| Probably the most revealing structure an architect can design is his own house. Jim Olson’s weekend cabin, located on lakeside land bought by his grandparents nearly 100 years ago in Longbranch, Washington, says a lot about the priorities of the Seattle-based architect who has become the go-to guy for some of the world’s top art collectors.
Ever since his father gave him $500 in 1959 to build a bunkhouse there, Olson has been adding on to it and refining the structure, yet it remains only a paltry 1,200 square feet, seemingly suspended among the pines and offering a partial view of the nearby beach. There’s not a hint of color anywhere inside, just earth tones that evoke the site’s sand, driftwood and bark. One bedroom has a domed skylight that recalls a James Turrell installation. Everything is practical and comfortable, but also elegant and inviting. It’s where Olson does most of his sketching for new projects around the world.
Even when Olson’s structures are large, they retain a sense of modesty (a defining trait of the designer himself). An Olson house glows from the inside, flattering the contents and the surroundings instead of shouting out to be noticed. “I guess I’m really interested in the landscape, the architecture the furniture and the art all being one continuous environment, with each element playing off the others,” says the 70-year-old Olson, who in his 20s started his own firm, which has grown into the 80-employee Olson Kundig Architects.
Certainly something in his neutral palette and reverence for the outdoors marks Olson as a denizen of the Pacific Northwest, and much of his work is located in his home region, though he has branched out all over the Pacific Rim (a Hong Kong villa won an international interior design association award in 2009) and occasionally forays east, such as to Bedford, New York, and Atlanta, Georgia. “I like rain,” says Olson, who attended the University of Washington in Seattle. “I’m completely Northwest. But those earth tones feel natural in a desert environment, too. It’s a way of grounding a house in a landscape.” Olson believes anything that links people to nature makes sense, like hiding window casements: “Your mind tricks you into thinking that maybe there’s no glass there at all.”
Though mostly a residential architect, Olson has done some institutional projects as well, notably last year’s addition to the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, Washington, which was immediately dubbed The Lightcatcher because of its central feature, a huge translucent wall that appears to rise out from and bisect the building as it curves upward. “It’s a lantern from outside at night, and from the inside it’s like a luminous fixture,” says Olson.
The addition holds the museum’s contemporary art collection, and the results are further proof of Olson’s mastery of designing spaces for artworks, the facet for which he has become best known. “What I like to do is essentially frame the art with the architecture,” he says. That’s a deceptively plain statement, given that many architects fail miserably on this score. In the book Jim Olson: Houses (published by Monacelli Press in 2009), several good examples are on display, notably the way Olson has installed Dale Chihuly’s anemone-like glass pieces in front of large windows overlooking Elliott Bay in a glamorous Seattle apartment. (Olson’s own collecting tastes are surprisingly eclectic: Among his passions is the genre of manipulated photography, and he owns works by the likes of the controversial Andres Serrano.)
Olson’s knack for designing for art certainly reached its apotheosis on the shores of Lake Washington, just outside Seattle, in the home of travel magnate Barney Ebsworth. (In addition to Ebsworth, other prominent trustees of the Seattle Art Museum for whom he has designed houses include Jeffrey and Susan Brotman and members of the Nordstrom family.) The Ebsworth spread is referred to in the book only as An American Place, but it would be more accurate to call it a showplace for one of the country’s best 20th-century collections, stuffed with works by Georgia O’Keefe, Joan Mitchell, Max Beckmann and Willem De Kooning, to name just a few. “Jim’s a remarkably mellow and intelligent guy,” says Ebsworth. “I’d seen his first ‘art house’ and I liked that. He’s so good with light and proportion and materials.”
Certain vistas in the Ebsworth house — like a busty Gaston Lachaise sculpture at the end of a long hallway, and a Ming chair placed near a Joan Mitchell painting with light streaming in from the sides — linger in the mind as pitch-perfect combinations of art and architecture. As he often does, Olson spread the house out horizontally, with concrete columns forming separate niches in which to contemplate featured artworks. In fact, the space didn’t need to be hung with paintings to make an impact. “When I first walked down that central hallway, with the light streaming in, I said, ‘This is better than a Donald Judd,’” Ebsworth recalls.
Olson’s affinity for colonnades doesn’t come from classical Greek and Roman architecture, as might be expected. “Growing up there was a pergola that we went to often,” he says of a 14-foot-high grape arbor at a historic house not far from the family cabin. “As you walked along it, you felt like it was some kind of procession. And when I first went to Egypt that was what blew me away walking through the Luxor Temple: you’re in this space with huge columns on each side and this monumental scale. It left an indelible impression on my mind.”
Somehow Olson converted his love of grand Egyptian gestures to a modern domestic scale. And he’s incorporated other influences into his designs: Louis Kahn, Frank Lloyd Wright and Philip Johnson’s Glass House, the International-Style icon to which he paid homage in Eastern Oregon. At 1,500 square feet, the “glass farmhouse” is completely open to the fields and mountains, and it also sports several green features, including an “eyebrow” — a sort of shelf that cuts through a high part of the southern-facing picture windows, letting in low winter sun but not intense midday rays.
Olson has been environmentally oriented from the get-go. “I’ve done planted roofs for my whole career,” he says. “Back in the 1960s, very few people were doing it.” Since green features are the first thing to get cut when budgets are tight, he retains a few tricks up his sleeve: “We try to wire for solar panels even if they don’t make it to the finished building so that the clients have the option of putting them on later.”
A social conscience helps balance out some of Olson’s higher-end residential work. “I always try to have a couple low-budget projects going,” he says. These include a current Seattle complex that combines a church, affordable housing and a homeless services center — a far cry from art-filled estates for the Ebsworths of the world. “I have the privilege of working with these connoisseurs —the Medicis or pharaohs of our time,” says Olson. “But it’s great to share what you’ve learned with the general public on a more modest building.”
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