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Meanwhile, Kundig had entered a statewide competition for the design of a chapel at McNeil Island Penitentiary near Tacoma. This time, he was awarded rst prize. “That’s how I started my own of ce,” says Kundig, who promptly left McClure & Adkison. “It was my rst job.” After a couple of years working out of his home, Moritz was able to rent an of ce in downtown Spokane. He hired a secretary, then a draftsman, then another draftsman. And that’s when Theodore Pritchard, chairman of the Department of Art and Architecture at the University of Idaho, came calling, offering Kundig a position teaching fourth- and fth-year design.
“Here I was,” Kundig smiles. “I didn’t know a soul when I came here. Not one person. And somehow, things happened.”
Modernism and Its Discontents
Modern architecture was not without its critics, however. By the late 1960s, in fact, it had become almost sinister, according to John Abell, associate professor of architecture at WSU’s Interdisciplinary Design Institute. “At its extreme,” he explains, “Modernism is about expressing planes and volumes rst. It’s about abstract notions of physics.” The paradox of Modernism – with its open spaces and walls of glass – is that it had the tendency to separate people in beautiful, but hermetically sealed, buildings.
Moritz’s oldest son, who has reached a level of stardom in the architecture world few achieve, sees another problem: Modernism becoming what it aimed to dismantle. “At its root, it’s a social design movement,” he says. “It was a reaction to the pretentious, overdone, expensive architecture – the fake architecture – of previous generations. It was design stripped down to its raw, authentic nature; an attempt, socially, to say,
‘Wait a minute, we have to have an art form and a built form of the people.’ Well. It’s pretty interesting that Modernism is now almost more elite than anything that came before.”
In Moritz’s Unitarian Church, however, one can see hints of a push back. “He intuitively understood when it was appropriate to question Modernist rigor,” says Abell. “Look at that wall – concrete is no longer an abstraction.
Left to right: Spokane Psychotherapy Clinic,1979 (Tan Brookie Kundig); Moritz Kundig residence, Spokane, 1979; Critzer residence, Spokane,1972. Photos courtesy of Moritz Kundig.
Tom Kundig’s Chicken Point Cabin on Hayden Lake, Idaho (2003) features a six-ton steel and glass wall that can be pivoted open with very little effort by means of a hand-cranked wheel. Kundig, who initially didn’t want to pursue a career in architecture (“I was more interested in the hard sciences”), is a principal and owner at Olson Kundig Architects in Seattle. Photo courtesy of Olson Kundig Architects.
Tom Kundig,