Architect James Cutler incorporates living environment into his design

Architect James Cutler has designed some really big homes most notably Bill Gates's 66,000-square foothome that is estimated to have cost $125 million to build.

He has also designed some really small ones like the Rock House, a 704-square foothouse near Ghost Lake, Alta.,that was named the 2017 cabin of the year by Wallpaper Magazine.

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So which does he prefer to design? A monster home or tiny glass house?

"Actually the little ones,truthfully. You're capable of being much more expressive, and fitting things into landscapes much more precisely," Cutler said Wednesday in an interview with the Calgary Eyeopener.

Speaking in Calgary

Cutler is speaking in Calgary Thursday at the National Music Centre, where he'll talk about the role the natural surroundings play in the design process of any given building something that certainly came into play with the Rock House.

"When you have larger buildings, the programs become more complex and to fit them well onto landscapes, you have to eitherbreak them in pieces, if it's a rugged or treed landscape, or if it's very open, fit them into the contours of the land," he said.

"Plus [tiny homes] get built a little more quickly and that's nice, because architecture is sort of the art of delayed gratification.

"You have some idea that you really want tosee happen it's really beautiful andtypically about a year and a half to two years later, you see it sometimes fiveyears, when it's a high-rise building or something like that," Cutler added.

"It's nice to dream up a project andsee it come to fruition in a shorter period of time."

Guiding principles

Thursday, Cutler plans to discuss that philosophy of design.

"I'm going to talk about the principles that have guided my work for the past 40 years, some of which I inherited from a very world-famous architect who was my teacher," he said.

"A guy named LouisKahn who was considered one of probably the threegreat architects of the last century.

"I studied with him and got a degree from him and then sort of incorporated things I learned from him into what I loved, which is the living world basically landscapes and plants and climate and gravity.

"They're all things that I deeply love and consequently like to do work that displays the things that I love most beautifully."

He hopes that by the end of a project, his client is as emotionally connected to it as he tends to get.

"[I]actually try to do work that's emotionally compelling to people, so that they get it and believe it and even possibly some of my clients get to love the planet as much as I do."

Studio space

Cutler incorporates some of those philosophies into his everyday work life as well he often works out of a tiny office space in Washington State.

"My little studio cabin is about 80-square feet,but it's also my daughter's bunk house," he said.

"It's not far from the main house. It's just big enough for a desk and refrigerator, some storage batteries, and twofolding bunk beds that fold out of the wall for my daughter's sleep overs."

What his office lacks in square footage, it makes up for in vantage point.

"It's got a big window looking out over the water."

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