2010 Architecture Honors
Each year, Midwest Home magazine teams up with the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Minnesota to honor two residential architects: an Architect of Distinction, an AIA member and licensed architect who has been practicing for at least 15 years; and an Emerging Talent winner, an AIA member and licensed architect who has been practicing for 10 years or fewer.
Tom Ellison, AIA, CID, is this year’s Architect of Distinction. In recognition of his work as founder of TEA2 Architects in Minneapolis, Midwest Home will contribute a scholarship in his name to the University of Minnesota’s School of Architecture. Christian Dean, AIA, cofounder of City Desk Studio in Minneapolis, is the winner of this year’s Emerging Talent award.
2010 JURY
| Timothy A. Alt, AIA Principal, Altus Architecture + Design 2009 Architect of Distinction | Kerrik Wessel Principal, Wessel Design 2009 Emerging Talent |
| Leslie Van Duzer Professor of Architecture College of Design/School of Architecture University of Minnesota | Chris Lee Editor Midwest Home magazine |
Delighting with Impeccable Design
2010 ARCHITECT OF DISTINCTION: TOM ELLISON
Photo by Todd Buchanan
Photo by Todd Buchanan
For nearly three decades after founding TEA2 Architects in Minneapolis in 1980, architect Tom Ellison refined his approach to residential design by listening to clients describe their feelings about their living spaces. He understood that they wanted a connection to the outdoors, as well as to the interior spaces throughout a house. They wanted to move through their new or renovated home with a sense of exploration and discovery, to enjoy views and sunlight through thoughtfully placed windows while, at the same time, experiencing a sense of safety and enclosure.
Those criteria were more important to his clients than architectural style categories, such as traditional or modern, says Ellison. “Essentially, people were talking with me about a pair of ideas having to do with spatial connection: the relationships between indoor and outdoor spaces, and the sequencing of a house on its site.” Those ideas were “prospect and refuge,” which Ellison recognized immediately when he read about them in Grant Hildebrand’s 1999 Origins of Architectural Pleasure (University of California Press).
Hildebrand links our innate need for both enclosure and view in our homes to a primal survival instinct: to be safely concealed while enjoying an unobstructed view of approaching game or predators. Hildebrand also discusses “enticement,” which he describes as the ways a design invites us through a home by revealing spaces and views as we move through it. “Hildebrand’s ideas really hit home because they’re essentially what we work with everyday,” Ellison says. “He doesn’t provide a proscriptive method for design, but his ideas relate to our design fundamentals and help us keep track of what’s really going to make people happy.”
While Ellison, a 1970 graduate of the University of Minnesota’s architecture school, discovered new terms for his approach to residential architecture, that didn’t change how he works with clients. Bill Simpson, chair and executive director of Periscope, a Minneapolis advertising agency, says he chose Ellison to design his new Tudor-style home on Lake Harriet because of Ellison’s “impeccable attention to detail and his very keen eye for great architecture.” Did “prospect and refuge” come up during pre-design discussions? “I don’t know if we used those words,” he laughs. “But Tom certainly talked with us a lot about how we would live and how spaces inside the home would enhance our lifestyle.”
While Ellison doesn’t use the terms, he does shape interior spaces that will make us humans comfortable and that will fit individual clients’ needs as well. He manipulates light and shadow, varies seating and window orientation, and adds porches and terraces adjacent to indoor living areas—all with an eye to fulfilling that dual need for prospect and refuge.
A Lake Superior retreat, on Park Point in Duluth between the lake and the St. Louis River, is a prime example. The house “rises up from its surroundings for a sense of privacy, while providing sweeping views of the water from both sides,” says Ellison. An open-plan interior and broad windows capture sunlight and the surrounding water and woods.
The house also features steeply pitched gables with window alcoves, timber columns, and an entry of birch-bark-clad blocks. “People come to us for our affinity with traditional forms,” Ellison explains, “which we balance with innovative ideas about materials and modern concepts of how architecture can support contemporary living.”
That balancing act is evident in his design for a house on a sliver of land near Lake Calhoun. In that home, Ellison refined the area’s traditional architecture into sleek simple shapes. The main living area is set up from the busy parkway to ensure privacy and provide lake vistas from windows and terraces.
Photo provided by TEA2
Inside long, narrow living spaces stacked on three levels, he designed an equally refined, museum-quality palette of darks and whites. The ebony-and-ivory theme continues in the kitchen where Ellison combined black-granite countertops with white cabinetry and stainless-steel appliances. A black-leather banquette and white-topped breakfast table sit at the back of the room, where family members can relax and enjoy meals and views of the lake. A small TV room adjoining the kitchen offers the family a more private retreat from the spacious living areas where expansive windows draw in sunlight and provide panoramic views to bustling, urban lake life outdoors.
Ellison’s style “is difficult to define in broad strokes,” says architect Dan Nepp, his partner at TEA2 since 1986. “But he places a priority on substance and integrity. He pursues things that aren’t faddish, but have lasting meaning or value. He’s fundamentally intrigued with how one enjoys life through residential design.”
Case in point: Ellison’s design for a new residence for recently retired Target CEO Bob Ulrich and his partner Jill Dahlin. He distilled the couple’s desire for low-profile luxury into a contemporary rendering of English Arts and Crafts architecture. The home’s front entry is modestly scaled to convey a sense of privacy and intimacy on arrival. At the back of the house, two stories of windows and terraces embrace the nearby woods and pond. “What people need out of architecture goes beyond the latest materials or cook top,” Nepp says. “It’s about understanding the most pleasant moments in life and how architecture can reinforce those experiences. In his residential designs, Tom really gives voice to Hildebrand’s ideas of prospect and refuge, which is why people connect to his architecture. He’s always pursuing excellence in his work, and guides his clients with a soft hand so the best ideas rise to the top.”
Camille LeFevre is a St. Paul arts writer.
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Minnesota Modern with a Twist
2010 EMERGING TALENT: CHRISTIAN DEAN
Photo by Todd Buchanan
Photo by Todd Buchanan
Arbiters of architectural taste are often enamored with our distinctive Minnesota modernism. In the expansive glass boxes of, say, Vincent James or Julie Snow’s residential designs, they applaud a rigor and reserve associated with the state’s Northern European ancestry. In the white and gabled forms of David Salmela’s designs, they note a well-hewn Scandinavian vernacular.
Among the handful of Minnesota architects who design modernist homes, however, Christian Dean’s work expresses a sensibility that is modest, inventive, and inspired by a keen attention to context. Jury members in the 2010 Emerging Talent awards recognized these qualities immediately. Dean’s work, they agreed, shows “inventiveness, attitude, and personality—all traits of an emerging talent.”
Dean, who finished his master’s in architecture at the U of M in 1996, cofounded City Desk Studio in Minneapolis with Ben Awes and Bob Ganser in 2004. “I’m curious about all the things that come to play in a project,” he says. “The client’s needs, the site, the neighborhood—I try to let all of those things have a critical voice in the work to leverage the opportunities of a place.”
In 2005, Dean completed an addition to the shingle-clad Cape Cod that he shares with his wife and their three young boys in the Linden Hills neighborhood of Minneapolis. He extended the house into the backyard with two simple shingled forms: a rectangle for the kitchen and a square for the owners’ bedroom. On the north walls of both forms, he punched window openings into the sheathing, using his own innovative glazing system to create unique walls of both transparency and privacy. “The neighbors are only 40 feet away, so I wanted to pixelate the view while letting in light,” he says.
In October 2007, Dean and his family and the house appeared on the cover of Dwell magazine. “Perhaps the most surprising element of the Deans’ addition is how it integrates into the existing home,” enthused the accompanying article. “Neither an ostentatious move toward modernity nor a traditionalist expansion, the new home occupies a middle ground.” Dean says his aesthetic is created by a “tension” between a universal modernism and the contextual vernacular.
“I wanted to retain and respect the old forms of the house, but also reinterpret and find something unexpected in them,” he explains. “I hope when people look at the house they see just the right amount of tension between old and new—a vibrant tension that’s not awkward and not overly resolved.”
When Joe Duffy saw Dean’s house in Dwell, he asked the architect to expand his cabin complex. “What drew me to Christian was his understanding of context,” recalls Duffy, founder of the Minneapolis brand-design firm Duffy & Partners. “His addition put a contemporary twist on a traditional home, creating an appropriate and unique environment within the context of the original house and the neighborhood. That’s just what we wanted.”
Duffy’s property near Minong, Wisconsin, already included a traditional log cabin, a stone garage with a loft, and a contemporary stick-frame studio in which Duffy and his wife stay. To this family of structures, Duffy wished to add a new cabin for his son and daughter and their families. To reinterpret the vernacular notion of “north woods cabin,” Dean worked with the iconic familiarity of pine logs to design a structure both familiar and unexpected.
Photo by Chad Holder
The cabin’s low, simple form is embedded in the hillside and covered with a sod roof to minimize its profile. While floor-to-ceiling glass provides views to the lake and woods, other walls are composed of logs in a quilted pattern of varied textures and translucent solidity. One section, for instance, is a screen wall that lets light in during the day and glows from light within at night.
A new home Dean is completing for graphic designer Jeff Schweigert and his kids in Golden Valley is also tucked into a hilltop site. From the street below, the modern white-stucco house is barely visible. But from inside the two-story walkout, which sits on a thermal-mass concrete base and features glass walls overlooking Sweeney Lake and woods, “the architecture disappears and it’s all about the view,” Schweigert says. Clear-plank cedar stained a warm teak color wraps the house, from garage, entryway, and stairs, into the lower level and owners’ bedroom.
Dean demurs when asked to describe the style of his residential work. “I’d rather have the client and the site’s voices speak louder than my own hand,” he says. “I hope people see the clients’ personality in a finished project, and the connection with the site and existing context.” Still, his interest lies in “designing the unexpected, and not relying on preconceived solutions.” Architectural arbiters take note: Minnesota modern has progressed with a delightfully original twist.
Camille LeFevre is a St. Paul arts writer.
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