Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects began its creative existence with architect Jim Olson, whose work in the late 1960s explored the relationship between dwellings and the landscape they inhabit in the Northwest. Olson started the firm based on some simple ideas: that buildings can serve as a bridge between nature, culture and people, and that inspiring surroundings have a positive effect on people’s lives. Rick Sundberg joined the firm in 1975, and its commitment to urbanism and civic life became evident as they began designing and developing modern urban buildings in and around national historic districts Pike Place Market and Pioneer Square.
The addition of partners Scott Allen and Tom Kundig has taken the firm to another level of creative exploration, and grown it into an office with a national reputation. Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen’s work, including museums, academic buildings, exhibit design, interior design, places of worship and residences, often for art collectors, is now worldwide. The office combines the capacity of a large firm with the intensity of a small one. The firm’s commitment to vigorous, critical design review sessions has infused its designers with a shared sense of commitment to every project.
The partners lecture extensively on design, regularly serve as university studio critics, and are board members for civic institutions and jury awards programs. The firm’s award-winning work has been widely exhibited in North America, including at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. The work has been published extensively, including in the New York Times Magazine, Architectural Digest, and Architectural Record, and has been featured numerous times on the covers of books and magazines.
Among the firm’s accolades are National and Regional design awards from the American Institute of Architects, American Architecture Awards from the Chicago Athenaeum, and Tom Kundig’s Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and his recognition as an “Emerging Voice” by the Architectural League of New York.
A monograph of the firm’s work, Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects: Architecture, Art and Craft, was published by The Monacelli Press in 2003. This was followed by Art + Architecture: The Ebsworth Collection + Residence, which highlighted the house designed by Jim Olson for art collector Barney Ebsworth, and Tom Kundig: Houses, published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2006. In 2007, on the occasion of the Frye Art Museum’s fifty-fifth anniversary, Documentary Media published The Frye Art Museum: Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects, highlighting how the firm designed a remodel and significant expansion to bring a classic Seattle institution into the present.
