Kirsten Murray’s passion for Seattle’s urban fabric manifests itself in a wide range of complex projects for Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects. Her leadership, particularly on projects requiring significant programming, spans hotels to cultural facilities, small vacation homes to large estates.
Murray joined Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects in 1989, and became an owner in 2008. She is a generalist architect with particular interest and experience on residential, mixed use, and institutional projects with complex site development and programmatic aspects including site selection and analysis, programming, master planning and design. She is currently working on several urban infill projects, including Art Stable in Seattle’s South Lake Union, the First and Stewart development in the city’s downtown, and 1111 East Pike in Seattle’s evolving Pike/Pine neighborhood.
Like her frequent collaborator Tom Kundig, Murray is deeply engaged with issues of context – how a building relates and responds to its surroundings. Raised in the landscape of the American Rockies and educated in the mid-Atlantic states, Murray holds a deep appreciation for the natural world as well the ways that architecture and responsible stewardship can shape it. She is drawn to the design aesthetic of the Pacific Northwest, a region where the built and natural have a strong dialogue, and where the sense of craft and materiality is evident in the history of the architecture. Murray brings this sense to many of the firm’s urban projects, exploring how economic, industrial, and environmental factors can be melded with concepts of urban design to create flexible environments that promote healthy living and community.
Murray’s project work has been published in a variety of magazines and books including the New York Times, Architectural Digest, Interior Design, Architectural Record, and Architecture. Several projects on which she has worked have received awards from the American Institute of Architects, including Tye River Cabin which won a National AIA Housing Committee Award, as well as an American Architecture Award from the Chicago Athenaeum. Projects for which she served as project manager are included in the monograph, Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen Architects: Architecture, Art and Craft, which was published by the Monacelli Press in 2003.
Murray and principal Alan Maskin were instrumental in creating Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen’s intern program, expanding it to a pool of international students and adding a speaker series and presentations. She served as Staff Coordinator and oversaw the hiring of architectural staff for ten years. Murray has served as a visiting design critic at the University of Washington since 2002, and in fall 2006 she was a design critic in the Department of Architecture at Syracuse University. She has a Master of Architecture degree from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Environmental Design from the University of Colorado.