{"id":1224,"date":"2023-04-05T17:52:00","date_gmt":"2023-04-05T17:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.timothyschuler.com\/home\/?p=1224"},"modified":"2024-01-05T22:10:52","modified_gmt":"2024-01-05T22:10:52","slug":"remote-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.timothyschuler.com\/home\/remote-work\/","title":{"rendered":"The Otherworldly Homes of Architect Craig Steely"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Originally published in <\/em>Hana Hou!<\/a>, January 2023<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Craig Steely’s Musubi House on the Big Island of Hawai\u02bbi. Photo by Darren Bradley.<\/sup><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

If asked where<\/strong> the epicenter of Hawai\u2018i\u2018s architecture and design scene is located, the obvious answer would be Honolulu. Where else can a person have lunch in a Julia Morgan-designed caf\u00e9? Or soak up skyline views from mid-century master Vladimir Ossipoff\u2019s Liljestrand House? Or bask in the Brutalist beauty of Victor Gruen\u2019s Financial Plaza of the Pacific, a concrete sculpture the size of an entire city block? And yet for all of the city\u2019s offerings, some of Hawai\u2018i\u2019s most original architecture over the past twenty years is not in Honolulu but two hundred miles southeast, in the verdant, violent wilds of Hawai\u2018i Island.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here, amid fields of pahoehoe lava and old-growth \u2018ohi\u2018a forest, 58-year-old architect Craig Steely has been building a portfolio of bold, unapologetically modern houses, no two of which are alike. Some seem to float in the forest canopy; others hide in plain sight\u2014simple boxes that belie the dynamic interplay of light and shadow taking place inside. Some look like spaceships fallen from the sky. What unites them is their sensitivity to place; Steely\u2019s work eschews the stereotypical hallmarks of contemporary Hawai\u2018i architecture\u2014double-pitched roofs, Polynesian patterns, black basalt\u2014 responding instead to the land and history of the Islands in ways that are not always immediately apparent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m interested in projecting in my work deeper connections to Hawai\u2018i,\u201d Steely tells me. \u201cSome laser-cut sunscreen that looks like an \u2018ulu [breadfruit] is just embarrassing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHe\u2019s not trying to do something that looks like it belongs in Hawai\u2018i, as an aesthetic or a form. He\u2019s designing spaces that [work] in Hawai\u2018i,\u201d says Graham Hart, assistant professor of architecture at the University of Hawai\u2018i at Manoa and cofounder of the boutique design firm Kokomo Studio. Hart first saw Steely\u2019s work while a student at UH. He admired the architect\u2019s restraint. Spatially, the houses were simple yet sophisticated. They nodded to midcentury modernism and other styles without feeling derivative or dated. They were one of a kind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf you were to put together a list of the best architecture to come out of Hawai\u2018i in the past decade, the top five would have at least one or two Craig projects on it,\u201d Hart says. At the same time, the place Steely occupies in Hawai\u2018i\u2019s design scene is, like each of his houses, unique, Hart says. \u201cA hundred years from now, or whenever we start doing retrospectives on contemporary Hawai\u2018i architecture, I think he\u2019s gonna be in his own box.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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D-Fin House on Big Island. Photo by Darren Bradley.<\/sup><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Steely grew up<\/strong> on a walnut orchard in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. He remembers his childhood house as an ever-changing amalgamation, perpetually under construction to meet the family\u2019s needs. \u201cIt was always being added onto,\u201d Steely says. \u201cThe entry room became the dining room. The kitchen expanded into the garage, which became another living room.\u201d Like their friends and neighbors, his parents did much of the work themselves. \u201cEveryone built their own houses. You needed a barn, you just built it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Steely was 13 or 14 when he discovered capital-A architecture on a family fishing trip up the California coast from Bodega Bay. From the water one day Steely spotted a group of odd wooden buildings with sloping roofs, each seeming to flow into the other. It was as if they had been there all along, he thought, shaped by the same elemental forces as the rugged shoreline. \u201cThey looked like rocks just sitting out in the grass,\u201d he recalls. It was Sea Ranch, the famous early environmentalist community developed in the early 1960s by a coterie of the era\u2019s leading designers. The development was radical at the time for its ecological sensitivity; buildings worked in concert with the terrain, and most of the 3,500-acre property was left undisturbed. It set\u2014and in some ways remains\u2014the bar for inserting architecture into a sensitive landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was on the same trip that Steely came across a copy of Sunset<\/em> magazine. He\u2019d already started drawing houses\u2014quick sketches of rooflines and forms in his spiral notebook\u2014but flipping through that issue, he had a life-changing realization: There were people who just designed houses. \u201cIt was like, wait a minute, this can\u2019t be real,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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D-Fin House. Photo by Darren Bradley.<\/sup><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When the teenage Steely wasn\u2019t sketching\u2014which his mother, a painter, encouraged\u2014he was learning how to soup up cars from his father, whose own father owned a garage in nearby Clements. Similar to his family\u2019s ever-evolving house, building hot rods taught Steely that there wasn\u2019t much in the world you couldn\u2019t change \u201cto make it more the way you wanted it to be,\u201d he says. \u201cYou could do that with anything. You could do that with a tractor. You could do that with a house. You could tailor anything to exactly the way you wanted it to be. Nothing was sacred.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a lesson Steely has applied to his career. After architecture school and a stint working in Italy\u2014where he met his wife, artist Cathy Liu\u2014he moved to San Francisco in 1990, where Liu was living. He had little trouble finding a job, he says, but quickly soured on the long hours and lack of creative freedom. He was fired more than once. Steely considered leaving architecture altogether and pursuing sculpture, but then he\u2019d take a side gig\u2014designing a set for a fashion show or some other unconventional project\u2014and remember how much he loved it. \u201cI kept being dragged back,\u201d he says. \u201cAt some point I realized that I\u2019d been fired from the best architecture offices in San Francisco, so I wasn\u2019t going to get back into architecture that way. I had to do it my own way.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That meant starting\u2014and staying\u2014small. He opened a practice and did projects for friends. He saved money by being his own builder. \u201cI would design something, and the contractor would say, \u2018That\u2019ll cost $30,000,\u2019 and I would say, \u2018I can do it for $20,000.\u2019\u201d Thirty years later Craig Steely Architecture is still mostly a one-man shop (at most Steely employs one or two other designers). He\u2019s selective about clients and, with the exception of a ramen restaurant in San Francisco, exclusively designs houses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He owes at least part of his success to a combination of punk-rock charisma and childlike enthusiasm. \u201cPicture the stereotypical surfer from San Francisco\u2014you know, a little bit hippie, a little bit hipster, but with an encyclopedic brain,\u201d Hart says. Indeed, conversations with Steely, who, with shoulder-length hair and a uniform of jeans and vintage t-shirts already looks more like a pro surfer than an architect, tend to be riddled with references to obscure music, books and films and peppered with big ideas. The first time I met him, at the Kaimana Beach Hotel on O\u2018ahu, he saw my voice recorder and began excitedly telling me about the time he bought one to make field recordings, which spiraled into a discussion of archives, entropy and the nature of time. It\u2019s as if he never shed that teenage part of himself that unselfconsciously thrills at discovering new things. \u201cHe\u2019s just so engaged in the moment,\u201d Hart says. \u201cHe never runs out of energy. I\u2019ve never seen him tired.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Lavaflow 2 – Liu\/Steely Residence, on Big Island.<\/sup><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In 1998, Steely flew to Hawai\u2018i for the first time. He\u2019d been hired to design a house near Pahoa on Hawai\u2018i Island, and on his way out to the building site, he stopped at Pohoiki, the popular beach park and surf spot that was later destroyed during the 2018 volcanic eruption. \u201cI remember pulling up, and there were people fishing and surfing and swimming and camping, and instantly I felt incredibly attracted to this place,\u201d he says. The more time he spent on Hawai\u2018i Island, the more it reminded him of the Sierra foothills. \u201cIt was really rural, and you knew your neighbors because you had to depend on them when things broke down. There was just that sense of connection that people had to the land\u2014and to each other,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Less than a year after beginning that first house, Steely and Liu bought a small property in Kalapana on which he built a modest residence that\u2019s somewhere between a 1960s glass house and a Hawai\u2018i-style bungalow, with cantilevered rooms and floor-to-ceiling glass but also a corrugated metal roof and jalousie windows. The blessing for the house and the lu\u2018au for their son Zane\u2019s first birthday took place the same day. Neighbors came to help cook. \u201cWe felt so instantly included in the community down there,\u201d Steely says. He and Liu have split their time, more or less fifty-fifty, between San Francisco and Hawai\u2018i Island ever since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Lavaflow 2 – Liu\/Steely Residence, on Big Island.<\/sup><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Ask Craig Steely<\/strong> about a house he designed and he\u2019ll start by telling you everything else: about the site\u2019s mercurial weather, the subtle variations in topography that create eddies of wind and fog, how these inform where he puts a house. Or how he bonded with a client over their shared love of German composer Klaus Schulze and the playlist they ended up making for the project, all droney synths and pulsing beats, the juxtaposition of sci-fi soundscapes made with analog recording equipment seemingly a metaphor for the house itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s all a part of Steely\u2019s sponge-like creative process. Most often it begins with the land. He makes repeated visits to building sites, trudging through the rainforest or picking his way over expanses of lava, sensing where the slope changes, where the light shifts, where the views begin to open\u2014all before he draws a single line. To Steely a house should connect a person to the environment, not separate them from it. A house, he says, should be secondary to the land it sits on. \u201cIt\u2019s another client, in a way,\u201d he tells me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Architecturally, Steely\u2019s houses have little in common with the kinds of high-end luxury residences one sees throughout Hawai\u2018i, most of which share a handful of stylistic touchpoints. Steely\u2019s houses, in contrast, are specific and idiosyncratic in their influences. They respond not to a vague, nostalgic idea of \u201cHawaiianness\u201d but to what it means to live right here, right now<\/em>. \u201cModern Hawai\u2018i\u2019s culture is amazing,\u201d Steely says, describing it as a panoply of Oceanic and Pacific Rim cultures that \u201cstill holds the best of the old.\u201d For him, the idea that Hawai\u2018i architecture can be reduced to something visual is \u201ccompletely lame and inappropriate.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hart recalls a lecture Steely gave at UH, which began with photos of run-ofthe-mill carports in Manoa. \u201cHe talked about the \u2018carport vernacular\u2019 rather than the lanai,\u201d Hart says. \u201cBecause a lot of homes don\u2019t have properly designed lanai, but a lot of them have carports that everyone kind of lives in. And I think that understanding, like, \u2018I\u2019m not going to do something that\u2019s referential to the Hawaiian archetype; I\u2019m gonna do the thing that people live in, the lifestyle\u2019\u2014that\u2019s what he\u2019s designing for.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Musubi House. Photo by Darren Bradley.<\/sup><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Photo by Darren Bradley.<\/sup><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Steely\u2019s latest project, his ninth on Hawai\u2018i Island, is the 2,200-square-foot Musubi House, so named for its roundcornered triangular floor plan. Guy Brand, the house\u2019s owner, says Steely spent countless days at the property, which sits about four thousand feet above sea level on the Hamakua Coast, walking every square foot of its hundred acres over several years. \u201cOne time, Craig went up on his own, and there was a storm. There was a river running through the place, and he was wading through it,\u201d Brand recalls. \u201cI thought he would have said, \u2018Yeah, f**k this place.\u2019 Instead, he calls and goes, \u2018Oh, man, this is gonna be great!\u2019 His son, Zane, almost got washed away. But that didn\u2019t stop Craig.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Over the course of two or three years, he got to know us, and he got the vibe of what we liked. Then, one day, a sketch comes over. And it\u2019s like, \u2018Here\u2019s your house.\u2019 I was like, holy s**t!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sketch showed an equilateral triangle nested inside a much larger triangle, forming three spacious rooms organized around a central courtyard. The sides of the outer triangle would be glass, while their vertices would be cast-in-place concrete, and the whole thing would be topped by a monumental, diamond-shaped roof that would extend past the enclosed parts of the house to form multiple covered lanai. To Steely it was the only appropriate response to a place so dynamic. \u201cOn sites so powerful, how can you compete with it? You can\u2019t,\u201d he says. \u201cSo you make something that\u2019s specific and its own thing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photos by Darren Bradley.<\/sup><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The unusual geometries have a purpose. On his visits, Steely had seen how rapidly the weather can change at that elevation. \u201cThere are times when the rain is coming horizontal and the fog is [super thick], and then other times it\u2019s so clear and still,\u201d he says. The house, which is completely off-grid, is sited so that its ocean-facing corner deflects the prevailing trade winds, much like the prow of a ship slices through the water. At the same time, Steely wanted to capture and even amplify the everchanging atmospheric conditions. He made the glass walls of the courtyard fully retractable, allowing whatever is happening outside to permeate the house. \u201cI know it sounds crazy,\u201d Steely says, \u201cbut the house really is designed to create a weather system within.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Crazy or not, Brand has embraced this aspect of the house. \u201cSometimes it\u2019s just raining in the house, and I love it,\u201d he says. He texts me photos to prove it. Then he sends one of a wild boar on the lanai.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As futuristic as the Musubi House feels, it is intimately connected to the Hamakua landscape, embodying many of the same principles Steely saw in Sea Ranch all those years ago. \u201cIt\u2019s like the whole hill is part of the house,\u201d Brand says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite Steely\u2019s successes over the past decade\u2014he\u2019s been featured in magazines like Dwell<\/em>, named a top residential firm by the American Institute of Architects and is currently at work on a book of his houses\u2014the designer is nowhere near the pinnacle of his career. For one, he\u2019s still young. Architect years are like dog years, but in reverse. Being 50 years old and an architect is like being 35 in any other profession; at age 60 many architects are just beginning to enter their prime. \u201cArchitecture is a long game,\u201d Steely says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Steely tells me that the worst part of being an architect is that all of your half-baked ideas are on display. \u201cYou leave this trail of ideas that you thought were so great, then you look back at it and you\u2019re like, \u2018Oh my god, what was I thinking?\u2019\u201d Steely has evolved over the course of his career, as have his houses. And yet, he says, sometimes it feels like he\u2019s chasing the same elusive ideas. \u201cI see one project, just different iterations on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Steely hasn\u2019t tired of the chase. All these years later, he gets the same thrill from designing. He\u2019s still that kid flipping through a Sunset<\/em> magazine, sketching houses. \u201cSome people are good at singing, some people are good at ballet,\u201d he says. \u201cI feel like architecture is the best way that I can express myself. I\u2019m still finding inspiration from it. I feel like it\u2019s getting better and better.\u201d \ud83c\udf3e<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally published in Hana Hou!, January 2023 If asked where the epicenter of Hawai\u2018i\u2018s architecture and design scene is located, the obvious answer would be Honolulu. Where else can a person have lunch in a Julia Morgan-designed caf\u00e9? Or soak up skyline views from mid-century master Vladimir Ossipoff\u2019s Liljestrand House? Or bask in the Brutalist … Continue reading The Otherworldly Homes of Architect Craig Steely<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timothyschuler.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1224"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timothyschuler.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timothyschuler.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timothyschuler.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timothyschuler.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1224"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.timothyschuler.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1288,"href":"http:\/\/www.timothyschuler.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1224\/revisions\/1288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timothyschuler.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timothyschuler.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timothyschuler.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}