David Salmela is an architectural anomaly. Self-taught in the ways of design, practicing far from the centers of fashion on the frigid edge of Lake Superior, a diminutive man with a friendly, disarming manner, Salmela is hardly the prototypical trendsetter. But for more than a decade he has been a progressive force among Minnesota architects. And with his receipt of not one but two AIA Honor Awards at this year's national American Institute of Architects convention and a merit award from this magazine, Salmela secured his place as a force to be reckoned with on the national scene as well. A self-described modernist who admits, with a hint of bewilderment, to being controversial, Salmela routinely creates sophisticated houses that blend his own proclivity for minimalism with a talent for concocting domestic comfort. All this for clients who, by and large, are everyday people—not corporate executives, not art collectors, not style-conscious celebrities.

The unusual trajectory of his architectural career has placed Salmela in the rare position of having one foot outside of the architectural mainstream and one foot in, giving him a perspective on architectural practice unencumbered by academic brainwashing or old-school ties. The product of an old-fashioned Finnish upbringing, on a dairy farm in central Minnesota, Salmela displays a streak of stubbornness, tempered by ever-present optimism, that makes him an uncommon figure indeed.

At times his buildings can be coolly abstract or irrepressibly playful, but much of the attention given to his design accomplishments focuses on his uncanny ability to blend the familiar with the modern. At a minimum, Salmela's importance lies in his ability to marry characteristics that many observers presume to be in opposition, says Tom Fisher, dean of architecture at the University of Minnesota, and author of the recent monograph Salmela Architect (University of Minnesota Press). “He has shown how modern minimalism and traditional form-making are compatible,” Fisher asserts. “In terms of his practice, he has demonstrated that architects can do important work with the smallest of budgets and in the most out-of-the-way places. After David, architects have no excuses for not doing terrific work.”

As he tells it, Salmela started his career as a forward-thinking modernist, but after a few years he started to question why the public failed to embrace the modern agenda. He took a harder look at the old buildings of his region and studied the architectural traditions of Scandinavia. Architects such as Charles Moore and Robert Venturi were challenging the limitations of modern doctrine at the same time. Now, Salmela says, even the purists are becoming more sensitive to the feelings of their clients. “And basically that is what I am trying to do.”

David Salmela

Credit: Danny Turner

Born in 1945, Salmela grew up near the hamlet of Sedeka, Minnesota. He fondly recalls the carefully tended fields and meticulously maintained flower beds on the family farm—where Salmela learned to value tidiness over messiness. As a youth, he was awed by the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright. Soon Wright was displaced by Le Corbusier, whose coverage in a magazine convinced Salmela his fate was to pursue architecture. But by the time he was ready for college, Salmela suffered under the impression that good marks in math and science were the only ticket to success as an architect. At age 18, he was so intimidated that he lowered his sights—enlisting in the National Guard and enrolling half-heartedly at the University of Minnesota.

Soon he quit school altogether. To bide his time, he took a drafting course and looked for a job in an architecture office. Nobody would hire him, but he had better luck with engineering firms, where he learned how to get things built. “So it wasn't time wasted,” Salmela says. “But as far as getting a prestigious degree and getting architectural credentials—I have none.”

Salmela made the transition to architecture by working at firms located in the state's rugged Iron Range. After a year at a small office in Hibbing, Minn., he took a job at another firm, where the pace was so hectic that he was given free rein to design. “We did a lot of buildings, and we did a lot of gutsy things,” Salmela says.

For 23 years, he made his home in this obscure corner of the state, and over time developed skill as a designer in the office of Damberg, Scott, Peck & Booker in Virginia, Minn. Between 1985 and 1990, three of his residences won statewide accolades for the firm. By the time the third award was announced, he already had packed up his wife and five children and moved to Duluth to open an office for Minneapolis-based Mulfinger and Susanka. That office closed a year later, so he launched a practice with his colleague, Cheryl Fosdick. Their partnership lasted three years, ending abruptly in 1994.

So, at 49, Salmela found himself thrust out on his own, without ever having wished for the independence that would liberate him artistically. It was a turning point. By then, he already had begun to look to his Finnish roots for inspiration. More importantly, he had work. In fact, he had already started designing a house for clients Jim and Judy Brandenburg.

Jim Brandenburg, a celebrated nature photographer, owned a large parcel of land far in the north woods of Minnesota near the 3-million-acre Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. On it, next to a waterfall that churns with the spring thaw, sat a simple log cabin. To hear Brandenburg tell it today, he approached Salmela for help with a simple lean-to addition.

Salmela had other ideas. He preserved the log cabin but used it as a departure point for a series of additions, each with a discrete roof form, texture, and material. The resulting compound, a house and studio known as Ravenwood, straddles the gravel drive like a tiny wilderness village.

Salmela choreographed the approach to the house to create a sense of anticipation. Visitors are guided past the studio addition, onto a wooden porch, and around the log cabin, where the waterfall comes into view. Along the path, there's much to catch the eye: a dry-laid taconite wall, board-and-batten siding painted in deep hues, a shingle roof with the delicate texture of tweed, a stark chimney made of dark gray concrete blocks, a cedar-clad box with ribbon windows and a thin cedar eyebrow, and a wide blue bench where one can contemplate a 300-pound stone that sways on a thin steel cable like a prehistoric metronome.

The rustic qualities of the exterior disappear inside the house. Flush tongue-and-groove cedar paneling turns the corners with taught precision; trim, gray-slate floors lend a minimalist air. But the combination of natural materials imparts warmth to the space, which is comfortably scaled. From there, the visitor steps into the studio, which extends into the woods like a large tent. Brandenburg's library and workspace occupy the ground floor, with an additional office loft overhead.

“I visited that house and loved it at first sight,” says Mark Simon, FAIA, of Centerbrook Architects and Planners. Simon, who served on the jury that recognized the house with an AIA Honor Award in 1998, praises Salmela's configuration of the house as a complex that allows occupants to feel at once protected, but close to nature. “David focused views on the surrounding landscape in a variety of ways—tall windows frame a few trees while long low windows frame the whole forest going up a hill or down into a valley. Each makes you look more carefully. The house instructs and pleases at the same time.”

This year, Salmela racked up two more AIA Honor Awards for a very small-scale project—a sauna—and a far more expansive one, the 145-acre Jackson Meadow development that, when completed, will consist of 64 Salmela-designed houses. The sauna, built in 2002 for Peter and Cindy Emerson, is in many ways the counterpoint of the multi-faceted house designed for Jim Brandenburg. An essay in abstraction, the sauna has a powerful triangular gable end that balances delicately above a semicircular wall of brick. Those elements, and the simple brick box that contains the actual sauna, are arranged neatly in the woods on a shallow stone plinth.

Entering the structure is akin to stepping inside a well-made cabinet—wood ceilings and partitions wrap the visitor in a protective envelope. Narrow stairs rise to the cooling porch, a tree-house-like room furnished with slatted benches and simple wooden chairs. Salmela notes that the sauna often was the first building erected on the pioneer farmsteads of Finnish immigrants. It provided shelter for the family while the larger homestead was being built. Used not only for bathing but also for social gatherings, the sauna often was the place for childbirth and burial preparation. Salmela's father was born in one.

The contrast between the highly-articulated Ravenwood studio and the minimalist Emerson sauna begins to illustrate the boundaries of Salmela's architectural field of play. Over the past 10 years, his portfolio includes residences that, on the outside, range from the overtly traditional to the starkly contemporary. Somewhere in between are his rural cabins, whose anthropomorphic shapes can make them look like animals hunkered in the woods. But, no matter the outward image, Salmela consistently handles color, materials, and massing with a modernist's eye. And his interiors reflect a keen interest in light, freedom of movement, and scale-making.

“If there is a common thread in the houses I do, it's about bringing light in,” he says. “The most common device I use is to make the house as narrow as possible, so that the house is one room wide. If you glaze it, then you have light coming from two opposite sides.”

Although his inspirations are many, Salmela is quick to acknowledge his creative debt to Alvar Aalto. There is a kind of kinship between the two—“Aalto was a Finn and I'm an American Finn”—and a similarity in culture and environment shared by Minnesota and Finland. But what resonates most with Salmela is the way Aalto's mature work exhibited a regional response, a humanizing of hard-edged modernism with a craftsmanlike use of materials.

“He's an influence, but the things I do are influenced by other architects, too, whether it's Charlie Moore or Venturi or Mies van der Rohe,” Salmela says. “Those architects would never do what I do. But the whole idea of advancing architecture is to discover a means of solving the problem. And if we can't use what they learned, what good are they?”

Salmela's ability to produce variations on a theme is most evident at Jackson Meadow, a new residential development near the pioneer settlement of Marine on St. Croix. Nestled beside 191 acres of permanently protected open land, the new community both preserves the site's rural character while reinterpreting the vernacular forms, materials, and detailing of the historic town.

Working with landscape architects Shane Coen and Jon Stumpf, Salmela served as co-planner for the site and handled the design of each residence. In selecting the project for an AIA Honor Award for Regional and Urban Design, the jury complimented the design team's sensitive and respectful approach.

Although each house at Jackson Meadow is one of a kind, the developer's requirements for profitability mandated a certain level of standardization too. One of the rules Salmela established for himself: No home can be wider than 24 feet. That accomplishes two things. First, it fills the houses with natural light, a Salmela trademark. Second, it controls the scale of the houses, which all have a 12/12 roof pitch that recalls the historic houses nearby. Were he to make the houses anywhere from 32 to 36 feet wide, Salmela says, their roofs would make them wildly out of scale. “That's the problem with suburban houses,” he fires.

Salmela also criticizes the way many suburban houses have garages jammed up against them. “The builders realize there's a scale problem, so they make bay windows and projected entries. They're trying to correct the scale in a superficial way.” At Jackson Meadow, he separates the houses from the outbuildings, which creates spaces between them and lets light bounce off the outbuildings onto the north side of the houses. “These ideas are so elementary that nobody talks about them,” he says. “But it is so important.”

While Salmela continues at Jackson Meadow to invent new iterations of early Minnesota house types, this year he also completed an all-modern house for contractor Kevin Streeter. At first glance, Streeter's house appears to be a black, concrete-block wall supporting two large metallic boxes on top. A closer look reveals that the wall encloses a garage, which abuts a glassy pavilion containing living and dining areas, a kitchen, and a small office. Inside, the polished concrete floor is a foil to wood window frames and beams overhead. The symmetry of the interior layout demanded two stairs flanked by screen walls made of narrow slats and ascending in opposite directions to reach the two boxes, each of which contains a bedroom and bath.

At the Streeter Residence, the references to Scandinavian tradition are subtle, save for the ubiquitous sauna. Instead, this house celebrates spatial organization, materiality, and light—particularly the light that filters through the slatted screens covering each end of the bedroom boxes.

After visiting a half-dozen of these houses, eventually one wonders what gives David Salmela the freedom to range so far in so many directions? Does it have anything to do with his upbringing in the profession—a benefit, perhaps, of his lack of indoctrination at a school of architecture? “That's probably very true,” he allows. “I don't have any allegiance to anybody. And I kind of get a kick out of it, because I'm critical of the critics. I guess the critics might say I'm out of tune, but it doesn't make a big difference to me. I have to satisfy the needs of my client and also satisfy my own intuition about what architecture is.”

No question, David Salmela is his own man. His is not a black-and-white world, but one that's enriched with infinite shades of gray. And while he acknowledges that buildings of great cultural importance might demand a strong, unrelenting architectural statement, he also insists that if he has a client with a little piece of land hidden in the woods, it isn't a violation of the Constitution to give them what they want.

“You find in this profession that we have things pounded in our heads that you can't do this and you can't do that,” Salmela pronounces. “It isn't always so.”

Vernon Mays is the editor of Inform magazine and Curator of Architecture + Design at the Virginia Center for Architecture in Richmond.