Mountain House Studio/The Sugden House
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Address
Summit Park, Utah
Year Completed
1984
Building Type
Architect:
Firm/Partnership
Project Description
Sugden built this house for his wife, Jutta Alwang Sugden.
An article describes the structure: “A forested mountainside above Salt Lake City provides the site for this steel-and-glass cube. Though it contrasts boldly with its surroundings, one juror justifies the approach: ‘There’s a clear delineation of this as an object in the landscape.’
Most of the house was built in a factory and trucked to the site, ensuring quality and speeding erection time in an area where weather limits the building season. The house is based on 11-foot modules. Most exterior walls are glass, joined to the steel frame with rubber gaskets.
Wrapped in single-pane glass, the house doesn’t hold heat well, but it warms up quickly when the sun shines. On all windows, thin-profile blinds have a mirror-coated side to reflect heat, a black side to collect it. Large sliding doors help vent the house and catch prevailing breezes.
Hot-water registers around the perimeter add heat, but as the owner says, ‘On cold nights, we grab a quilt and go to bed.’”1
When the Sugden House was presented with an Honor Award from the Utah Society of the AIA, the jury noted that “It is refreshing to see such a clear, direct design statement. This house is a very sophisticated insertion into the landscape. Formal and deliberate, with the integration of the interiors into the envelope of the building very well done, it is a design statement you can accept because it is so beautifully carried out. One knows immediately, looking at the plan that this is a home for two adults who are very clear about direction and lifestyle.”2
Another article describes the residence as, “Thirty years after returning to Utah, Sugden designed his own home on a hillside at the summit of Parley’s Canyon. Sugden’s wife, artist and graphic designer Jutta Alwang Sugden, continues to live in the home. The ground floor of the three-story live-work studio incorporates a covered carport, entrance, and a library and archive of creative work. A 45-degree open-deck steel stair tower leads up to the living-dining room and kitchen. The sleek black-and-white space has a theatrical quality and sets a dramatic tone lightened by the large-scale, colorful Sugden painting that forms one wall. Here the visible structure and cross-bracing details can be appreciated up close.
The upper floor houses the live-work space, with sleeping and bathing quarters and a working design studio. The black concrete floors are softened with a grid of white sports court floor tiles, an innovative application of a material typically used as an underlayment. Floating walls and a digitally-designed panel created by Jutta free the ceiling from obstruction, allowing light to spill over walls and establish zones for working and living. The space is flooded with natural light from expansive glazing and a central overhead skylight and has an entirely different feeling from that of the proportionally equal floor below.”3
In an application to submit the Mountain House Studio/the Sugden House for consideration in the 1986 AIA Honor Awards Program, Sugden wrote about the house and its design: “Built for my wife, a graphic designer, and myself, an architect, the site is difficult, confined, and very steep on all sides with a large stand of alpine white fir trees and mountain maple within the approximately once-acre boundary. The views in all directions are unbelievable. We felt that the living and studio areas should be raised as high as possible since one major view reaches down the canyon and across a valley to the highest range of mountains in Utah, some twenty miles away.
The architectural solution grew to a basic cube, 33’ x 33’ x 33’, with the studio on the top floor, living and bedrooms on the second floor down, and storage and darkroom in the half-basement area with a guest room under the south-facing terrace. Sliding doors open out to a terrace on the main floor and in the center bays of each 33-foot frame, thereby allowing an extension of space from inside to outside or a living high in the trees.
A cabin, a residence, or architecture of any kind built in a mountainous area and at a high altitude imposes distinct and unique demands upon the architect. These demands (not usually found in the more familiar ‘urban situation’) are at once philosophical by nature and they are, at the same time, usually coupled with construction difficulties of the highest order. Such projects, if poorly conceived, produce a constant irritant upon not only the landscape and those immediately involved, but balance at these particular altitudes or elevations.
It is my belief that only architecture which is of its time can be significant. Therefore, I build only within those general confines of the principles of architecture which I understand. It seems to me, and from what I have found out, that there is no architectural form specific to the form of a mountain which can be understood in a historical context without being formalistic in concept. ‘Mountain architecture’ as such is not a unique architecture. It is like all other architecture, perhaps just more dramatically set. It is a geometricising [sic] or crystallization of space within the space formed by the natural elements of the mountain architecture as being unobstrusive, natural, reflective of its surroundings, clear in structure and barely noticeable. I prefer nature – or rather the natural landscape – to flow visually through the structure. I try to separate outside from inside with the lightest possible membrane and touch the ground at the least number of points on which the structure can be properly organized. In this particular project I have kept the ratio of perimeter to floor and roof areas as small as possible, opened the walls on the sun sides and closed them on the cold side where communsurate [sic] with view and planning considerations.”4
Sources
1.
2. “Award of Merit – For their forest house, they borrowed high-rise techniques,” Sunset: The Magazine of Western Living (October 1985). In the folder “Clippings, 1980-1989,” from the John W. Sugden Papers, 1909-2009, accn 2720, box 4, folder 2. From the Special Collections and Archives Department at the University of Utah, J. Willard Marriott Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.
3.
4.
5. Joseph Linton, “Architectural Awards Presented,” Deseret News, June 5, 1988, pg. 14E. In the folder “Clippings, 1980-1989,” from the John W. Sugden Papers, 1909-2009, accn 2720, box 4, folder 2. From the Special Collections and Archives Department at the University of Utah, J. Willard Marriott Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.
6.
7.
8. Anne G. Mooney, “John Sugden: Modern Architecture Utah-Style,” Utah Preservation: Building on the Past, 2006, 8. In the “Clippings, 1990-2007” file from the John W. Sugden Papers, 1909-2009, accn 2720, box 4, folder 3. From the Special Collections and Archives Department at the University of Utah, J. Willard Marriott Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.
9. “Entry # A-119, Mountain House Studio, Parley’s Summit, Utah. Completion Date: June 1985,” from a 1986 AIA Honor Awards Program Concealed Identification form in the folder “Architectural Award Submission Materials, 1966-1990,” from the John W. Sugden Papers, 1909-2009, accn 2720, box 13, folder 12. From the Special Collections and Archives Department at the University of Utah, J. Willard Marriott Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.
10. Kirk Huffaker, “John Sugden: Mid-Century Modern Man and his Architecture,” from The Alta Club’s Annual Lecture in Architecture, October 10, 2007, accessed February 13, 2017, pg. 28, http://www.utahheritagefoundation.org/images/stories/resources/sugdenforwebsite.pdf.
11. United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, “National Register of Historic Places Registration Form for Sugden, Roberta, House,” January 20, 2016, accessed February 20, 2017, pg. 34, https://heritage.utah.gov/wp-content/uploads/UT_Salt-Lake-County_Roberta-Sugden-House-1.pdf?145555.
