Meet Tom Kundig

Earlier this week the Seattle Times ran an article on Tom Kundig, Seattle architect Tom Kundig known for daring architecture, basic style:

His down-to-earth style and disarming personality almost seem to clash with his highbrow résumé — one riddled with big-name clients and daring projects and, most recently, the architecture design award from The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

Most notably for us he’s working on Eleven Eleven East Pike which just topped off the other day and Candela which the Times also just wrote about, Candela hotel-condo project design boasts striking touches of nature:

The building, at Second Avenue and Pike Street, would have a cinched waist: big on the bottom, skinny in the middle, then bigger again up high. The top 13 floors of the condo tower would be cantilevered out up to 30 feet from the shaft below.

Kundig says his design for Candela references the Northwest lifestyle — casual, yet sophisticated — and its inextricable connection with the Northwest landscape: forests, mountains, clouds.

Here’s a gallery of renderings of the Candela project.