Inside a Modern Moving Home On Railroad Tracks
Today AD travels to the woodlands of the Pacific Northwest to tour Maxon House. Designed by Tom Kundig, owner of Olson Kundig Architects, Maxon House is a modern home revolutionizing the work commute. Work/life balance is given new meaning in Kundig’s design–a fully detachable home office on wheels journeys across a functional rail track into the forest creating an innovative work-from-home setup. With no shortage of ingenious features, Maxon House is a marriage of form and function and a prime example of modernist design.
Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00I think kinetic elements are important.
00:13We deal with kinetic elements every day.
00:15We open a door.
00:16We open a window.
00:18It's the place we actually touch the building.
00:20There's an architect, Yohani Palasma, which has a terrific quote.
00:24He says, when you touch a building, that's the handshake with the building.
00:28It's the most intimate connection you have with the building.
00:31So if you recognize that, then you should make it a very special event, rather than
00:36just a functional event.
00:42I'm Tom Kundig, owner of Olsen-Kundig Architects, designer of the Maxon Residence.
00:48I built the house for the Maxon family, just a terrific family, Lou and Kim and their three
00:53boys.
00:54The creative relationship between Lou and I was almost like colleagues.
00:59Lou comes with a design background, and so for us, it was a conversation, frankly, about
01:06what he was thinking, what I could bring to the table.
01:09The architectural style at its root is modern, modernism.
01:14And what I mean by modernism is it's a rational building style.
01:19It's more than style.
01:20It's almost like a value.
01:22How do you make a building efficient and deliver it in a package that is also beautiful?
01:29So form follows function, beauty follows function.
01:33In my mind, that's the definition of modernism.
01:38Originally, the speculation of the idea that you could move a part of the house happened
01:45on a project maybe six or seven years ago, where we were working on a project that had
01:51one particular family member that the rest of the family really didn't want to deal with.
01:55And we were just laughing about it.
01:57It's, wouldn't it be great if you could push a button and then send that bedroom off into
02:01the other end of the property?
02:02But what I did was I brought it back to the office, and our gizmologist, Phil Turner,
02:07who's frankly a genius, we talked about it.
02:09And so he built a little model of a cog.
02:12It wasn't proven because it wasn't built, but Phil, with his background, felt that absolutely
02:19it was possible.
02:21And so the conversation with Lou was, this is efficient family house.
02:25It's all about the chaos.
02:26It's all about how do you raise a family?
02:28Well, this particular house is a relatively small house, so it's really hard to get away
02:33from that kind of life.
02:34But Lou wanted to remain on site.
02:36He wanted to be with the family.
02:37It was a conversation about maybe he could commute into the woods, you know, from this house.
02:49I'm here with Lou Maxon at the entry to the Maxon property.
03:01This is where the gate is, and it sets the spirit of the house, and it's intentionally
03:05very straight, orthogonal, and geometric as a counterpoint to the beauty of the forest,
03:11of course, and the modeled light, the speckled light that's coming through the forest.
03:20As you come into the property, you don't see the house at this point, but as you come around
03:25the corner, you begin to get a little glimpse of the house as it reveals itself in this
03:31landscape.
03:32So this sort of chicane road, which is called a shifted axis, it's very important in a Japanese
03:39garden where you can't see where you're going, but as you come around the corner, it reveals
03:44where you're going ultimately.
03:50You'll notice the house kind of levitates or floats off the ground, and the ground is
03:55allowed to go underneath the house.
03:57So the idea is to float this building kind of gently off the ground so that it takes
04:02that mid-story between the upper forest and the low story.
04:06So there's a ramp that is taking you from that sort of ground level to that elevated
04:11level at the entry door.
04:15The exterior of the house is formed in a very simple shape to sort of almost be the
04:19yin to the yang of the natural landscape, but it's also made out of a tough material
04:24that's allowed to weather.
04:25Ideally, the building gets better with time rather than it's great at the beginning and
04:30then it begins to deteriorate.
04:32It's also the colors fit in with some of the colors of the bark, some of the colors of
04:37the landscape beyond.
04:38It's intended to sort of disappear into the landscape.
04:46This is actually a good example of what we sometimes call a nominalese, and these are
04:52like in the wabi-sabi tradition, an accident is a good thing because it gives sort of a
04:56humanity next layer to the project, and actually I just love the way that kind of like connects
05:03all the way through.
05:05The entry door, it's intentionally large into a relatively smaller, more modest house for
05:11the big welcome into the family's home.
05:15This is a good example of balanced light.
05:17In the Pacific Northwest, we have actually a large percentage of cloudy skies, so you
05:21want to harvest as much light as possible, but you also want to balance the light.
05:27The glass is floor to ceiling, so as much as possible, it's opening to the view and
05:32to the light, but also it's on the part of the building that's basically cantilevered
05:37above the ground.
05:38So the idea is it feels like you float above the ground, so there's a little bit of a different
05:44almost magical sort of moment when you come into this space.
05:47You feel like you're hovering in that landscape.
05:58The far end that we just came from is the living room, and at this end, the most private
06:03end is the bedroom, and the bedroom then is confronting the rails and the office off
06:10in the distance.
06:11That office can come all the way to this window, and then Lou can walk into the private bedroom.
06:17Also, you've got balanced light from three different angles blended into this room.
06:26The reason for the wide train tracks has a lot to do with just stability, because you've
06:33got a relatively tall object here, and you just want to be able to make sure, I mean
06:38a train has the stability of a horizontal physics basically.
06:42This is very vertical, so you want to really be able to put that on solid rails in a sense
06:49so that it becomes functional.
06:51The reason for the roughness is Lou's agenda, where he didn't want to feel like he was on
06:55a maglev.
06:56Train has a certain soul to it because of the grit and the way it functions.
07:09And I think it makes perfect sense that you want to just be able to sort of tell the story
07:14about the materials and the relationship between the rails, the wheels, and the train.
07:19And the relationship between the rails, the wheels, and then the building itself.
07:26Lou was able to find these rails that were built pre-1910 in Bethlehem.
07:35Bethlehem Steel.
07:36This is perfectly level, because obviously you can't have your car in any way sort of
07:41shift around.
07:43You'll probably also see the sort of tall proportions, the reasons for the windows being
07:49elongated.
07:50It's not just as a reference to the relatively long proportions of the building itself, but
07:56it's also intentionally picking up all of the more vertical proportions of the forest
08:03here in the Pacific Northwest.
08:05We talked about this yellow door.
08:08Maybe instinct was on our part that it be yellow, but really for Lou, this yellow is
08:15much more important from his research into what yellow means in the railroad industry.
08:22Warning signs, Burlington Northern graphics.
08:25This has actually got an interesting history behind it.
08:28Yeah, this is an original great Northern switch stand that they would use to switch the
08:34trains off the tracks.
08:36So everything in the project that we found artifact-wise had to be connected to railways
08:41that would have served the community here or in the greater Pacific Northwest.
08:45And we sort of brought back to life some of these artifacts.
08:48This is the original lantern that would designate when the trains were coming.
08:52This would have been full of kerosene, but we've sort of hacked it to work with LED
08:56lights today.
08:57The lights actually do come on or will blink, and so when I'm working and the light's on,
09:02someone knows I'm in here and not to be bothered.
09:06Once the possibility became a reality that we could actually collaborate and figure out
09:15how to have my studio run on actual railroad tracks, that's really where I sort of looked
09:21back almost in a nostalgic way to like growing up and loving trains, having a train set.
09:27That really reinvigorated my passion for trains.
09:30And it also sort of connected me to the history of Carnation and the railroading here.
09:36One of the key pieces of the project was figuring out how we're going to actually operate the
09:43rail car.
09:44And through some connections I made with actual folks that work for the railroad, they pointed
09:49me to this, which is basically a locomotive control panel, which runs even today on diesel
09:57and electric locomotives.
09:58So we were able to actually acquire this and then have our fabrication team sort of hack
10:04it to work with our electric motor system.
10:09So basically it all starts with this brass key, and once the key is put into the locomotive
10:16control, the key actually becomes the way that you motorize the studio.
10:22So we're at the end of the track now, but to point back towards the house, the Home
10:27Depot, we go here and then the studio starts moving.
10:30We can actually change the speed of the car.
10:34If we want to go slow back home, or if you're in a hurry to get home for dinner, you just
10:39slide the locomotive control and we pick up speed.
10:46The movement of that building changes the context, becomes a sort of collected building.
10:52But as soon as it moves, there's a whole different sort of perception of that building.
10:57And Lou can choreograph his experience.
11:01He doesn't have to go to the very end.
11:03He can stop a lot of times, and he can do a lot of things.
11:07And he's able to do a lot of things in a short amount of time.
11:10So here we're in Lou's world, basically.
11:14And as a creative, this is what I just find personally fascinating, is that all we do
11:19is we set up shelves or desks or whatever.
11:21But this is the real interesting stuff.
11:24All the little things that somehow make up the building.
11:27And it's a lot of fun.
11:29It's a lot of fun to be a part of it.
11:31It's a lot of fun to be a part of it.
11:33It's a lot of fun to be a part of it.
11:35It's a lot of fun to be a part of it.
11:37interesting stuff, all the little things that somehow intrigue Lou.
11:43And again, all steel, so you can use magnets to move things, change things.
11:49So this really is an active collage.
11:53It's the most exciting part for me personally, is how people actually engage their places.
11:58It brings a humanity to the building.
12:01It brings a poetry to the building.
12:03It tells you a lot about their personality, way more than the architecture would.
12:11In order to keep this as a tight, disciplined box for all sorts of functional reasons,
12:16we really didn't have the geometry or the space to do a stair.
12:21So we basically did a ladder to go from the lower floor to the upper floor.
12:26But you can't carry the stuff that Lou would need.
12:30And so Lou thought, well, let's put a dumbwaiter in here
12:34to carry some of the heavier stuff to the upper floor.
12:46This is the studio upstairs.
12:48It's relatively clean of stuff.
12:51And of course, you can also do chalk on this wall also.
12:55So this is more about thinking and dreaming.
13:00I think this is something kind of interesting, is
13:03Lou's got our model of the house with the office.
13:07Which moves on a little magnet.
13:11I was noticing that there's a Lego model up here
13:14that Lou or one of your kids possibly built.
13:18So there's, I think, you know,
13:20these proofing models are some of the most important design tools we can work with.
13:25And this is elevating off the ground just for a little bit more of a peaceful,
13:29quiet, in the clouds kind of position off the level where the chaos is with the family.
13:37So super important view, a quiet view, a meditative view.
13:48The architecture is intentionally, or should be,
13:52intentionally responding to the idiosyncratic nature of the situation,
13:56the client or the climate or whatever.
13:58And as you begin to understand those idiosyncratic situations,
14:03you begin to use all the tools on your belt
14:06to basically come up with a route or come up with a solution.
14:10And sometimes that leads into invention.
14:13And of course, that's a very exciting moment when that happens.
14:16But you don't go into it, I don't think, looking for an invention or a new idea.
14:26It's like a musician that's really skilled at a piece.
14:30They'll always modify it because they're interested in it.
14:33It's like Bob Dylan.
14:34He's not going to play Tangled Up in Blue the same every time he does it.
14:38He's always going to be sort of twisting it into sort of a different way.
14:42That's a true creative.
14:44And hopefully that's what architects do.
14:45Yes, you may have done it before.
14:47We've certainly done roofs.
14:48We've certainly done foundations and walls.
14:51And if you're really skilled and you really know those issues,
14:54then you can actually...
14:55It's like a jazz musician.
14:57I would argue that most jazz combos don't play the same piece the same
15:04every time they play it because they're always in conversation.
15:06The biggest thing I took away from this house was friends.
15:10And you always hope that's the case with these projects,
15:13is that you remain friends and typically we do.
15:18I think to be an architect is one of the biggest privileges we can have
15:22because literally you are involved in a community,
15:25worldwide community,
15:26and you are in a trusted position to interpret what the community is thinking,
15:33in a sense, and giving something back to the community.
15:36We're not in a life-saving situation, but we're in a life-changing situation.
15:42And what a privilege to be trusted with that agenda.