Aamodt / Plumb are a team of architects, designers, and builders. For more than a decade we have specialized in designing and building homes, and have learned some lessons along the way.

• Good design has a huge impact on people’s lives, and so does bad design. 
• Hiring an architect is out of reach for most people.
• Typical buildings today are only expected to last 3040 years.
• Common building products contain a wide array of toxic chemicals. 
• Skilled trade jobs can offer meaningful and well-paid careers for many people. 
• The construction industry contributes to exploitation and modern slavery.

We uncovered some serious problems within the design and construction industry and were not satisfied with the impact we were making. In 2017 we started The Slow Space Movement, modeled on Slow Food, to rally like-minded architects, designers, builders, and artisans around the idea of good, clean and fair buildings for all. We started the conversation around many of these issues and began to raise awareness about material health and fair labor in the building industry. 

In 2020 the coronavirus pandemic put a hard stop to business as usual. As we all sat at home pondering the health and economic impact of this crisis another virus of-sorts reemerged. Racism, injustice, and inequality lay just beneath the surface of our society and the killing of George Floyd and the resulting protests shone a new light on an old problem. 

Meanwhile the climate crisis continued, unaltered by the covid related pause in industry and automobile use. We are in the midst of a climate, justice, and public health emergency. Business as usual will not cut it. The great pause of 2020 allowed us to see things clearly and take a hard turn toward doing what is right. 

Our mission is to create homes that are good, clean and fair.

We came together as a studio to define what ‘good, clean and fair’ means to us. We synthesized design principles from our early influences and current inspirations from around the globe to define these terms and a list of design principles. This guide is a work in progress and will change as we learn and grow. We are sharing this with the design and construction industry in the hopes of furthering conversations, inspiring action, and broadening our impact. 

This article is the first in an upcoming series around the concept central to our work philosophy: good, clean, and fair housing. We hope to spark inspiration and conversation around what good design really is. We welcome your thoughts and feedback.

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Each day offered new living experiences that were a revelation to me. – Joseph Eichler

At a time when modern architecture was exclusive to the white and wealthy, Joseph Eichler, and his company Eichler Homes, built nearly 11,000 mid-century modern homes for the middle class. They challenged what homes should look like and how families could live. He was the only merchant builder in the United States that partnered with skilled architects, used quality materials and built homes for everybody, regardless of race or religion. For many families, his homes were more than just homes, they represented a new way of living that has not been equaled since.

In the early 1940s, it was still uncommon to find merchant builders that worked with architects to construct housing developments. However, Joseph Eichler was inspired by modernist architects such as Richard Neutra and Frank Lloyd Wright, and wanted to bring quality but affordable modern architecture to post-WWII American families. He would achieve this by aligning himself with progressive, empathetic architects such as Anshen & Allen, Jones & Emmons and later Claude Oakland. Together their designs emphasized social change, progressive planning and beauty. This style later came to be known as “California Modern”.

At first, the Eichler homes were seen as unconventional, with their low or flat sloped roofs, horizontal forms, and few if any windows on the front facade. However, the interiors were filled with light through floor to ceiling windows around private courtyards and skylights. The interiors were fitted with local materials, such as redwood, and built-in furniture. In additional, they emphasized open planning which allowed for subtle lines across public and private areas. Later models introduced the Eichler atrium, an entrance foyer that straddle the line between indoors and outdoors. His whole ethos was based on bringing the outdoors inside and creating spaces for both socializing and privacy. Furthermore, he believed that all families should experience the joys of living in a modern home.

His mission was to bring a holistic approach to home and community building. Born in New York to European Jews, he was raised in a politically liberal family within a culturally diverse community. He insisted that his homes be open to all buyers, regardless of religion or race during an era of open racial discrimination. When the National Association of Home Builders refused to adopt a non-discrimination policy, he famously resigned. When homeowners in Marin opposed African-Americans moving into the neighborhood, he created a policy of buying back the houses if the new families did not feel welcome. Thankfully, no one took him up on this offer.

Throughout the 1950s and 60s, Eichler Homes received countless design awards, both national and international, although at the time, they never achieved large profits. Still, he left behind a legacy in residential homes. Today, his homes are highly desirable, both amongst architecture buffs and everyday families. A current listing priced an Eichler home at $1.8 million.

Buildings should be built to last, and the unique and iconic design of the Eichler homes are still in high demand today. His homes obviously have much to teach us. In an era of material excess and increasingly vocal discrimination, we need community developments that address low income housing, neglected urban spaces and isolated suburbs. The spaces where we live, work and visit have a huge impact on our lives, health and mood. Therefore, Eichler Homes serve to remind us of what we value and want to bring to the next generation – affordable, inclusive and beautiful modern homes.

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Like a growing number of her peers, architect Stephanie Horowitz believes in the design community’s inherent responsibility to address climate issues. So much so that her firm works only with clients who want to build or retrofit buildings that aim for net-zero energy use.

“When we meet with potential clients, it’s a vetting process,” says Horowitz, managing director of ZeroEnergy Design in Boston. “We’re very clear that this is the way that we practice architecture—it’s not negotiable.” Sustainability-centric details such as flashing, insulation, air sealing, and decarbonization are presented on equal par with floor plans and cladding. “The way that all of these things are considered is part of the design service,” she says. “It just kind of comes with the package.”

Mette Aamodt, principal of Aamodt/Plumb Architects in Cambridge, Massachusetts, takes a similar approach. Most clients are drawn to her firm’s mission-driven work. “For others, we try to educate them and be upfront about it. Sometimes we’re going to convince people; sometimes we’re not,” she admits, “but the onus is on us to make the case.” Aamodt focuses on quality over quantity and designs built with clean, healthy materials and fair labor.

Read the full article, “Designers vs Climate Change”.

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Cambridge Architecture Firm Aamodt Plumb is Radically Holistic in Life and Work

Husband and wife team Mette Aamodt and Andrew Plumb, who met while students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, got their first break in 2007, when a potential client asked them to create an ambitious beach house in East Quogue, in the Hamptons. They worried that they had “bit off much more than [they] could chew,” as Plumb puts it.

“The inclination could have been to play it safe and do what we’re comfortable with,” which meant to pass and continue working at their respective firms. “But we really tried to push ourselves. That’s carried through in all our jobs,” notes Plumb. They went ahead, and simultaneously launched their firm, Aamodt Plumb.

Aamodt, 41, and Plumb, 40, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have since created a handsome body of work that mixes tradition and modernity, clean lines with time-tested techniques and materials. The result is no-nonsense, comfortable, approachable, and accessible— much like the architects themselves. They strive for transparency and make a conscious effort to have a healthy live/work balance.

Work Life Balance

Employees at Aamodt Plumb work 40-hour weeks, enjoy flex time, and receive retirement benefits. “We can really design our lives and design it for the way we want to live,” says Aamodt. “It’s really not groundbreaking, but in this industry it kind of is.” This attention to live/work balance was solidified when Aamodt was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 2002. “We realized what was important,” said Aamodt. “I was not going to be able to keep up the pace and stay healthy.”

The firm’s holistic approach extend to clients as well. On their website they distribute a free guide, How to Hire an Architect, which demystifies the “complex” and “frightening” process through nine key points, including searching for an architect, understanding their process, and figuring out fees.

“Very few people understand what we do and what value it has,” notes Aamodt. “There is a huge lack of information and a lot of mis-information.”

Scandinavian Influence

This kind of rich simplicity reflects the couple’s Scandinavian ancestry, which they say helps ground and inspire them. The two-level Hamptons house consists of overlapping concrete rectangles, carved out with living spaces and framing views of the ocean. It’s not clad; just left as-is, a minimalist reflection of the environment, especially because much of the sand used in the concrete was locally sourced. Along the building’s flanks, the duo created variety with ornamental steel screens that lend privacy as well as protection from storms. Their intricate delicacy offsets the heaviness of the concrete.

The Scandinavian influence shows again in projects like their renovation of three modernist barns in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Adapted into homes in the 1950’s, the structures had been cluttered with an eclectic renovation in the ’90s. The couple pared back that job, inserting warm wood screens, ash floors, and an open kitchen, and “scraping away the additions to clarify its soul,” Plumb says.

A prefab home in Austin consists of a single story living space in front and a two-story bar-shaped structure for bedrooms in back. (To build the structure, they poured the foundations at the same time as the envelope was being built offsite, keeping total construction time down to one year.) Spatial intrigue comes in the interplay between volumes and the use of simple, warm materials. One of them, charred wood, is an example of the firm’s initiatives to use old techniques in a contemporary way.

“We see too many materials that are ten years old that seem great until they’re awful. There’s a reason these older things have been around for so long,” says Aamodt.

Materiality

For their competition-winning temporary warming hut in Winnipeg, Canada, the firm created a tactile, “primitive experience,” with charred wood cladding and a fire pit surrounded by felt lining inside. A guesthouse in Texas utilizes limestone in several ways, from monolithic blocks to tapered veneer, as if it were woven like fabric. A steel trellis behind a Victorian House in Cambridge—modeled after the form of a carport— provides a structure for creeping vines and encloses an outdoor space.

“It’s a way of using a material as a launching point and seeing what we can do with it,” says Plumb, of these investigations.

Moving forward the firm is working on creative office and university work in Cambridge, and an ad agency inside a former mill in Manchester, New Hampshire. They only take on work that has meaning for them.

“We have to think about how we make use of our energy and time,” says Aamodt.

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The awards editorial mission is as follows: How does one build a practice in today’s economy? How can a designer assert his or her own moral beliefs when working in a traditional client-based structure? How does architecture address and incorporate other disciplines, from biology to sociology to technology to art?

How can a designer assert his or her own moral beliefs when working in a traditional client-based structure?

The first-ever class of Groundbreakers does it all (and more): health centers in impoverished countries, startup offices, guidebooks for building a modern home, prefab in a major American city, stage sets for Kanye West.

The firms selected are: Mass Design Group, Family New York, El Dorado Inc., Aamodt / Plumb Architects, Iwamoto Scott, Bureau V, KSS Architects

Get to know the 2015 Groundbreakers!

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Together with her partner Andrew Plumb, Aamodt and their firm Aamodt / Plumb Architects is raising money to start a non-profit organization dedicated to education and advocacy around quality construction techniques, healthy materials and fair labor practices.

“We have just elected one of the world’s worst developers as President, who exploits people and natural resources to build junk buildings that benefit no one but himself,” says Mette Aamodt. “It’s time for architects to take a stand and fight back, rather than rolling over as Robert Ivy suggests we do.”

As Trumps inauguration draws near groups across all walks of life are mounting resistance to his hate rhetoric, cabinet appointments and policy announcements. Architects must decide if they will collaborate with the reigning powers, as Albert Speer did with the Nazis, be part of the resistance or simply sit idly by as they have historically done.

News of this announcement was published in Archinect under the title “Aamodt/Plumb Architects resigns from the AIA over Robert Ivy’s conciliatory comments toward Trump” however the title is misleading as only Aamodt has resigned.

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