Ever since they appeared on the residential architecture scene a little more than a dozen years ago, Johnsen Schmaling Architects has continued to surprise, delight, and sometimes confound. The first project of theirs to attract notice was the Parts House Pavilion, a whimsical rooftop entertaining space in their hometown of Milwaukee. Colorful, versatile, and clever, the pavilion structure transformed a neglected space atop a condo conversion building. As zany as the space seemed at the time, there was wisdom in the whimsy. With Johnsen Schmaling, there always is.
Apart from their obvious talent for creating distinctive residential buildings, the firm partners have a special knack for elucidating the intellectual underpinnings of every design decision they make. There’s a rationale for every choice, and they make sure to document that process thoroughly. This bread crumb approach helps them immeasurably with their clients and with award juries, because appreciation for their work invariably deepens with a fuller understanding. They are the rare firm that seems able to quantify what most consider qualitative choices.
First and foremost, the foundation of each design begins with the landscape and context it occupies. Now, plenty of firms will tell you they are inspired by a project’s surroundings. They may even show you a poster board festooned with samples from the site—bark, lichen, pebbles—that is intended to serve as a kind of Rosetta stone to the work. But few if any can track every little twist and turn along the way to the final result with such clarity, self-possession, and conviction.
Perhaps that’s because both partners are professors of architecture practice (at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) as well as firm leaders. They are at once steeped in theory, practice, and practicality. They’re accustomed to breaking concepts down to critical elements for students and for budget-conscious residential clients.
Leaves of Glass
The next big firm project to capture national attention and award recognition was Camouflage House in 2007. Designed as a weekend home on Wisconsin’s GreenLake, the 2,700-square-foot, low-slung structure uses a meticulously patterned facade to mimic the solids and voids of trees on the heavily wooded site. An almost musical composition of tongue-and-groove cedar, glass, and colored Prodema wood-veneer panels alternately conceals and reveals the landscape and lake beyond.
The partners based the color palette of the house, and especially of the Prodema panels (variations of browns, reds, yellows), on a year’s worth of site visits, tracking the changing of the leaves through the seasons. Those Prodema panels project forward from the facade about 4 inches, adding another variation of layer and depth to the structure as well. Over time, the cedar silvers out, but the veneer panels hold their hues.
The project was a breakthrough for the firm. It garnered local, regional, and national design awards. The following year, the Architectural League of New York selected Johnsen Schmaling as one of its Emerging Voices for 2008. Although now more than a decade old, the house still pleases Sebastian’s design eye and aligns tightly with the firm’s ongoing mission. “One of our revelations is that we still like Camouflage House all these years later. This is a building we probably would design similarly again,” he says. “It taught us a lot of things: The rhythm shift and overlay of trees as you walk through a forest, the vertical lines, the changing colors of the leaves, the bark of the trunks. We took the language from that and translated it into Camouflage House—the idea of verticality, even when you have a horizontal house, the undulated skin and colors of the facade panels.
“Camouflage is applicable to many of our buildings. We still think that’s an appropriate way to respond to the site: We develop a palette that allows a building to blend in with its context, rather than standing out in contrast to it.”
Undulation Education
On the strength of its home-turf accomplishments, Johnsen Schmaling is increasingly called upon to design outside Wisconsin’s boundaries. “We are as busy as everybody else these days, which is a big change since 2011,” says Sebastian. “We’re up to eight people now, and half our work is out of state. We’re not just relying on the small pool of potential clients in our neighborhood.” Oftentimes, though, the jobs out of state have a Wisconsin connection.
Such was the case for the Mountain House in Montana, whose client is from Wisconsin. Even in a new and unfamiliar location (in this case, the Rocky Mountains), the lessons from Camouflage House remain applicable.
Blending in amid the backdrop of Big Sky country means responding to terrain, in addition to other natural elements. And that’s no small challenge with an orthogonal structure. For Mountain House, the firm used “a series of flat and gently sloping volumes and planes” to track the undulating topography. The canted roof responds to the mountain ridges at a distance.
Pitching the roof made sense in harsh snow country and as a response to the landscape. It’s a move the firm has zero qualms about, despite a prevailing notion that modern houses should have flat roofs. “You can’t just take a style and transplant it around the country. It becomes intellectually void and empty,” says Sebastian. “When people ask us for a modern building, we don’t know what that means. Imbuing a building with another level of meaning is what makes it so interesting. You have to tie it to the landscape.
“We are not trying to deny that these are man-made products, but they blend in and then reveal themselves,” he concludes. “They’re not about using their manmade-ness to stand apart.”
Mountain House’s facade echoes the colors of the site, much as Camouflage’s exterior does. An evolution in materials has clearly taken place all these years later, but the careful balance of constancy and change remains. Like the Prodema panels, charred cedar cladding will hold its color long term and protect against the elements. Mountain House also employs clear cedar that will silver over time and corrugated Cor-Ten steel that will age to an earthy patina as ruggedly beautiful as the landscape.
No Gut, No Glory?
Multiple site visits and exhaustive studies go into the evolution of Johnsen Schmaling’s designs, whether residential or commercial, single-family or multifamily. Elements are distilled, extrapolated, and then reapplied to the final concept.
The team generates axonometrics, diagrams, renderings, and other graphics. And they build “a lot of physical models at all scales and levels of sophistication— rough and fine,” says Sebastian. “We explain graphically the bark structure we see and how that resulted in the facade system. It’s very different from the gut-feel approach. Our clients say they wouldn’t have understood it without the backstory of how we got there.”
This rational, methodical process stands in opposition to how some other architects divine their design solutions. Indeed, many creative professionals talk of tapping into an almost trancelike state of artistic flow that feels like a higher power or divine guidance.
If you believe in the left brain/right brain assignment of labors, does that mean our analytical skills lie wholly divided from our creative powers? Or does that trancelike state more plausibly originate in an open, functioning pipeline between the two hemispheres?
Says Sebastian, “Our buildings are a hybrid of something that is inspired by subjective elements of the landscape and packaged in a rational object that is not organic in a stylistic sense. We use a reductive process of organizing our own observations and translating them into a tectonic language—it’s instrumental to the way we work.”
Even if the firm’s buildings are tightly rooted in the rational world and the process by which they are designed is a highly edited one, they total much more than the sum of their parts. They evoke their own exalted state that elevates them above the ordinary. The paring away of unnecessary distractions reveals a pure and poetic heart. Maybe they’re “not organic in a stylistic sense,” but given their ability to elicit an emotional response, they are almost organic in a functional sense.
Into the Void
If Camouflage House was the prototype lake house in the woods for Johnsen Schmaling, Linear Cabin is a natural progression. Located on Alma Lake in St. Germain, Wis., the 900-square-foot “cabin” is just one-third the size of its forebear. It, too, explores the idea of solids and voids, of horizontality amid the vertical woods. But this iteration is even more distilled and extracted.
There are three modules to the whole—a storage room (lake toys), service room (kitchen, bath, laundry, utility), and a “sleeping box” (containing two bunk rooms). These modules comprise the “solid” portions of the building, and between them two see-through “voids” serve as carport and “hearth room,” respectively. One continuous flat roof connects the components. The carport lies open to the elements, and the hearth room appears similarly open, but is glazed with 15-foot-wide lift-slide glass doors. The closed modules are clad in locally sourced, blackened pine planks. A varnished, lighter-colored cedar reveal continues along the roof line and to the ground at the north end of the building, creating a subtle, almost halo effect.
In its resolute simplicity, the house exudes a kind of inevitability about its presence in these woods. The effect is quite deliberate. “We truly believe that a building wants to grow out of the site. Once it’s built, it becomes a logical component of the landscape,” Sebastian explains. “Deep down, we are real rationalists, but we have a poetic vein. We are sort of trying to analyze what we see, digitize it in a way, and reassemble it into a building.”
Lyrical Stillness
The word “poetic” may best apply to one of the firm’s smallest buildings, Studio for a Composer in Spring Prairie, Wis. The studio space is just 315 square feet, but glass window walls at either end connect it to infinite space outdoors. The rectangular room sits atop a storage volume and a vegetated roof—landscape brought within the boundaries of the building. Locally sourced weathering steel skin introduces an element of unpredictability and imperfection to the otherwise strictly controlled composition. Another multiple award-winner, the jewel box music building struck a major chord with critics.
Materials that weather, materials that withstand change, taut volumes of carefully orchestrated interior space and exterior skin—a tuning fork struck on the ground and resonating to a perfect tone. These are characteristics all Johnsen Schmaling’s buildings share.
Even when their projects occupy urban sites, they find something meaningful to root them in. A recent breakthrough project, Belay MKE, allowed the partners to employ their book of spells at a larger scale—an 18,000-square-foot, mixed-usebuilding with 46 apartments. Instead of bark and leaves, the building draws from the human-built fabric that surrounds it. “It doesn’t matter if it’s rural context or urban context. There is history baked in that you cannot deny,” says Sebastian. “This was a brownfield site. It had a noticeably raw character, even 30 years after the shops have closed.”
There are other new buildings in the vicinity, but according to Sebastian, they’re lackluster. “They’re inspired by the cheapest cladding they can find. We need to find cheap cladding, too, but we work hard to find something with more sophistication. Other buildings tend to use three or four different materials, because the developer is afraid the building will look too monolithic. We’re not afraid of the masculine, strong volume, clad in one material that can change over time. We’re proud that we were able to convince this developer that weathering steel was a good idea. There are people who look at this and see only decay.”
Once again, the firm’s penchant for support materials and intensive research made the case for their design choices. Their ability to work imaginatively and, yes, poetically, within limited budgets is endearing them to forward-thinking developers. There’s another multifamily project in development for Sacramento, Calif. And meanwhile, the single-family commissions keep coming in—urban, suburban, and rural. All will receive the quietly powerful and deeply considered Johnsen Schmaling process, intertwined on an almost atomic level with landscape, site, context, and program.
“We are not about aesthetic fireworks,” says Sebastian in conclusion. “All architects are under pressure to create something noteworthy, but it can’t be disconnected from the project itself. That usually doesn’t work. Our buildings are quiet and calm, and it takes spending time with them to appreciate them.”
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