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Seattle architect Tom Kundig is celebrated for crafting kinetic houses fitted with gears, wheels and pulleys and various other gizmos that open up structures to dramatic natural settings. He has won more than 50 awards, including top honors from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his firm, Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects, was recently anointed with a 2009 AIA Honor Award for Firm of the Year. In 2009 alone his work has been published in the New York Times Magazine, Metropolitan Home and Architectural Record.

The non-stop pace of his current practice is rooted, somewhat paradoxically, in a long, freezing cold night spent trapped on the north face of a mountain when Kundig was a 20-year-old architecture student at the University of Washington. “To this day I can relive that night’s cycle of sunset, night sky, and sunrise with all of its meaning. It was a visceral awakening for me and my place in the world,” Kundig wrote in the preface to his monograph Tom Kundig: Houses (Princeton Architectural Press, 2006). 

Kundig’s keen attention to both minute detail and big picture context plays out in designs that strike a balance between raw and refined. Case in point: an early work, the Brain Studio in Seattle (1998 – 2001), where rugged concrete walls are juxtaposed with honey-colored hardwood floors and a warm, book-lined space opens to the outdoors via large steel-case windows. A loft constructed of steel plates welded and folded into origami structure, the fireman’s pole egress from the loft, a special sentry window for the client’s hound dog Oscar, and naked light bulbs suspended from motorized industrial pulleys are typical of the idiosyncratic flourishes that Kundig develops in partnership with his clients. Other iconic residences include the Delta Shelter and Rolling Huts in Mazama, Wash.; Chicken Point Cabin in Hayden Lake, Idaho; and Kundig’s own home, Hot Rod House, in Seattle.

Recently Kundig has taken on larger scale urban projects such as the Sun Valley Center for the Arts in Ketchum, Idaho; the T Bailey Offices in Anacortes, Wash.; and two large hotel and mixed-use projects in downtown Seattle. Though acclaim has brought in larger projects, Kundig continues to explore the personal realm in residential projects on all scales, from a 25-foot by 25-foot cabin retreat in Skyomimsh, Wash., to a glass, steel and concrete-block box that floats in the Idaho desert.

Kundig's lecture, which honors the memory of William F. Pendergrass, is sponsored by Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo and Associates.