Articles by Karen Valenzuela

The sixty-mile-long glacial Methow Valley, in the northern Cascades of Washington state, is a special landscape, with a climate that ranges from hot, fire-prone summers to winters with heavy snow pack. It’s a true four-season landscape—the landscape I grew up in. Our clients wanted to build a second home here that would be a kind of adventure home for them and their kids. They are great parents and always undertaking adventures as a mindful, deliberate way of developing memories as a family.

This house establishes an uninterrupted ̈inside-outside ̈ relationship; a sequence of layers between the open and the intermediary. Frontal boundaries are blurred by sheets of glass and vegetation, framed by two horizontal planes, floor and ceiling, where the full and the void are related via a series of matter, water, vegetation and sky. Lateral boundaries establish the ̈full-void ̈ relationship via a series of solid materials that close transversal views.

Located on a sloping mountain ridge at the foot of the Yatsugatake Mountains, this house was designed on a piece of land that offers spectacular views that are rarely known. 

Located on a sloping mountain ridge at the foot of the Yatsugatake Mountains, this house was designed on a piece of land that offers spectacular views that are rarely known. 

The BMX Supercross Track Legacy Project from the 2015 Toronto Pan Am Games was designed and constructed to the exacting standards of the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) certification board. It has been certified by this group and as such is the only track in Canada to be recognized.

Hyunam (A Black Cottage) – The House That Remains Still In The Nature. Once I designed a small house named Moheon and a beautiful garden named Sayawon in Daegu, Korea for a person who wanted to enjoy a new life in a new space.