Ten Houses: Miller Hull Partnership

Firm Profile: The Miller/Hull Partnership has built a reputation based on simple, elegant, and authentic designs. The Seattle firm, established in 1977, has pursued a rigorous logic in its design approach, which is based on the belief that architectural programs are best solved directly and efficiently. This rigor has resulted in a body of work that expresses powerful concepts in lyrical form.

Founding partners David Miller and Robert Hull, both raised in Washington State, have explored the development of two dominant themes in America's western regional architecture: the need to establish a defined place within the landscape, and the art of rational building. Their attitude toward building in the landscape takes advantage of a mutual inflection in which architecture and landscape seem to need each other for completion. In their residential architecture they attempt to capture the spirit and vitality of the American West by focusing on the tensions between nature and materiality, detail, and structure.

Miller/Hull has developed a community-based architecture for a variety of clients ranging from regional government agencies, colleges, and universities to private corporations and residential owners. The have been the recipient of more than seventy national and regional design awards during their first twenty years of practice. Their design work has been frequently published in international journals, has been featured in exhibitions--including two solo shows--and has been the subject of lectures given by the firm's Partners in the United States, Canada, Japan, and Italy.

Originally from Buenos Aires, Oscar Riera Ojeda is an editor and designer who practices in the United States, South America and Europe from his office in Boston. He is vice-director of the Spanish-Argentinian magazine Casas Internacional, and is the creator of several series of architectural publications for Rockport Publishers in addition to the Single Building series, including Ten Houses, Contemporary World Architects, Architecture in Detail and Art and Architecture. Other architectural publications include the New American series for the Whitney Library of Design, as well as several monographs on the work of renowned architects.