TO AN EAST COAST corporate tower builder, Jim Cutler might sound like some kind of New Age nut. A soft-spoken, bearded guy who pads in his socks around a snug office overlooking a Puget Sound marina, Cutler is a bit ambivalent about his profession. He’s uneasy about its destructiveness (“whenever you build something, you insult the land”); he terms the unnecessary bulldozing of a tree “wanton murder.” So when he starts a new project, be takes the lay of the land: he personally surveys the site, nestles his design into the existing trees as much as possible and marks out a staging area so construction crews contain their mess. His buildings don’t look like they were erected on the spot so much as parachuted in-or as if they’ve been in the forest forever.
Cutler, 44, was one of the last students of Louis Kahn at the University of Pennsylvania and, like his great teacher, he believes in the expressive power of architecture. He uses wood, stone and concrete in rich, often symbolic ways; he pours much of his energy at the drawing board into designing the beautiful details by which these materials are joined. Growing up in the coal country of Pennsylvania, he spent lots of time in the woods (“looking for wild mushrooms with my Uncle Henry”), but when he came to Bainbridge island near Seattle 20 years ago, he thought it was paradise. Since then, he’s made environmental sensitivity a hallmark of his work.
For the Bloedel Education Center on Bainbridge, Cutler created an elegantly rustic wood, stone and glass pavilion. Sitting in a 200-acre nature reserve, the structure–a memorial to Virginia Bloedel from her husband of 60 years-is traversed by a bridge that’s exactly in line with her grave site, several hundred yards away. “It was the first time I realized we could imbue the land with emotion,” he says. The big wooden beams and generous overhangs of the metal roof are reminiscent of the lavish bungalows built in Seattle in the early part of the century-and are logical details in such a rainy climate. But more than common sense is at stake here; Cutler is also trying to capture the emphemeral cycles of nature and the persistence of memory. “The wooden structure might burn or rot,” he told his client, but “the stone elements will be there for 1,000 years, always on axis to the grave.”
Cutler’s fame has been growing, particularly since he and architect Peter Bohlin won an international competition in 1989 to design a huge residential compound for Microsoft chief Bill Gates on Lake Washington near Seattle. Though no doubt a few trees have been murdered in the process, Cutler and Bohlin hope to create a wetlands on the site and are replanting an alder forest in what is otherwise a suburban neighborhood. And let’s not forget recycling: for the beams and posts, they’re salvaging wood from an abandoned saw mill.
The Gates project, a couple of years from completion, will cement Cutler’s national reputation, but the question is, can an architect so identified with the timbers and stone of the Pacific Northwest make it anywhere else? If the award-winning design for the memorial to the witch trials in Salem, Mass., is any indication, the answer is yes. That project, a collaboration between Cutler and artist Maggie Smith, called for a rough-hewn granite wall and black locust saplings to create a tiny, utterly somber New England park. One of his next projects: a house on a dairy farm in Ohio, where he’s taking his cues from farm sheds. The point, says Cutler, is that no matter where a project is, it should reveal the nature of the place.
TED FLATO AND DAVID Lake have designed lots of homes on the range, but even if a ranch is vast-say, thousands of acres-according to Flato, “there’s only one place to put the house.” Where the wind comes from, where the trees stand, where the land rises and where the sun sets are all elements that Texas pioneers understood. When he sited the Carraro house, though it sits on just 17 acres in the Hill Country near Austin, Flato thought about its relation to the live oak trees that would give the big, rambly structure a sense of scale; he thought about the stone walls that would buttress the house against the north winter wind, and about the huge screened porch that would collect the prevailing southeast breezes during the sultry summers. Inside, each window frames a wonderful view of the oak, persimmon and mesquite trees. “All of these things are efforts at trying to make you part of the land,” says Flato. “You really move around the house during the day as the sun moves, and then-if you’re lucky-the moon comes up and throws in all this light.”
But the Carraro house doesn’t just glorify the land, it celebrates the beauty of indigenous industrial architecture. The frame of the house was recycled from the 1920s Alamo Cement factory in San Antonio, with its steel trusses and clerestory at the crown of the roof. Flato took the 140-foot shed frame, and cut it “like a sausage” into three parts: one contains the porch and a living area faced in butter-colored Texas limestone; one is covered in galvanized steel, with a bedroom and study; one is just a ghostly frame for a carport. It’s an exuberant, funky “collage of materials.” Such confident use of textures stems partly from the influence of the great Texas regionalist O’Neil Ford; both Lake, 43, and Flato, 39, once worked for him.
The partners, who work in a sleekly rehabbed former garage, split each project: one takes charge, the other acts, as Lake puts it, as “the taste police.” So though their houses tend to employ such Texas traditions as wraparound porches, there’s nothing hokey about what they do. As taste cops, they work in honest forms and materials, but with a sophisticated touch.
THIS SURE IS DIFFERENT," SAID THE local sheriff when he pulled up to the Cook house outside Oxford, Miss., just after it was built. The Deep South is not home to a particularly rich architectural tradition, beyond antebellum mansions and maybe the shotgun house. With its concrete-block walls, irregular corrugated roof and air of maverick grandeur, the Cook house looked like nothing else in town. The owners had trouble finding a contractor who could build it, and wound up with a guy who usually puts up commercial structures. “Basically, there are two distinct cultures here,” explains architect Coleman Coker. “One culture has lived closer to the land by necessity, agrarian as opposed to industrial.”
In the Cook house, Coker and his partner, Sam Mockbee, each a native Mississippian, embraced both traditions. They were inspired by the lonesome chimneys you see in fields along back roads, remnants of long burned-out farmhouses. And they were struck by the way people shore up their mobile homes-icons of industry and the machine-by covering them in hunks of corrugated metal “like a handmade cocoon,” says Coker. The Cook house, built for an Oxford anesthesiologist and his wife, a potter, sits along a ridge with a splendid view. You enter in the middle of a big asymmetrical chimney; the door is set in a slot that echoes a dogtrot (a hallway cut through from front to back in a local house type). The corrugated metal roofs of the house and garage seem to float. “I like to say we’ve been dealing with deconstruction since Reconstruction,” drawls Mockbee.
The witty, tough design looks both jerry-built and assured. Not surprisingly, given the house’s sculptural quality, both Coker and Mockbee believe art is a bigger influence in their work than architectural tradition. Mockbee, 49, paints; Coker, 43, who’s a Loeb Fellow at Harvard this year, is working on a master’s degree in sculpture. Their firm used to number as many as 15; now it’s just the two of them and they tend to practice via fax. For at least 10 years, they’ve done low-cost housing as well as custom residences. Mockbee, who teaches at Auburn University, has just finished an experimental house in Hale County, Ala., that cost $15,000. It’s made of hay bales between stucco walls, and it has, he thinks, quite a bit in common with the Cook house, which cost 20 times as much. “The requirements of people are the same,” he says. “They need to be warm and dry and to have pride in the house.” Though Coker rejects the regionalist label, Mockbee doesn’t. “I think an architect has to be attached to a locality-a time and place,” he says. Certainly it’s hard to imagine the Cook house anywhere else on earth.
