Alterstudio Architecture, an architectural and design firm based in Austin, Texas, was founded by Kevin Alter. Renowned for its innovative approach to architecture that enhances the human experience, the firm integrates buildings within their ecological and cultural contexts, emphasizing sustainability and meticulous craftsmanship. Celebrated for its adept manipulation of space and light, Alterstudio has garnered multiple awards, including recognitions from the Texas Society of Architects and the American Institute of Architects.
Alterstudio Architecture’s projects, such as Highland Park Residence and Constant Springs Residence, exemplify its commitment to creating environments that are responsive to their settings and sustainable over time. These projects reflect Alterstudio’s philosophy of ethical architecture, highlighting the use of sustainable materials and strategies that contribute positively to the built environment and its inhabitants. This approach has established Alterstudio as a prominent figure in contemporary architecture, dedicated to enhancing both the community and the natural world through thoughtful design.
What inspires you?
Inspiration for us is wide and omnipresent, but I think if you look at the inspiration for our work, we are inspired by the ever-present beauty of the natural world (i.e., the passing of the day in light and shadow, the powerful pull of the contours of the land, the meandering limbs of Live Oak trees, the orientation of the prevailing breezes), the powerful material presence of gravity in masonry and timber, the magic of steel and glass, and the poetic possibilities of building a more beautiful and consequential environment. In our City Park Residence, for example, one can see the way that the building engages and highlights the many conditions of its circumstance. We can’t design anything as amazing as the views afforded by this property, the meandering limbs of the adjacent Live Oak trees, the southeastern breezes, or the shadows cast by the advancing path of the sun, but we engage and frame them, and make them a significant part of the experience of this home.
What inspired you to become an architect?
The built environment is a ubiquitous presence in the serendipity of social occasions, both public and private, and we were excited to imagine the ways in which we might contribute something that has such a consequence. In our Highland Park Residence, we were able to work with an incredible collection of contemporary art and a family that enjoyed hosting special events, and the house was designed as a kind of primed canvas against which these extraordinary artifacts and rich social occasions would play out.
How would you describe your design philosophy?
We see architecture as an act of profound optimism, and as intrinsically intertwined with culture. As a consequence, we understand the building as part of a larger, inclusive context and our work as something that supports what is positive in a place suppresses what is problematic there, and elevates its latent possibilities. We embrace serendipity and the natural world, while at the same time being deeply interested in the presence of powerful buildings/artifacts. We believe in building exceptionally well, that beauty is crucial, and that the most important aspect of a building is its consequence on the experience of its various constituencies. The property for our City Park Residence presented the opportunity for unparalleled views of both the City of Austin, up and down the Colorado River, and the undulating landscape of the hill country, and the building design begins with directly engaging the myriad possibilities there.
What is your favorite project?
We love all our projects, but the ones that we are currently working on are oftentimes our favorites because they capture our attention at the moment. Akin to our clients for the Highland Park Residence who own an extraordinary collection of contemporary art, we are currently working on a project, the Pedernales Ranch, with clients who also own a fantastic collection of contemporary art, and it is a special pleasure to design rooms to embrace and feature these pieces.
What is your favorite architectural detail?
Like the last question, we can’t identify a favorite detail, but rather a favorite condition. We find it is the threshold between inside and outside, between one room and another, between building and the sky or building and the ground, that prove to be the most fertile moments for significant architectural detail. That said, any given detail is never understood as parenthetically removed from others, and one is only significant in this larger context. The abstraction of the way that the sky is framed in our City Park Residence, for example, is more significant in relation to the horizontality of the primary views, and the rich textures and shadows of the adjacent screens, etc. Likewise, the 34’ cantilever of the primary suite, around a Cedar Elm tree to define the entry blurs the boundaries between inside and outside, heavy and light, materially concrete and magically ephemeral.
Do you have a favorite material?
We don’t find any particular material more valuable than another. Rather, it is always in the deployment of a material that we find meaning and value. We love the way that gravity pulls masonry to the ground, the way wood comes alive through its workmanship, the startling elegance of steel’s strength, and the magic transparency and reflection of the glass, to name just a few. Each material is disposed of with intention. We utilized Indiana Limestone in our Highland Park Residence precisely because it is so homogeneous and supports the singular nature of the volume that it defined. In contrast, we used quarter-sawn, sequenced Walnut veneer inside to expose the richness and serendipity of the wood grain.
What is your process for starting a new project?
We always begin with a lot of due diligence: diligence with respect to both the various conditions of a given place as well as of our clients. Armed with this knowledge, we begin collaboratively with the partners and project architects, drawing and discussing the possibilities for any given project, and pursuing as many lines of inquiry as we think viable and interesting – with many hands and minds involved in every project. At our City Park Residence, we spent many days traversing and getting to know the vicissitudes of property, and subsequently tuned our design to its latent possibilities.
How do you balance function and creativity in your designs?
We reject the notion that function and creativity are distinct, or that one follows the other. As Vitruvius notes in the first book in the field, architecture is a combination of firmness, commodity, and delight, and all three legs of this triumvirate are required. Our creativity arises out of the pursuit of solutions to concrete problems, and functionality often arises out of an unexpected poetic inspiration. While I believe that our City Park Residence is both creative and beautiful, our clients are not sacrificing any functionality to live there. On the contrary, so much of the post-occupancy feedback we receive is precisely how beautifully the building accommodates their needs and desires, even before they knew what they wanted.
How does the environment influence your work?
Consideration of and inspiration from the environment is ubiquitous in all our work. It is both the foundation and the delight, relied upon and framed. However, we understand the environment as all of the complex circumstances that define a place – not only the visual or most obvious, but also the subtle and non-visual. The City Park Residence, for example, was designed both to engage its rich circumstance, but also to be acoustically tuned for live music performances – and the musicians who have played there have all uniformly commented on how wonderful the room ‘sounded.’
How do you collaborate with clients to achieve their vision?
We love to collaborate with our clients and understand their vision to be integral to our work. That said, we don’t accept their vision solely as instructions to follow. Rather, we try to understand the underlying desires – both aesthetic and social – for the way that a building might make its future that much better, inspiring, and exciting, and we act as partners and trusted advisors in guiding a project into being. In the way that the best teachers are guides more than lecturers of fact, we try to design to the individual characters with whom we work as partners. While we believe that a trained eye will be able to note our work as a distinct body, we take pride in the great variegation in character that our buildings demonstrate and believe that this is direct because they embody both our desires and our respective clients. Our clients for the Highland Park Residence wanted a building that on one hand would support their family life as well as their collection of art, and on the other be an inspiring piece of architecture in and of itself. We worked closely with them for many months, iterating different options and exploring every facet of the building with them in drawings and 3d models to get to the best solution.
What inspired the Highland Park and City Park Residences?
Highland Park and City Park Residences were inspired by the combination of our client’s hopes and dreams, their respective places, and a desire to create buildings that would be both powerfully present and a compelling background for the rich lives lived in and around these buildings.
How did materiality shape the design and sustainability of the City Park Residences?
We deploy material and constructional concerns such that form arises from their intrinsic characteristics and such that it is worthy of the effort exerted by the various crafts and people who construct our buildings. Sustainability is present for both its ethical and financial aspects and is inescapable in our thoughts and designs. At our City Park Residence, the primary spaces are defined as a bridge between two wings that directly engage the hillside. The grounded anchorages are rendered in stone, drawn into the ground by gravity, while the former spaces float in timber and glass almost effortlessly above the landscape that flows unobstructed underneath.
What advice would you give to young architects?
It’s hard to offer generalized advice, as everyone is different. For students preparing for architecture school, we often suggest learning to draw more than draft, and to use photography to frame those aspects of a place that they find compelling. For young architects, we would direct them to engage in the larger world and find the ways in which building as a noun is meaningful to them, and to pursue the knowledge of building as a verb to enable them to design and build those kinds of buildings that they identified as meaningful.
