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2011 Architecture Honors
Each year, Midwest Home magazine teams up with 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.
Julie Snow, FAIA, is this year’s Architect of Distinction. In recognition of her award-winning work as founder of Julie Snow Architects Inc. in Minneapolis, Midwest Home and AIA Minnesota will contribute a scholarship in her name to the University of Minnesota’s School of Architecture. Meghan Kell Cornell, founder of Kell.Architect(s) in St. Paul is the winner of this year’s Emerging Talent award.
2011 JURY
| Tom Ellison, AIA, CID Founder, TEA2 Architects 2010 Architect of Distinction | Christian Dean, AIA Cofounder, City Desk Studio 2010 Emerging Talent |
| Mark Tambornino Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture College of Design/School of Architecture University of Minnesota | Chris Lee Editor Midwest Home magazine |
2011 Architect of Distinction: Julie Snow
Midwest Minimalism
Mastery of structural detail and spare form shows in these impeccable designs
Julie Snow was, as she puts it, “incredibly nerdy” in high school. The Michigan native loved science and math, so she set her sights on medical school. But she also loved to draw. One day, shortly after her parents spent a weekend with their friend, architect John Dinkeloo (his New Haven firm was a direct outgrowth of Eero Saarinen and Associates), her father—a physician—talked her out of medical school.
“They came home and told me I should be an architect,” Snow recalls. “They thought it was pretty glamorous. You draw, and you travel.” Then her disarming laugh—like a voluminous pour of champagne—takes over as she adds: “They were naïve.” And did she have a sense of form, an awareness of industrial materiality, or a notion about the intricate assemblies for which her spare, rigorous architecture is so well known? She laughs again: “Didn’t have a clue.”
Suffice it to say, Snow quickly learned. After graduating from the University of Colorado–Boulder with a Bachelor of Architecture, she traveled the world with her husband, mechanical engineer Jack Snow, moved to Minneapolis and started a family, and then worked at HGA for a decade. From co-founder Bruce Abrahamson (the A in HGA), Snow says, she learned “to have fun with architecture and how to get to know
She was also mentored by architect Ted Butler at HGA—“an architect who got so involved in a design that he would know every detail, every joint, every material that went into a project,” Snow says. “His buildings would start with the dimension of a brick. It is at that level of detail that we produce our work,” she continues, referring to her studio-based practice, Julie Snow Architects, which she opened in 1994. “Our houses, in particular, are very exacting, a labor of love in detailing.”
Snow’s residential architecture expresses a lean and restrained attitude, using economical materials and meticulous structural details to create spaces that feel expansive. The same can be said of her public work; it informs her residential designs and vice versa.
As a result, her work is often described as a unique offshoot of minimalism or modernism. “Those ‘isms’ are big buckets,” she hazards. “Our architectural voice, if you will, is somewhat restrained. It depends heavily on material expression and is very much about understanding the light on the site, how it permeates the project and connects you to the landscape. But certainly, central to our approach to residential design is the intersection of family life and the site.”
Take the much-lauded Koehler house, pictured on the cover of the monograph Julie Snow Architects (Princeton Architectural Press, 2005). The clients are tremendously social, enjoy beautiful collections of art and pottery, and love to cook and entertain—none of which they wanted at their new residence, Snow says. “This house wasn’t about bringing all that with them; it was about freeing themselves from it to enjoy this special place.
“The kitchen is two simple bars,” she explains. “It’s about slipping the lobster into the pot, not about housing every potential appliance required by a gourmet cook.” Perched lightly on the rocky carapace that defines the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick, Canada, the structure of steel, aluminum, stone, wood, and glass is attached to stainless-steel plates that resist the lateral loads of the area’s frequent high winds.
Sustainability is integral, not an afterthought, and comes via Snow’s attitude toward the site and the pared-down, high-performance structures of her buildings. “One of the characteristics of Julie’s work is how straightforward it is, and logical, sensible, and minimal. She doesn’t waste money on extravagances,” says Thomas Fisher, dean of the University of Minnesota’s College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, where Snow has taught.
Fisher also wrote the foreword to Julie Snow Architects, in which he designated Snow the heir to John Entenza’s Case Study House Program, for expressing “the social ideal of improving the lives of ordinary people through good design with the technological idea of harnessing industrial science to minimize the materiality of buildings” in her work.
Case in point: The B+W house, which sits on a long-vacant, small lot at a busy intersection in south Minneapolis. While distinctly modern—“It’s impossible to not be modern,” Snow says—the house is based on the residential patterning of the neighborhood’s existing houses: front yard and porch, house, then yard and garage. But there’s also a living room that opens, via a full-height glass wall, to an enclosed courtyard.
Snow sited the simple plan to maximize daylight. The t-mass concrete wall system super-insulates the house sustainably; the concrete walls (both inside and out) require minimal maintenance. The dark-brown ipe wood of the exterior and the walnut floors add durable warmth to the home. “Julie has the ability to mix a Midwest pragmatism with clean, modern architecture,” Fisher says.
Snow’s own weekend house on the North Shore strips these strategies to their essence. Poised on wood piers so the wetland site can freely collect and discharge water, the house’s super-insulated structure and black roof, skin, and floor keep it warm despite vast expanses of glass, which bring the exterior indoors. “We call it camping with a dishwasher,” Snow says. A bank of white cabinetry conceals such conveniences, so the narrow horizontal form of the house—vertically juxtaposed with steel framing and the fireplace tower—remains undisturbed.
The prospect of such openness and formal rigor worried Maddie Soskin when her parents Patti and Robbie hired Snow to transform their much-remodeled, cozy Cape Cod into a spacious, modern home for hanging out and entertaining. Snow opened the kitchen to the dining, family, and living rooms using a commercial beam to support the structure. Windows and sliding-glass doors across the back of the house create a seamless connection between the spacious interiors and the outdoors.
A constant social center for the school, the neighborhood, and friends, the Soskins’ place is now known as “the iPod house” to the kids. Even Maddie approves. “I got a note from Patti after their first snowstorm in the new house,” Snow says. “Maddie had come downstairs, and whispered, ‘Mom, it’s like living in a snow globe.’ And I just loved that.”
Camille LeFevre is a St. Paul arts and architecture writer.
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2011 Emerging Talent: Meghan Kell Cornell
Playing with Proportion
Creative collaboration guides designs for living
As an incubator for residential-design talent, Twin Cities-based SALA Architects is unparalleled. For 25 years, the firm, co-founded by Dale Mulfinger, Sarah Susanka, and Michaela Mahady, has mentored dozens of young architects, teaching them to collaborate with clients to design homes brimming with personality, style, and craftsmanship.
Many of those architects, in fact, remain with the firm for decades. Meghan Kell Cornell, a 17-year employee and winner of this year’s Emerging Talent award, left SALA in June to enjoy a summer off. But by August, she’d fielded so many referrals for remodels, renovations, and new construction that she started her own firm, Kell.Architect(s) in St. Paul.
A graduate of the University of Minnesota’s College of Architecture, Cornell started working at SALA while a student. “I learned everything I know about houses from them,” she says of the architects with whom she worked. Mahady, for instance, was her “color teacher,” Cornell says. “Michaela creates colorful, gorgeous work that’s delightful to be around.”
Each of the projects on which Mahady mentored Cornell involved “a fully collaborative design process,” Mahady says. “I knew that together we would establish a thoughtful, strong, and beautiful design direction. Meghan has an incredible amount of insightful design talent, and, as she worked with our principals, she absorbed the ways they think about their work.”
Color became one of the three guiding principles of Cornell’s design philosophy. On a home in Scandia, which she worked on with SALA principal Katherine Hillbrand, the exterior’s ocher-and-rust scheme is “playful with the existing colors on the site,” Cornell says. “In the summer, the color pops. In autumn, the clients’ favorite time on the property, the colors blend in. In winter, they pop again. So the house is always changing in the landscape.”
For Cornell, color also refers to her preference for natural woods in residential interiors. The project dubbed Le Petit Poucet (designed with Hillbrand), a European-style cottage in the woods, is clad from floor to ceiling in rich, dark- and light-toned woods, including the well-crafted built-ins. “The clients wanted to feel sheltered,” Cornell explains of the enveloping interior.
That sensation is initiated by the roof’s protective curve, which Cornell sketched on trace paper during a client meeting. “We gave Meghan a lot of latitude, and she’d run with it,” Hillbrand says. Their collaborations, filled with “exciting” back-and-forth suggestions about moving a project forward, Hillbrand adds, “allowed Meghan to show her juice, her astute design thinking. That’s one of her primary strengths, and it will serve her well.”
The roof curve of Le Petit Poucet also established the house’s sense of proportion, another of Cornell’s design principles. “Proportion gives you the feeling of comfort, seriousness, or playfulness you want in a design,” she explains. “Proportion is space, size, geometry, how a gable roof sits on the rectangular mass, and window measurements, right down to the dimensions of a piece of trim lumber.”
Daylight is Cornell’s third guiding principle, a value most clearly celebrated in a project on the Black River in Wisconsin (also designed with Hillbrand). A clerestory over the house’s circulation spine, which joins the sleeping and gathering pavilions, runs parallel to the home’s horizontal expanse of floor-to-ceiling windows and fills the home with natural light.
The SALA architects who mentored her, Cornell says, “gave me a great deal of freedom to explore and create my own voice.” She expressed that voice as lead architect for an addition to the Olsen Peterson family home on White Bear Lake in Mahtomedi. She transformed the 1980s home into a cottage with a screened-in back porch/living room, second-level master suite with an exposed natural-wood plank-and-beam system, and lower-level apartment for Kandace Olsen’s mother. Also included in the transformation was a rearrangement of the main-level kitchen as well as the dining and living rooms.
“Meghan was such a great listener and so good at explaining things to us,” Olsen says. “She delivered exactly what she said she would. Our house is functional and beautiful. People walk by and say, ‘Your house is just the way it should be.’”
Cornell credits SALA with teaching her the importance of “the client relationship. I love working with families and helping them discover the best way of living within their own home.”
Camille LeFevre is a St. Paul arts and architecture writer.
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6 ISSUES (1 YEAR)
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