Kundig says that people don’t hire him because they want a “Kundig,” but because they want a “good building.” Or, in Michal Friedrich’s words, “someone who can listen to you, take in your ideas, then do what you expect and a little bit beyond.”
Kundig and his convictions are reminiscent of another Seattle architect who has won national acclaim: James Cutler. The only local architect to bid on the Bill Gates home project (Cutler teamed with Peter Bohlin), Cutler was—in Gates’s words—“the only one who proposed something that didn’t look like a museum.” Cutler’s design, for several wooden buildings terraced into a hill, was by far the least pretentious and least visible of the proposals Gates entertained.
Like Cutler, Kundig is unequivocally northwestern. Think of his approach as another Seattle “alternative,” like coffee, microbrew, software, and grunge—the antitraditional products that put Seattle on the map in the ’80s and ’90s. Ours is an age when many architects promote themselves as auteurs whose every building is immediately recognizable as one of theirs. “The signature style thing,” Kundig says dismissively, “okay, I guess from a marketing standpoint it’s effective: ‘Oh, that’s an X,’ or ‘That’s a Y.’ But I just don’t think it’s really architecture. It’s not really engaging your client, or getting to know your client or the constituency or the culture.”
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