For all of his attempts at invisibility, though, Kundig is extremely visible these days, attracting attention from all corners of the country. The New York Times Magazine has featured two of his buildings—one of them Friedrich’s cabin—in recent months. Kundig’s Chicken Point Cabin, in northern Idaho, is a staple in architecture and design magazines, as is the studio dubbed “the Brain,” which he built for Seattle cinematographer David Wild. With some 20 projects currently under way, ranging from a California winery to a San Francisco residence to homes in North Carolina and Ontario, Kundig is routinely described in magazines as one of America’s most sought after architects. He was a finalist for the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt 2005 National Design Award for Architecture. Princeton Architectural Press is publishing a celebration of his work, Tom Kundig: Five Houses, in October. Kundig’s projects have been featured in more than 220 publications worldwide, and he has won 18 American Institute of Architects awards, including two national ones in 2004; national AIA awards are like architecture’s Oscars.
“I like to leave things the way they are rather than cover them up and paint them,” says Kundig.
Yet Kundig insists that he is an “under the radar” architect who has “no signature style.” And the two statements he most loves to quote about himself from the reams of press he’s been getting are decidedly unenthusiastic. BMW Magazine wrote recently that “his style has no readily distinctive marks. No one who sees his elegant, minimalist, cement, glass and steel creations says, ‘Aha—a typical Kundig!’ ” And the Gutter, a designers’ blog, reacted to Kundig’s Cooper-Hewitt nomination with horror: “Diller Scofi dio + Renfro seem poised to win the architecture honors (their competition is the fading Antoine Predock and some dude from Seattle).”
“I loved that!” Kundig says, laughing. “At least it wasn’t ‘some fading dude from Seattle.’”
Kundig exercises a similar self-effacement in the kinds of materials he chooses. Many of his homes are made from nondescript commodities: cement, steel, glass, copper, plywood—none of which he bothers to cover up with even minimal paint or finish. Chicken Point Cabin, probably his most celebrated residence, has cinder-block walls, even on the inside. The oft-photographed Brain is made mostly from unfinished concrete.The cabin in Mazama is weathered steel on the outside, unfinished plywood on the inside. “It’s the nature of the way I like to work with things,” Kundig says. “I like to leave things the way they are rather than cover them up and paint them.” His homes, then, generally have exteriors that grow moss or lichens, or that rust—in other words, that keep changing over time, letting the surrounding natural environment work them over. “I don’t think buildings are ever finished,” Kundig says. “I think they always change. And if you put things in there that let them change, you will take them to that next level." At which level the buildings submit to their surroundings, becoming less visible and less intrusive the more the nature around them darkens, discolors, or rusts them.
But his buildings are not without their striking features. Many Kundig buildings have huge, movable pieces that seem to defy the laws of physics. The Chicken Point Cabin has an entire wall, made of glass and steel, that can open, garage-door-like, onto a lake. (Talk about letting the landscape in.) Although the wall weighs approximately six tons, it is so easily opened and closed that a small child can do it with very little eff ort. The same is true of a sixton, glass-and-steel, hydraulic-powered skylight that Kundig created for Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen’s Pioneer Square offices, which he designed, and of the huge, sliding, metal “shutters” on the Mazama cabin. And Kundig is no less fond of massive, heavy doors (examples of which can be found in his firm’s offices) that slide or roll into position with no more than the pressure of a fingertip.
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