By Gene Ely, AIA, LEED AP
Associate Principal
Tom Kundig, principal in the firm of Olson Kundig in Seattle, Washington, and winner of national and international design awards too numerous to mention, led off the recent biennial Monterey Design Conference with a provocative talk about his work and the influences that inform it. Those influences include everything from physics to rock climbing to hot rod cars, but perhaps his most interesting statement came in his characterization of the nature of architects. He described them as being “professional voyeurs,” but far from being negative, he sees this as being one of their strongest assets. Kundig characterized architects as being voyeurs of time, culture, fashion, and landscape just to mention a few. He went on to say that the more outside our realm of architectural design that we are able to draw inspiration from, the better our work can be.
While the connotation of voyeur certainly has a sensational side to it, if you substitute the word observer for voyeur, it becomes clear, but perhaps less exciting, that Kundig’s intention is to focus on the fact that the best architects are observers of the world around them and use these observations as underlying threads in the fabric of their work, whether it be in the form of contextualism that responds to the physical nature of a project’s surroundings, or whether it’s a provocative approach that attempts to prod the observer to respond to political, social, or economic circumstances that surround a project’s inception and realization.
Olson Kundig is a firm that has been well-known and well-regarded in the Seattle area for more than 30 years. It has evolved in that time with the names of various principals adorning their doors, with Olson Kundig being the most recent incarnation and the one that has garnered the most attention outside of the Pacific Northwest. Kundig, in introducing the audience to his firm in his recent talk, identified two up and coming members of the firm as the next likely people to have their names on the company’s masthead. This willingness to share credit and to acknowledge the growth of valued staff members is the mark of a firm with confidence in its abilities and strengths and possessed of a vision that’s forward-looking and not resting on past laurels. Looking to the future, being a voyeur of time perhaps, one can expect that only good things will continue to come out of such a firm.
