Jim Olson, FAIA | Principal & Founder
Tom Kundig, FAIA, RIBA | Principal/Owner & Founder
Jim Olson, FAIA and Tom Kundig, FAIA, RIBA are principals and founders of Olson Kundig—a collaborative design practice whose work expands the context of built and natural landscapes. The firm began its creative existence in 1966, grounded in the belief that buildings can serve as a bridge between culture, nature, and people. Under the leadership of Jim and Tom, Olson Kundig has since evolved to become a multi-disciplinary practice, globally renowned for its design and craft. Rooted in the Pacific Northwest, the firm’s work—private residences, museums, workplace and mixed-use buildings, cultural and civic centers, and hospitality projects—extends worldwide, from the rural landscapes of Montana and Idaho to the dense urban environments of London and Manhattan. Now in its sixth decade of practice, Olson Kundig has been recognized with some of the industry’s highest honors, including the 2009 AIA National Architecture Firm Award, 2025 Large Firm Award in Architect’s Newspaper’s Best of Practice Program, 2025 Best Large Firm in Architizer’s A+ Awards, named one of Fast Company’s Top Ten Most Innovative Companies in Architecture four times, and Architectural Digest’s AD100 list 17 times.
Inspired by the relationship between light and space, Jim Olson, FAIA has explored the aesthetic interplay of art, nature, and architecture for over sixty years. Thoughtfully balancing the relationship between interior and exterior, Jim creates homes that offer intimate settings for living with art and nature, such as An American Place, House of Light and Hong Kong Villa. His projects are characterized by a keen sensitivity to proportion and scale in service to the unique artworks displayed, and to each site’s natural attributes. Jim is equally passionate about making architecture that enhances the urban context. His commitment to creating a thriving community is best exemplified in Seattle, where his work has powerfully altered the city’s fabric. The award-winning mixed-use Pike and Virginia Building—the first new mid-rise constructed in Pike Place Market in fifty years—originated a style of architecture in the neighborhood. This building, along with Jim’s wide range of international residential and commercial work, expresses the power of contextual design: architecture that fits into the cultural, social, and economic milieu of both the built and natural environments.
Jim’s influence extends far beyond the Pacific Northwest—his career is marked by significant projects around the world, global publications and speaking engagements, and several exhibitions of his designs, including a traveling retrospective titled: Jim Olson: Architecture for Art. In addition to widespread publication across major media outlets like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Architectural Digest, Jim’s body of work is documented in a collection of four monographs, and widely recognized through a range of national and international awards, with citations from the American Institute of Architects, the Chicago Athenaeum, the American Association of Museums, and more. Over the course of his practice, Jim’s contributions to the field have led to numerous individual honors, such as the AIA Seattle Medal of Honor, the Federación de Colegios de Arquitectos de la República Mexicana or the FCARM Medal, GRAY Magazine Legacy Award, and induction into Interior Design magazine’s Hall of Fame.
As one of the most internationally renowned architects, Tom Kundig, FAIA, RIBA, has spent over four decades crafting award-winning architecture across six continents. Widely published in prominent media outlets like The New York Times, Architectural Digest, Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal, his work spans private homes and hospitality destinations to museums, towers, sports facilities and venues, wineries, adaptive reuse developments, and more. Equal parts function and beauty, Tom’s contextual approach to design is grounded in the expression of craft and the science of building tectonics—informed by a longstanding curiosity around the ways in which buildings come together and how people experience place. Known for his innovations in kinetic architecture, Tom’s gizmo designs reveal the wonder of physics within the natural world, crafting tactile moments of connection where humans are the motor to the machine. Exploring the relationship between people and their built, cultural, and natural environments, his work is deferential to its surroundings, creating architecture that is quietly powerful and profoundly human. Collaborating with artists, craftspeople, engineers, and other project partners, he uses this combined knowledge to challenge design conventions, pushing his work to constantly evolve.
Over the span of his career, Tom has been recognized by over 230 individual and project award programs—including over 80 AIA local, regional, and national awards, ten AIA National Architecture Awards, and two COTE Top Ten Awards, as well as the AIA Seattle Gold Medal, the FCARM Medal, induction into Interior Design magazine’s Hall of Fame, a National Design Award in Architecture from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and an Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His projects and perspectives are published in four monographs, with a fifth monograph to be published by Monacelli Press in October 2025. Expanding on his design dialogue, Tom frequently engages with global audiences through design juries, podcasts, keynote presentations, lectures, and speaking engagements around the world, in locations ranging from Seattle and New York to London, Switzerland, and Kyoto.