Page 4 - PROOF!v4

Cheney Junior High School (1979), designed by Brooks Hensely Creager, was built around a “shopping mall” concept, with clustered classrooms and a variety of view spaces and activities along its length. As is typical of modern design, the school was ahead of its time in anticipating the construction methods and materials necessary for energy conservation. Photo courtesy of Joe Hensely.
Joe Hensley,
Royal McClure,
McClure & Adkison’s Studio Apartments (1949) was a project brought to the
rm by their young designer-draftsman Bruce Walker, who was just a year out of college. And it was none other than Ken Brooks who, with his wife Edna, rented one of the apartments while
their own home was being built. Photo courtesy of ALSC Architects.
One of the major in uences on the development of Modernism – also known as the International Style
– Walter Gropius believed that architecture should be tethered more closely both to social needs (namely, affordable housing) and to the latest industrial techniques and construction materials Modernism relied on. While Gropius’s in uence as an architect
is undeniable, it’s his impact as an educator that is truly staggering: Philip Johnson, Eliot Noyes, and I. M. Pei were students of his – as were Royal McClure, Bill Trogdon, and Bruce Walker. Gropius is shown in front of his design for the Chicago Tribune building (circa 1934). Photo courtesy of AP.
Covenant United Methodist Church, Spokane, 1981, designed by Moritz Kundig in association with Tan Brookie Kundig. Photo by Chad Ramsey.
Walter Gropius
The Form-Givers
Architect recently retired, lives in a 1948 home designed by Royal McClure. It’s one of the earlier examples of Modern architecture in Spokane. “What people don’t realize,” says Hensley as he points out details that go unnoticed by the untrained eye, “is that there are lots of good architects. But the design architect is maybe two percent of the total. They’re the ones who can create and visualize – who can conceptualize – how a building needs to come together. It’s not necessarily that they’re better; it’s that they’re exceedingly rare.”
“There aren’t too many of those we call the ‘form-givers,’” agrees Don Trail, who, at 76, still practices architecture in a small basement of ce on Wall Street in downtown Spokane. It’s a term, he explains, that has been used to describe the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright, who forever changed the way Americans think about residential design.
In Spokane in 1955, there were ve of these design architects – form-givers, really – trying to make a go of it.
who grew up in Seattle, met Tom Adkison when the two were undergrads at the University of Washington. Upon graduation, McClure was accepted to join Wright’s architecture school at Taliesin, but chose instead to continue his studies under at Harvard. McClure and Adkison opened a practice together in Spokane, Tom’s hometown, in 1948.
Bruce Walker, another UW alum, worked for McClure and Adkison before being accepted to Gropius’s program at Harvard. One semester behind him was Bill Trogdon; as students, both he and Walker worked at The Architects Collaborative in Cambridge. Walker opened a practice in Spokane in 1952, and Trogdon joined
Naramore, Bain, Brady & Johanson in Seattle (now NBBJ).
Ken Brooks had spent more than a year in New York at Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM), then volunteered in the Town Planning of ces in Stockholm and Goteberg before earning a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Illinois. On a train trip to Seattle, Brooks stopped overnight in Spokane and liked what he saw. He opened a practice here in 1951.
And Moritz Kundig? He was the sixth. “From the standpoint of pure design, of setting the tone for architecture in Spokane, those are your guys,” says Ron Sims, the ‘S,’ now retired, in the architecture rm ALSC. “They’re in a class all their own.”