Tim Olson’s job in life is to take the inordinately complex and make it as functionality seamless as possible. A multiple award-winning architect interested in the utility and stability of structure, Olson’s background in sculpture also informs the exteriors of his finished work. Developing his professional skillset as a fulcrum between the two disciplines can be a rather fine line, but it’s the middle way between the two where Olson and his work thrives.

Porches Model by Tim Olson | Photo courtesy Olson’s website

Olson received a Master of Architecture from MIT in 2011. After attending a lecture by Tedd Benson at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Olson was so impressed that he decided to move with his wife and two young children to New Hampshire to join Benson’s Walpole-based architecture firm, Bensonwood. Olson says he chose Bensonwood because “it seemed radical in that they were just doing the work, doing the academic work, designing real projects then realizing it.” Just as importantly, Bensonwood is a hands-on facility where the architects are also sometimes responsible for creating aspects of the finished work by hand, skills that are more classically associated with tradesmen. The combination fits Olson perfectly.

“There’s a craft tradition in New England that Bensonwood builds off of that I have affinity for,” he says. “If you talk to Tedd, he’ll tell a story about finding old timber-frame houses in Walpole and deconstructing them to see how they tick. This place is an anomaly in that it’s rooted in a rural area. It’s all the contradictions that I find appealing in a place. It’s super high-tech, but the vast quantity of the output is low-tech. It’s timber-frame; this place is rooted in New England.”

Olson first began work as a visual artist, but found it unsatisfying. “It was an interesting practice,” he acknowledges, “but it wasn’t collaborative enough, or tied enough to specific problems. Architecture ends up relying on relationships with many people. No building is built by one person or designed by one person. It involves a team; I enjoy the collaborative environment. Installation art can get close to this, but making space is the territory of architecture.”

Inside the Wing Back design | Photo courtesy Tim Olson

In 2015, Olson was one of four winners of the Toronto Winter Stations Design Competition, part of an initiative to turn snow-covered lifeguard stands in the city’s beach area into art installations. His entry, Wing Back, is modeled after a cozy wingback chair, and features a chiminea-style fire pit at its center. The year before that, he won the 2014 Timber New England Competition with Coopered Column, which was developed to demonstrate how large-scale structural columns could be designed to withstand the loading conditions of tall timber buildings.

“In order to structure taller buildings,” he explains, “you need to be able to connect materials and assemble it out of smaller pieces. Wood isn’t the ideal material to connect end to end. As you start stacking the wood together, you end up with weak points everywhere. What Coopered Column does is finger-joint these two things together.” The idea for Olson’s design comes from cooperages, where wine and whiskey barrels are made. “Using the cooper, the screws help keep the form from buckling and holds the vertical load, but also knits these two things together the length of the materials so you’re able to make a taller thing. It demonstrates the ability to withstand these forces by taking what would have been a cylindrical column, turning it into a cone, then cutting it. It forced an asymmetrical load as if there was wind being blown on it.”

Olson chose Port Orford Cedar for his curvaceous design, mostly for its aroma. “It smells natural, resinous. The wood itself is probably not what you’d use to structure a tall building, but to put that wood in a gallery was part of the point. Have you ever been to the Earth Room in New York? You get out of the elevator and you smell it, you smell the Earth. The fact that you’re making a building out a structural material that smells good, that’s natural, was also part of the exhibit.”

Olson’s next challenge, one that’s closer to his leanings as an artist, is the development of a small furniture company he calls Typodesine. His first prototype is a deceptively simply chair. It’s a smooth, modern, surprisingly comfortable piece, cut expressly from plywood. “I think furniture design puts you in touch with a manufacturing idea,” he says, “ideas about materials, about texture, about ergonomics. I think those things feed into architecture in a different way—a much more tactile, more intimate sense. My hope is to end up with something unique.”

As for how he merges his work as an architect and as his ideas for developing Typodesine, Olson is quick to reply. “It’s a matter of exposure and growing beyond a kind of street installation. What am I working on this week? I’m working on furniture. There’s always a special part of a building that is somewhat of an installation. There’s always a lobby, a courtyard, a place where the public gathers that’s special. I’d like to see some of these ideas end up in real buildings.”

Photo of Tim Olson by David Nielsen

Tim Olson is an architect and designer living and working in Walpole, New Hampshire. Follow the Bensonwood team on Instagram.

Top photo Tim Olson’s award-winning Wing Back design | Photo courtesy Tim Olson

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Aaron Forrest and Yasmin Vobis met in architecture graduate school at Princeton University and established their love of architecture through informal projects together. After years of moving to various cities and pursuing different projects, Ultramoderne was born.

Ultramoderne is an award-winning architecture and design firm located in Providence, RI, run by Forrest and Vobis. According to their website, “The principals are driven by an experimental approach that leads to conceptually rigorous and well-executed designs. The office has experience working at a wide variety of scales, from single-family residences to urban-scale planning.” What makes Ultramoderne so unique, according to Forrest, is their focus and dedication to public space projects. They’re driven and passionate about figuring out different ways to engage with a broader public.

“Providence has been amazing,” Forrest says. The space they occupy within Rhode Island is certainly significant to them. They lived and worked in New York before moving to Providence, and both experiences were incredibly different. Forrest and Vobis truly seem to love the region in which they work now.

SOUTHLIGHT Performance Pavilion + Public Garden 2016, project in collaboration with RISD students and faculty | Photo by Jo Sittenfeld

“The thing I love about Providence are the many old industrial buildings that exist around the city.” explains Vobis. “Many of these are incredible spaces — large, open spaces with lots of natural light and a clear expression of structure. The challenge we face will be to understand how to reuse many of these buildings in the future — how we breathe new life into them and re-imagine them — instead of tearing them down and replacing them with cheaper, faster and less flexible buildings, which happens all too often.”

But Ultramoderne is just getting started. While they’ve had lots of business thus far, with past clients including the Van Alen Institute, National Parks Service, Chicago Parks District, and the Boston Society of Architects, they are ready for the next challenge. “I would like to see Ultramoderne tackle larger public projects,” explains Vobis. “Our office started with small-scale installations, which were a great opportunity for us to test new ideas and techniques… we relish the idea that architecture can be for everyone, not just those that can afford to have something commissioned.”

Forrest adds, “We’d love to be so lucky to continue what we’re doing and find out how architecture can do more to help the community at large.”

Weir Farm wayfinding project with Jessica Forrest, Noah Klersfeld, Suzanne Mathew, and Dungjai Pungauthaikan 2015

Yasmin Vobis received her Bachelor’s Degree from the University of California, Berkeley and her Master’s Degree from Princeton University, where she was awarded the Butler Traveling Fellowship and the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Thesis Prize. She has taught at Princeton University and currently teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Aaron Forrest (AIA, NCARB) is a licensed architect who teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design. He received both his Bachelor’s Degree and Masters in Architecture from Princeton University. He has extensive professional experience, having practiced in New York with Bernheimer Architecture and Guy Nordenson and Associates Structural Engineers, and in Madrid with Ábalos & Herreros Arquitectos.

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The Philip Johnson Glass House becomes a canvas for one of the world’s most avant-garde conceptual artists.

The Glass House becomes the latest object to be caught in one of Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Nets.”

The final of three installations by Kusama that have transformed the look and feel of the Philip Johnson estate opened earlier this month and will be up until September 26th. Those of you familiar with the iconic artist’s work will immediately recognize aspects of her ground-breaking Infinity Theory installation. Born in Japan in 1929, Yayoi Kusama has been using art to distribute her thoughts about the world around us via writings, fashion, performance, and her exhibitions. Dots have been a constant presence in her life (she suffers from hallucinations) and her work. They’ve represented herself, the earth, the sun, the moon, a field of humanity; “Polka-dots become movement…Polka dots are a way to infinity”, Kusama.

Her 1966 work, Narcissus Garden, reappears here albeit updated from the original plastic balls. Located in the Glass House’s Lower Meadow pond on the property, the 2016 version has 12-inch wide, stainless steel orbs set free and lolling about the water, allowed to float and move as a slothful kinetic sculpture reflecting the viewer and the environment in an interactive exhibit.

Photo by Matthew Placek | Courtesy The Glass House

Visitors will also be treated to her enormous steel Pumpkin (2015), a joyful, lumpy, spotted, and bored gourd. Kusama says of the piece, “The first time I saw a pumpkin was in a farm in elementary school. In Japanese, a ‘pumpkin head’ is an ignorant man or a pudgy woman, but for me, I am charmed by its shape, form, and lack of pretension.” Set upon a concrete pad, in a place of honor that once held Ellsworth Kelly’s Curve II (1973), this monumental piece is the artist’s over-sized signature, effectively tying the three works together with its mirrored surface, holes, and red interior.

Photo by Matthew Placek | Courtesy The Glass House

Dots Obsession — Alive, Seeking Eternal Hope, where viewing outsider art from the inside is only the beginning of the juxtapositions; round shadows falling on straight lines and an all-over pattern enveloping the clear residence. The Philip Johnson Glass House looks right at home wearing the red circular window dressings of Kusama’s signature motif and amplifies the rigid bones of the architecture. The point-counter-point of the work of these two artists brings surrealness and order together beautifully. 

Photo by Matthew Placek | Courtesy The Glass House

The Glass House tour season runs May 1st – November 30th
Yayoi Kusama: Narcissus Garden will be included in all tours of the Glass House until the end of the season.
Dots Obsession included until Sept 26th

Photos by Matthew Placek | Courtesy The Glass House

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Remember our list of the coolest sculpture parks in New England? Well – if you’re trying to make it to some of these spots, you’re time is running out. The Green Animals Topiary Garden in Portsmouth season is ending especially soon. You can head to Portsmouth and see the carved giraffes, elephants, and dinosaurs one last time before they’re closed to the public on October 10th, since much of the garden’s small-leaved dense boxwood needs a bit of seasonal maintenance.

Photo courtesy Green Animals Topiary Garden website

The Green Animals garden is particularly interesting and unique for many reasons. First, the topiaries within the garden are all hand tripped and trained using the traditional technique, which takes decades to perfect. When the giraffe lost its neck during a hurricane in 1954, it took almost 5 years to grow back and it reappeared a bit shorter.  Most modern topiary gardens use metal frames or trellises to sculpt the shape, making this garden, perhaps, the most authentic version of a topiary garden in the region.  In addition, its sculptures have been a part of the landscape for over 100 years, first being purchased back in 1875. This garden, the oldest of its kind in the northeast, not only features animal renderings in peat and boxwood, but also displays 35 formal flowerbeds, geometric pathways, rose arbor, grape arbor, fruit trees, and vegetable and herb gardens. The on-site greenhouse is also used extensively to provide seedlings for the rest of the estate.

Photo courtesy Green Animals Topiary Garden website

Get your tickets to see the Green Animals Topiary Garden and all other adjacent Newport Mansion attractions here. 

Top photo by Dhananjay Odhekar

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