Saving the stories of a historic rooming house

Thinking back on his first visit to the ramshackle East Kong Yick Building, architect Rick Sundberg remembers thinking: "There's something kind of compelling about the building ... there's a lot of stories that can be told. Rather than gutting it, let's see how much we can save. That was our overriding goal."

Now preserved and renovated as the Wing Luke Asian Museum, the building helps tell its own story as a first home and foothold in a new country for many early 20th-century Asian immigrants. A highlight of the museum program will be its "historic immersion" tours, which will guide visitors through a preserved remnant of the old rooming house, re-created to give a feel for the stark living conditions for its former tenants, right down to the tiny communal kitchen adjoined by a cramped toilet.

For that historic portion of the building, Sundberg credits as his inspiration the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York. When he first heard of the place, Sundberg admits he found the notion kind of corny: "I'm just an old Swede," he joked in a recent interview. "We aren't very romantic people."

But his thinking changed after he visited New York and toured the Tenement Museum. "What I was impressed with was how people in my tour group were reacting. These people had tears in their eyes. It has this deep kind of personal resonance to folks."

That memory helped keep him focused on creating an evocative balance of old and new inside the building, while maintaining its simple exterior. "We wanted to be as light-handed as possible, so you couldn't see much of what we did ... We tried to be as historically accurate as we could, except for Gerry's entryway," he said, referring to a steel awning and bronze door handles he commissioned from sculptor Gerry Tsutakawa.

The challenging renovation pushed Sundberg out of his usual aesthetic comfort zone. "I am excited that it is kind of a complicated place. My normal pattern of design is to clarify ... this one is kind of messy. But we had to work with what was there."

His favorite part of the design is the open stairwell leading from the lobby up to the second-floor lightwells. "I ended up liking that because we got the light down and it worked. I also like the first-floor galleries because of their kind of wacky proportions. A brick bearing wall came down the center, and all we could do was cut a hole in it. I like the variety between the two [spaces]."

Sundberg sees a bright future for the new museum and hopes that once it opens, the unusual mission and programming — and the building itself — will strike a chord. "When visitors come to Seattle, they go to SAM, the Sculpture Park, with luck the Frye. I'm hoping if you are a curious person, you will also want to come to the Wing Luke."

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com