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It was a time ripe for change. “A lot of these guys were coming back from the service,” recalls Trail. “The generation ahead of them here in Spokane, they had done very well for themselves, particularly with government contracts like the Naval Station at Farragut. There was an established order: Whitehouse and Price, George Rasque, Gus Pearson. Then here come these young guys with different schooling, different philosophies, different ideas. And you have to remember: the post-war boom was beginning, and Spokane was just starting to emerge from a dusty little two-story town.”
And then, something remarkable happened.
Washington Water Power Central Operating Facility
Exactly how and
new Central Operating Facility in 1956 is anyone’s guess. The two weren’t established partners – Brooks had his own practice and Walker and John McGough had formed Walker & McGough three years earlier. This was a joint venture, put together speci cally for the WWP project. And there were far more reputable rms in town.
“I don’t know how in the hell they got that job,” laughs Bill Trogdon. “Here are these two new guys, and Bruce isn’t even a licensed architect yet.” At Walker’s urging, Trogdon had moved to Spokane from Seattle for the WWP project. While Bill worked on design development, his wife, Dorothy – also a Harvard Graduate School of Design alum – joined Walker McGough, which, like Brooks’s rm, continued to operate independently.
“That was the beginning,” says Hensley. “That’s when everything came together.”
Trail, who worked for Brooks for 25 years, remembers seeing a set of working drawings for the original project while Brooks’s rm was working on an addition in 1974. “The interesting thing,” he says, “is that in the title block on those drawings are the initials of practically every rm in town. Because when Brooks and Walker got that job, they had to tool up. They had to get people in there to draft for them.”
One of those people was Moritz Kundig, who found himself in the same sort of situation that prompted his move from Salt Lake City. At Whitehouse, Price, DeNeff & Deeble, he was working on the drawings for Manito Presbyterian Church on 29th Avenue – another conventional church design. “It was sort of painful,” he says. “It was really not what I was trained for, and not what I wanted to do.” Working nights at his kitchen table,
Ken Brooks
Bruce Walker
were awarded the contract to design Washington Water Power’s
WWP
The Convent of the Holy Names (1967) earned a number of high-pro le awards for Walker & McGough, including
an AIA National Honor Award, an Award of Merit from the National Catholic Education Association, and
a First Honor Award from Progressive Architecture. Photo courtesy of Integrus Architecture.
The Washington Water Power
Central Operating Facility (currently
the headquarters of Avista Corp.)
is arguably the nexus of Modern architecture in Spokane. There are earlier examples, of course, but nothing that matches its scale – and nothing that, at that point in time, did more to burnish the reputations of the young architects behind its design. Completed in 1959, the project won a National
First Honor Award from the AIA. Photo courtesy of the Joel E. Ferris Research Library.
A rendering of Moritz Kundig’s proposed Cowboy Hall of Fame and Museum (1957). Kundig’s entry was awarded fourth place in the national design competition.
The Ken Brooks residence (1956) is as unassuming as it gets: a 50-foot square with a 400-SF courtyard (shown) cut out of the middle – a house that looks in on itself. The home was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004. Photo courtesy of Don Trail.