for landscapes is born of a childhood spent in the Northwest outdoors. “I grew up in that big sort of landscape in northern Idaho and eastern Washington. The most meaningful experiences I had were in the natural landscape rather than the city landscape.”
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