Canyon House
Juliaetta, United States
A retreat from 2003 for a professor of veterinary physiology and an attorney: two buildings on forty acres above the Clearwater River canyon in Idaho, a studio house riding a finger ridge three hundred feet over the water and a bunkhouse tucked into a ravine nearby. The house was placed where the fish watching is best, marking a run where steelhead hold along the river's south bank.
The exposed structure in the picture is the idea itself: a metal-clad box slipped inside a Douglas fir frame that braces against the canyon winds, chosen because steel would have cost double. The bare frame earns its keep carrying sun shades, window-washing scaffold and the bridge out toward the bunkhouse, and the glazing grows as the house steps downhill, so from the ridge it seems about to take off. Built for under a hundred US dollars a square foot, it won an AIA Seattle Honor Award in 2004.
Paul Hirzel
An architect in Pullman, Washington, who taught architecture at Washington State University from 1989 to 2022 and ran a one-person practice alongside it. In 2026 the Inland Northwest Architectural Foundation gave him a lifetime achievement award.
Architecture Paul Hirzel. Photography Art Grice. Seen via @dereave_architecture.
The picture comes from this post on Instagram.
Researched August 2026. I credit each piece as carefully as I can; if you know more about this one, message me on Instagram.