The Visceralist

There is still snow on the ground, and a cold wind blows off the dark blue waters of New York’s Seneca Lake, but inside the lake house of Kim and Wendell Weeks, it is warm and sunny. You can see the lake from almost any seat at the long maple dining table: choppy waves to the south, framed by a stand of trees and a chunky concrete inglenook; and, to the north, the house’s dock and a boxlike, wood-sided boathouse in the distance. The Combs Point House is long and lean, meandering back from the water into a glen. A boardwalk connects the house to two more structures in the glen, a one-room office and a two-bedroom guesthouse. All three are sided in cedar, but the house sloughs off solidity as it moves toward the lake: by the end, it is essentially a porch, half indoors, half outdoors, as the roof, its full length supported by twinned glue-laminated beams, rises up to gain a few more hours of sun.

“The site is so touching,” says Peter Bohlin, the house’s architect, using a favorite word in his idiosyncratic architectural vocabulary. “The magic moment is when you move from the ravine to the delta and you look sideways at the lake. It is a visceral moment.” That’s where he put the table, turning the traditional home center, the kitchen, into something more dynamic.

The Weekses, who live in Corning, New York, came to Bohlin with clear ideas about what they wanted: a house for many generations, with a big, open living-dining area for gathering but enough separate spaces for their teenage children to have privacy. “He came to the property on several occasions just to wander around with us, to figure out where the sun was in the winter, what path the house should take through the gorge, where you wanted the dining table to be so that everyone can see the water,” Kim Weeks says. “That provided everything he needed to come up with the design. It was almost perfect the first time.”

Bohlin, who will receive the American Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal this June, has been practicing architecture since 1965, operating his 174-person firm, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, out of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. A measure of fame has come to BCJ only in the last decade, as its high-profile stores for Apple have become landmarks in cities across the globe, but the scale of its work still varies widely. In Seattle, where BCJ opened an office in 1997, the firm recently designed the new city hall, a green-roofed branch library, and a charming three-unit row house faced in red-and-blue HardiePanel siding. Bohlin is committed to maintaining that range, even though his firm has 12 partners and five offices on both coasts. From the beginning, he says, “We worked hard to seem like we weren’t working too hard. My practice sprung from a modest place, and I had to prove myself by doing modest things.”

One of those modest things, the 1976 Forest House, was on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. As James Timberlake, of the Philadelphia-based architectural firm KieranTimberlake, said in his speech nominating Bohlin for the Gold Medal, “Imagine, if the house were removed, that the site would be left completely intact, an extremely sensitive approach to its intrusion on nature.” The firm’s Shelly Ridge Girl Scout Center, built in Philadelphia in 1984, won a U.S. Department of Energy grant as a demonstration project for passive solar heat—teaching the Scouts, and the government, about sustainability long before it was a buzzword.

Two recent residential projects from BCJ’s Seattle office show the firm moving in some striking new directions, without losing track of nature, site, and sun. The Envelope House, in Seattle, completed in 2006, was a low-budget project, so crisp and cute I wouldn’t have been surprised to see it win its architect a “best new practice” award, or turn up in Brooklyn. When I mention this, Bohlin is pleased: “We hope to do more versions all over,” he says, clearly energized by the constraints of cost and site. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the Waipolu Gallery and Studio, in Oahu, a boulder of a building, clad in copper and designed to display an art collection and to open up onto views of sea and mountains. It also features a stunning glass bridge.

I ask Bohlin why he thinks he won the Gold Medal this year. “I think the whole culture has lost its bearing a bit,” he says. “I have a belief in the nature of things, in really solving things, and the ability to do it in a way that is quite visceral.” This sounded exactly right to me. BCJ’s new monograph, published this month by Rizzoli, includes short essays by Glenn Murcutt, Mack Scogin, Tod Williams, and Will Bruder. These are Bohlin’s colleagues: thoughtful people who are doing good work and have been doing so for some time; who have not courted the press, who are interested in materials, who have never turned their backs on modernism. They may all be better known than Bohlin, but it’s hard to argue that they have better practices. The AIA jury voted for longevity over spectacle. Bohlin thinks he was up against Thom Mayne and Adrian Smith: big names, big works. But a profession turning inward, correcting itself after the boom years, was looking to send a message by choosing something else. “Architecture has become a bit of a fashionable enterprise,” says Bernard Cywinski, Bohlin’s partner since the late 1970s and the head of the firm’s Philadelphia office. “Peter’s work is very fresh and very honest. It can be heroic when it has to be.”