Innovator: Architect Michael Krupnick designs “movie sets” for people’s lives that keep nature close
By Bill Rodgers | photos by kirk gittings
The adobe porch Michael Krupnick designed for a studio in Ojo Caliente, New Mexico, is plain, nearly featureless on its own. In the afternoon sun, though, a shadow splits its wall into two perfect triangles, one light, one dark. It’s the kind of detail that could take months to notice, but it’s key to understanding the Santa Fe architect’s approach: using minimal desert design features to quietly add some drama to the client’s life.
Krupnick’s work, at its most basic level, is a hybridization of the timeless stillness of ancient desert architecture combined with the more modern, minimal-industrial influences one might find in a city loft. But beyond that, his goal is to create a sense of place. The 49-year-old architect thinks of his homes as movie sets where the daily events of the residents’ lives play out. Composition plays a part, too; it’s not just the structure, says Krupnick, but how it enhances, and is enhanced by, the space it occupies.
Krupnick’s work, at its most basic level, is a hybridization of the timeless stillness of ancient desert architecture combined with the more modern, minimal-industrial influences one might find in a city loft
Left: This room is a focal point of the house, with a Trombe wall that provides radiating heat. Right: The rustic barn door was crafted from reclaimed walnut that Freeman’s father had saved for years, waiting for its calling. The dining table, sustainably harvested, is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.
“What I work on most is the ‘space between,’ how shadow and light interact with the sky and landscape,” he says. “More than the building’s structure, it’s the space between and the negative space the building creates.”
Krupnick, who started his studio with his wife, Kim Ray, in 1995, is a transplant to Santa Fe from Florida. He says he became interested in architecture as a reaction to how unfulfilling his hometown of Fort Lauderdale felt while he was growing up; the developments seemed “uncaring,” he says. He calls it “bad Modernism”—buildings and neighborhoods that spare no thought for the people who inhabit them, buildings with no sense of the space surrounding them. Krupnick wanted to compose spaces, private and public, that improved people’s lives. “I got into [architecture] because I knew I could do better,” he says.
Krupnick first attended the University of Colorado, Boulder, where one course, more about imagination than design, helped him to think of architecture less in material terms and more as a space where the events of people’s lives unfold. He came to study in New Mexico in 1990 and fell in love with the adobe buildings and the local culture, enjoying the lack of “flash” and the openness and warmth he found in the people here. He decided to stay.
At UNM he was able to study under Modernist architect Ricardo Legorreta and also Charles Moore, whose collaborative Sea Ranch condominium project had an important impact on Los Angeles architecture. And though he didn’t study directly with Antoine Predock, Krupnick and many of his classmates were influenced by his Modernist-industrial work. “He was the local architecture hero,” Krupnick says of the Albuquerque-based Predock. “He was very Modernist-industrial, very much sense-of-place. It’s influenced my work tremendously.”
Krupnick began working as an intern renovating rural New Mexican churches with adobe made from clay collected on-site. At first New Mexico hadn’t struck him as beautiful, he recalls; the desert and its architecture demanded quiet and patience to be appreciated. But in the cracked adobe walls of those old churches, Krupnick learned a subtle style that he uses to this day.
“New Mexico churches are like no other buildings at all, ever,” he says. “It’s not about the building—it’s about the people. Check out the softness of this line,” he says, pointing to an image of a church and observing how its peaked roof sagged and bent against the evening desert sky. “There’s a humanness in putting this out there. Sometimes architecture is so perfect that it takes out the human aspect.”
It was while he was restoring the old churches that he met Kim Ray, who would become his partner in the business for 16 years before establishing herself as a nurse and yoga instructor. In the studio’s earlier days, the husband-and-wife team tackled large-scale restaurant and apartment projects through Fort Lauderdale developer Alan Hooper. Even though Ray has since branched out, she still has input in some of the studio’s projects. “Kim is one of the best designers I’ve ever met,” Krupnick says. “So even though she’s not a full-time part of the firm, she’s always involved.”
Krupnick always makes room for nature, an important feature of his minimal designs. When Carlos Ramirez, a bridal and wedding designer from Miami, hired him in 2013 to renovate a 1940s Santa Fe adobe home that had undergone some slapdash renovation in the 1970s, he put that sensibility to work.
The house sits on a piece of land that faces the mountains, but its original design obscured this view with a utility room and gazebo in the backyard. What followed between Krupnick and Ramirez was a renovation by means of negation. They picked out features of the old home that worked and removed those that didn’t, often choosing to leave space rather than fill it. The utility room and gazebo were among the first to go, and a wall to the east was replaced with a window—the Sangre de Cristos would now provide an unobstructed vista for Ramirez’s dining room. The vigas in the living room were retained and painted white, while the old adobe portal to the home remains, opening onto a foyer with a black limestone floor.
Ramirez says his working relationship with Krupnick was “fluid.” The new design removed the cluttered feeling of the earlier renovation, he reports, and left an open, airy home with a floor plan that flows naturally. “It has a definite feeling,” Ramirez says.
One of the studio’s earliest projects was a home for Edwina and Charles Milner in northeast Santa Fe. Edwina, who’s served on the boards of several art organizations, wanted to build a home that would showcase her art collection, house a studio for her own work, and be a place where she could entertain guests. When the couple hired the young architect, Edwina was intrigued by rounded homes that were created by pouring concrete over inflated weather balloons. She wanted something that looked similar.
The lot sat on an incline with a view of the mountains to the east, and the home the Krupnicks and Milners designed now curves its way up that hill, with a view of the surrounding desert landscape from each of its five levels. It’s not designed in concrete or adobe, but rather a concrete-ash mix that evokes the look of old New Mexican homes, flawed but endearing. Upon seeing the pocked and bubbling material, Edwina fell in love with its pink-beige color. “It’s so pretty,” she says. “I didn’t let them paint over it at all. I just love that surface.”
The living room, with a large window that overlooks a patio and a view of the mountains, is a set piece for Edwina’s role in the fine-art world. A fireplace sits in the center, with traditional vigas radiating from the curved chimney. Her guests often gather there to listen to speakers and socialize at cocktail parties. The stairway was enhanced with additional windows, providing an unbroken connection to the outside. In Edwina’s art studio, windows open to the hillside slope at ground level. Edwina and Charles were so happy with the work that they recently invited Krupnick back to add a guest room with a private entrance and kitchen.
Another recent addition to Krupnick’s oeuvre, one that draws more heavily on his industrial roots, is a gallery in Santa Fe’s Railyard Arts District. California sculptor Bill Schindler hired him to transform what used to be an auto repair shop into a studio and a gallery space. In the back of the building, where people used to work on cars, Schindler has drills, a workbench, and boxes upon boxes of scrap metal and bent airplane propellers—everything he needs to make his art.
The gallery area is tidier but doesn’t lose the industrial aesthetic. Steel supports cross the ceiling above a concrete floor nicked with thousands of imperfections. But it’s the 22-foot, triangular steel tower and its canopy at the gallery’s entrance that is most striking. The tower links the gallery to similarly styled buildings near the train station. “It’s a nice sculptural entry,” Schindler says. “Being a sculptor, that’s important to me.”
The majority of the studio’s large-scale development work is in Florida, where Krupnick is also licensed. Ray was there to design some of the earliest entries, and many of these projects utilize the couple’s more minimal, modern influences. They worked together on the Mill Lofts, Foundry Lofts, and Himmarshee Bar & Grille in Fort Lauderdale, often in partnership with developer Alan Hooper. He and Krupnick were childhood friends from Fort Lauderdale, where they used to play baseball and ride bicycles around the neighborhood.
They ran into each other again in 1996 after Krupnick spotted Hooper working on a house on the street where he grew up. They began a conversation that turned into a 19-year working relationship spanning many projects and millions of dollars in development. Hooper says that Krupnick considers everything, from the building’s relationship to the sun to what things will look like at night and how the area will feel for pedestrians.
“We make buildings that look like they’ve been there forever,” Hooper comments. “We’re not as vanilla as most developers. Most developments are the delivery of a box for some sort of user based on square footage, but we go for the cool factor.”
The duo are entering the second phase of a project in College Town, a residential area near Florida State University in Tallahassee with access to food and entertainment within walking distance of Doak Campbell Stadium. The “cool factor” here includes multiple areas for restaurants and bars, wide brick sidewalks that are inviting to foot traffic, outdoor concert venues with canopies supported by steel struts, and a rooftop pool with a view of the stadium.
College Town may seem stylistically removed from the meditative desert homes Krupnick builds in New Mexico, but his architecture-as-movie-set approach is the same. Venues and restaurants along the streets are separated from the sidewalk by railings, but not quite. There’s permeability in this design that can be seen in many of the architect’s projects. When Krupnick was adding these dividing rails to College Town, he was imagining a scenario in which a resident walking on a Friday night recognizes friends at one of the restaurants and decides to exit the sidewalk to join them. It seems natural and unplanned, but Krupnick designed it to feel that way.
His technical drawings of College Town are peppered with similar scripted incidents. For efficiency’s sake, Krupnick often designs on his computer, but he says he reaches a different space artistically when he’s drawing by hand and listening to music. Scattered among hand-drawn plans are little notes he’s left himself, like “sitting on the steps waiting for a friend,” and “cool little pub.” The latter refers to part of the development that doesn’t have much visibility. Krupnick says he imagines someone turning this corner and stumbling across an almost-hidden bar.
Left top: Photographer Kim Jew’s studio is an articulation of space and light in Corrales. Top Middle and bottom: Traditional adobe massing meets rusted steel and reclaimed oak detailing in artist Joyce B. Scott’s Ojo Caliente studio, which has a bermed, below-ground workshop. Top right: Krupnick’s urban taste is seen in contractor Andy Joseph’s Santa Fe home.
The 49-year-old architect thinks of his homes as movie sets where the daily events of the residents’ lives play out
It’s this harmony between public and private life, between a structure and the person that inhabits it, that intrigues Krupnick. It’s one of the reasons he wanted to be an architect in the first place.
“It’s not the love of buildings, it’s the love of community building, of public spaces, composition, and drawing,” he says. “Houses are little compositions creating more of a village feel with walkways and pathways. I sometimes like the space between the buildings more than I like the buildings.”
Above: Edwina and Charles Milner were Krupnick’s first clients. Contractor Toby Anderson helped bring the sculptural, organic architecture to life in the home designed as a showcase for the couple to display and talk about their art.
Along with Alan Hooper and Brad Innes, the Southern vernacular industrial style of College Town in Florida is transforming the area into an arts and entertainment district.
From the Summer 2015 isssue
