Bainbridge Island Review, November 13, 2015

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REVIEW BAINBRIDGE ISLAND

Friday, November 13, 2015 | Vol. 90, No. 46 | WWW.BAINBRIDGEREVIEW.COM | 75¢

INSIDE: Meet the new coach, A15

FROM TRUST TO TRAGEDY

Time to thank the Academy

BHS teacher’s relationship with student leaves lives in tatters BY BRIAN KELLY

T

Image courtesy of Cutler-Anderson Architects

Jim Cutler’s hand-drawn site plan for the Gunnelson Cabin, a small home he designed in northern Wisconsin, will be displayed in the National Academy Museum in New York City.

Bainbridge architect receives an unexpected award and shares a valuable lesson in parenthood BY JESSICA SHELTON Bainbridge Island Review

If you haven’t heard about the National Academy, it’s OK — neither had Jim Cutler, the venerable island architect who was inducted into it last month. “I got an email from a radio talk show guy in North Carolina that I met once,” Cutler said. “And it was, ‘Congratulations on your election to the National Academy.’ “At first I thought I kind of won Publishers Clearing House,” he said, laughing. “I had no idea. I don’t follow things all that well.” But with his curiosity piqued, Cutler inquired further. “What is that?” he wrote back. Surprised, the radio host told Cutler he better contact the Academy. An email, a phone call — and Cutler heard nothing. Until he did. They wanted to know if he was coming to the reception. He asked around the office and found a brochure sitting under a pile. And suddenly he was crying. Cutler has won many awards in the 33 years since he built his design firm, Cutler-Anderson Architects, out of an old boat hall adjacent to Pegasus Coffee. He’s received six national AIAs — “the Academy Award of Architecture” he calls them; there are just 12 recipients every year — for projects as varied as

Photo by Plakke Media

Jim Cutler (right) sits with his wife, Beth Wheeler, and fellow 2015 National Academician Nick Cave at the induction ceremony on Oct. 27. a suburban library, a 1,350-square-foot cabin and a tercentenary memorial. Then last year, his remodel of the Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal Building in Portland, his first high rise, was named the best tall building in the Western Hemisphere. It was a big deal to a man who has been typecast for designing “great little finely crafted houses.” But for Cutler, the election to the National Academy was on a different plane entirely. He hadn’t done anything

to solicit it; he hadn’t submitted his work for consideration, as is the practice with juried competitions. Somebody had simply noticed and admired his work from afar. As he flipped through the brochure, Cutler was blown away by the names of all the greats whose ranks he’d be joining. John Singer Sargent. Winslow Homer. I.M. Pei. Frank Gehry. Two thousand of TURN TO ARCHITECT | A14

Bainbridge Island Review

here was a knock at the door, and within 10 minutes, the fragments of the shattered life of Jessica Fuchs would spill out of her modest mobile home in the trailer park near Bainbridge Island City Hall and empty into her driveway. The door opened. Fuchs was met with the stares of two detectives from the Bainbridge Island Police Department. Another officer hovered outside near a window at the side of her home, watching to make sure Fuchs didn’t try to escape out the back door. Fuchs wouldn’t talk, not without her lawyer, her husband said, as he held their toddler daughter. The police weren’t there to talk. She was quickly searched and Detective Aimee LaClaire took the school teacher’s hands and put them in handcuffs. Why? Fuchs asked. A detective told her she already knew. Out of the house and across the driveway they went. Her husband demanded the same answer, but when the husband was handed the arrest warrant, he shouted that he didn’t understand how police could arrest his wife. A detective told him that the evidence didn’t lie, and said, “Just because you hit ‘delete’ doesn’t mean the information goes away forever.” Fuchs was ushered to a patrol car and placed inside as her husband continued to yell while trying to call someone on his cell phone. Police had promised that his daughter could say goodbye, he shouted. A detective told him police weren’t going to let him “cause a scene and scream in the neighborhood.” And like that, they left.

Directly to jail Four days later, wearing orange flip flops and dressed in a green jail uniform with “KCSO JAIL” on the back of her shirt, Fuchs was led handcuffed into the courtroom of Superior Court Judge William Houser. She was seated next to, and then handcuffed to, a group of 11 other waiting defendants in the courtroom’s jury box. The allegations unfolded before a packed courtroom, lined at the back with news crews from Seattle television stations, and with the rows of wooden benches peppered with reporters TURN TO TRAGEDY | A17


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