Seattle-based Olson Kundig is an example of how context and culture can influence a firm's design approach. Founded in 1966 by Jim Olson and now consisting of hundreds of employees and thirteen principals/owners, including Tom Kundig, the firm has an extensive and diverse portfolio that spans different scales and budgets. In lectures and interviews, Kundig in particular often talks about how having grown up in a region with a strong mining and lumbering tradition has influenced the industrial and rational aesthetic of his designs, the use of durable and low-maintenance materials, and a special attention to craftsmanship. In many of the firm's designs, however, the ingenuity and emphasis on moving parts –blurring the boundaries between inside and outside– is striking. This is usually achieved by incorporating hand-held devices that allow users to activate the building directly, connecting them both to the context but also to the building itself and the dynamic mechanisms therein.
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Kinetic Architecture: Designs for Active Envelopes
Kinetic Architecture: Designs for Active Envelopes is a book about energy. We have written it to explore the new ways architecture has developed in the last decade to respond to the flow of energy, both natural and man-made, that primarily affects building performance and the comfort of the people in them. Buildings regulate energy flow in several ways, but in this book we explore the approaches that innovative architects, engineers, and consultants have taken with building envelopes, façades, and other types of enclosures that modulate the internal environment of architecture to various ends. Architects have expressed this regulation in ways both visible and invisible, using the media of air, water, and the thermal mass of a variety of materials, and often a combination of all three.