One Climate Change Innovation: Just Look Up

Photograph: Eric Petschek Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Tom Kundig absorbed lessons in resilience before he even knew the word. As a child, he saw many of the industrial and agricultural buildings of the rural Pacific Northwest abandoned but still standing, the harsh winter conditions no match for their steel columns. That background came in handy when he was asked to design a house for a young family on a coastal Mississippi site susceptible to severe flooding. The clients, Joel and Jill Kavanaugh, had fallen in love with a plot bordering the Gulf Islands National Seashore in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. The one-acre parcel looked out onto the Davis Bayou, with the Gulf of Mexico visible in the distance. That was the background; in the foreground were about a dozen ancient live-oak trees dripping with Spanish moss. As Joel puts it, he and Jill owned the painting; now they wanted the frame. And they wanted that frame to be the work of Tom Kundig, whose rugged houses they had been admiring in magazines for years.