Rooted in The Wilderness - Pieso Poagen House

By Michael Webb - 21 April 2015

Tom Kundig grew up in the northwestern United States - a region of mountains, forests, and great natural beauty. Though he is now a partner in the Seattle firm of Olson Kundig, he has never lost his love of skiing, climbing, and hiking through the great outdoors. His houses are tough and organic: finely crafted compositions of wood, steel, and concrete, and they demonstrate the architect’s love of mechanical ingenuity. Massive doors and windows swing open as the owner turns a wheel that operates a set of cogs and pulleys.
The client, an actress who retired to commune with nature, appreciated the intangible spirit of a house Kundig had designed for her niece and commissioned him to build a very different residence on her 400 hectares of woodland near the city of Spokane. There were to be no moving parts, except for the wood sliders; the roofs were to be sensuously curved, and the house was to be constructed from reclaimed timber and locally sourced granite boulders. She even picked the location, steering the architect away from the obvious choice of a lake-front site, and chose a name. Pieso Poagen is a Native-American phrase meaning “thunder from afar”. The project was to be a family affair, drawing on the talents of her sister, interior designer Agnes Bourne, and artist Johannes Girardoni, Bourne’s son-in-law.
This is Kundig’s native territory and he welcomed the constraints and creative opportunities of building in the wilderness with other strong-minded individuals. He created a house that seems to grow from the land, like an outcrop of the granite boulders that form one wall. Beyond that rock pile, the end of the house hovers above the ground. It began with two steel structures, the pieces of which were trucked in and welded together in place. A tower contains a spiral stair leading up to a glass-walled belvedere, where one can lie in a tub or on its cover and gaze up at the sky or out to a natural formation called...