American, b. 1954
Tom Kundig is a principal and owner of the Seattle-based design practice Olson Kundig. Over the past three decades, Kundig has received some of the world's highest design honors, from a National Design Award from the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum to an Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2014, Kundig was included in Architectural Digest's AD100, and in 2012, he was inducted into Interior Design magazine's Hall of Fame.
Kundig’s diverse body of work champions the formal and technical, yet makes a genuine connection with the people who inhabit it. From a tiny, elevated cabin in eastern Washington to a 15-story commercial headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, his work draws heavily on context and place, whether urban or rural. Today, Kundig’s work can be found on five continents, in locations ranging from Costa Rica and Brazil to New Zealand, China, Mexico, Sweden, Austria and Switzerland.
Kundig’s longstanding interest in the ways people interact with their environments, both built and natural, was honed throughout his extensive career designing private residences, but it is just as present in his larger scale work. His institutional buildings, art and natural history museums, hotels and commercial headquarters exhibit a keen sensitivity to scale and detail, resulting in highly approachable architecture that emphasizes quiet moments of human connection. In this way, Kundig’s design practice is an ongoing exploration of architecture’s elemental qualities: materiality, texture and detail in dialogue with the human cultural condition.
He is a frequent guest speaker at universities and conferences throughout the US and abroad. He has held numerous distinguished chairs and critic positions at the University of Southern California, Syracuse University, and Harvard University, among others, and served as the John G. Williams distinguished Professor at the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas.
Kundig’s diverse body of work champions the formal and technical, yet makes a genuine connection with the people who inhabit it. From a tiny, elevated cabin in eastern Washington to a 15-story commercial headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, his work draws heavily on context and place, whether urban or rural. Today, Kundig’s work can be found on five continents, in locations ranging from Costa Rica and Brazil to New Zealand, China, Mexico, Sweden, Austria and Switzerland.
Kundig’s longstanding interest in the ways people interact with their environments, both built and natural, was honed throughout his extensive career designing private residences, but it is just as present in his larger scale work. His institutional buildings, art and natural history museums, hotels and commercial headquarters exhibit a keen sensitivity to scale and detail, resulting in highly approachable architecture that emphasizes quiet moments of human connection. In this way, Kundig’s design practice is an ongoing exploration of architecture’s elemental qualities: materiality, texture and detail in dialogue with the human cultural condition.
He is a frequent guest speaker at universities and conferences throughout the US and abroad. He has held numerous distinguished chairs and critic positions at the University of Southern California, Syracuse University, and Harvard University, among others, and served as the John G. Williams distinguished Professor at the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas.
