Spokane and its neighborhoods contain a patchwork of architectural styles that give them a distinct identity and illustrate the changes throughout the city's history. Spokane has a rich architectural history for a western city of its size and much of it is a product of its circumstances at the turn of the 20th century when as a rapidly growing city, the Great Fire of 1889 destroyed 32 blocks of the city center which was quickly rebuilt in a more grand fashion by a community flush with money coming from regional mining districts. Many of the architects that found work in the city and building on the blank slate of the downtown commercial district became highly esteemed architects such as Kirtland Cutter, who has been credited with giving the city a distinctive character. In particular, the city has a high concentration of Romanesque Revival style institutional and commercial buildings and American Craftsman bungalow residences. The architecture of Spokane gained national recognition in industry publications in the early 20th century.
In the second half of the 20th century, Spokane again became noticed for its architecture, this time by a new cadre of architects in the modern architecture movement, which flourished in the city. During this period which lasted from 1948 to the mid-1970s, prolific architects in the city such as Warren C. Heylman gave Spokane a great breadth of mid-century architecture. The modernists in Spokane gave the city a new look and were instrumental in the developments, design, and legacy of the Expo '74 World's Fair in what is now Riverfront Park. The city's landscape architecture and park system was strongly influenced by the Olmsted Brothers, who designed a comprehensive plan for Spokane's park system in 1908 and was implemented almost in its entirety with a $1 million ($ in dollars) bond issue in 1910. Manito Park, which was the city's primary community park until 1974, is noteworthy for having a European style formal garden with input from the Olmsted Brothers and a Japanese Garden designed by Nagao Sakurai.
Background
Spokane and its neighborhoods contain a patchwork of architectural styles that give them a distinct identity and illustrate the changes throughout the city's history. Spokane has a rich architectural history for a western city of its size and much of it is a product of its circumstances at the turn of the 20th century. As a rapidly growing city when Great Fire of 1889 destroyed 32 blocks of the city center, Spokane, flush with money coming from regional mines, experienced a building boom on the blank canvas that was the downtown commercial district by now-esteemed architects such as Herman Preusse, Kirtland Cutter, and John K. Dow, who found much work in the city. Much of the buildings built in the years following the Great Fire of 1889 were built of more fire resistant materials such brick, stone, and terra cotta and on a bigger scale and in a more ostentatious fashion than the wooden buildings of a western frontier town that preceded them. Within a year, Spokane had built 100 new buildings. As the city continued to build, it was described as "the best built modern city on the continent" in a 1908 issue of The Western Architect, where the article's author went on to praise the city's architecture as distinctive, unique, and beautiful and in harmony with its setting. After a little more than a decade of work from Spokane's early architects, the city was profiled again in another publication, The Architect and Engineer, where the author muses as to why some larger cities are unable to match Spokane in its architectural footprint.
Architectural styles
Most of Spokane's largest buildings and landmarks are in the downtown commercial district, where many architecturally significant structures were built after the Great Fire of 1889. Many notable Spokane buildings are done in the Romanesque Revival style that was popular for institutional buildings at the turn of the 20th century. Prominent examples of this style include the Great Northern clock tower, Review Building, Cathedral of Our Lady of Lourdes, Peyton Building, The Carlyle, First Congregational Church, and Washington Water Power Post Street substation.
Other well-represented architectural styles include Art Deco (Spokane City Hall, Paulsen Medical and Dental Building, Fox Theater, John R. Rogers High School, City Ramp Garage), Renaissance Revival (Davenport Hotel, Steam Plant Square, Thomas S. Foley Courthouse, Legion Building, San Marco), Neoclassical (Masonic Center, Hutton Building, Bing Crosby Theater), Chicago School (U.S. Bank Building, Liberty Building, Old City Hall) and Modernist (The Parkade, Ridpath Hotel, Bank of America Financial Center). The tallest building in the city, at , is the Bank of America Financial Center. Also of note is the French Renaissance Spokane County Courthouse in West Central (the building on the seal of Spokane County), the English Gothic Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Rockwood, the mimetic literalist Benewah Milk Bottles in Riverside and Garland, Tudor and Collegiate Gothic Mount Saint Michael in Hillyard, and the Cambern Dutch Shop Windmill in South Perry.
Religious institutions
The Spokane area has a great number of architecturally significant religious institutions, cathedrals, and churches done in a variety of styles as different denominations sometimes have unique church architectural traditions. The most significant structures are likely the Romanesque Revival Cathedral of Our Lady of Lourdes designed in various stages by a combination of the firms Preusse & Zittel and Julian & Williams. and the English Gothic style Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist designed by Harold Whitehouse. The Cathedral of Our Lady Lourdes concept design is credited to Preusse & Zittel before construction began in 1902 and follows a cruciform plan with the apse on the south end and two 125-foot bell towers flanking the narthex entry on the north side with the nave, transept and aisles featuring ribbed vaults. The cathedral was dedicated in 1907 with Julian & Williams completing the project. The beginning of the story for the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist begins in 1924, not long after newly arrived bishop, Edward Makin Cross came to town and hatched a plan to put a cathedral on the South Hill to succeed the All Saints Cathedral downtown, and hired church congregant, Harold C. Whitehouse to design it. Touring Europe for design inspiration, he eventually settled on using the English Gothic style with some French influences. The first stage of construction, the nave leading to the high altar was completed in late 1929, allowing for the first mass to be held, ten days before the 1929 stock market crash which led to a halt in construction for almost two decades. Construction resumed in 1948, and the chancel, sanctuary, transepts, and the Gothic tower were completed by 1954. The building is a solid masonry construction featuring a sandstone exterior quarried near Tacoma and sandstone interior from Idaho with some Indiana limestone; the building contains no structural wood or steel.
Other notable works include the Romanesque Revival St. Aloysius Church designed by Herman Preusse, the Gothic Revival Christ the Redeemer Church designed by John K. Dow, Westminster United Church of Christ also by Dow and Worthy Niver, Mount Saint Michael designed by Julius Zittel, First Presbyterian Church designed by Loren L. Rand, the Victorian New Community Church (formerly the Central United Methodist Church), Carpenter Gothic St. Aidan's Anglican Church, Pilgrim Baptist Church, and Manito United Methodist Church. The Manito United Methodist Church was designed by Kirtland Cutter and was modeled after the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi.
During the modernist movement in Spokane, some congregations sought not to build traditional churches, instead opting for something more unique. Two notable examples of this are the St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church by Funk, Murray, and Johnson and the Convent of the Holy Names by Walker & McGough. The St. Charles Catholic Church, which also features art by local artist Harold Balazs and French stained glass artist, Gabriel Loire, is known for its thick unsupported thin shell concrete roof that once was said to be the "largest unbalanced hyperbolic-paraboloid in the world." The Convent of the Holy Names received an A.I.A. honor in 1967 recognizing it as the finest architectural design in the nation for that year.
Educational institutions
Some of Spokane's high schools and educational institutions are historic buildings and notable for their architecture. The first and one of the most striking is the Collegiate Gothic style Lewis and Clark High School designed by Loren Rand. Built in 1910 and 1911, Rand is said to have worked passionately on the project and dedicated an unusual amount of time on research, especially for the architectural embellishments which featured a clock tower and an entryway evoking elements of a European Gothic cathedral. Lewis and Clark High School was listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) in 2001 following a renovation and expansion. Also listed on the NRHP following a 2009 renovation and expansion is John R. Rogers High School, built in 1932 and designed by John Dow in Art Deco, a rarely used style for a high school, it features zigzags, chevrons, and vegetation etched on its exterior walls. During the years when modernist architecture was flourishing in the city, two high schools were constructed, Shadle Park High School and Joel E. Ferris High School. Shadle Park High School was built in 1957 well after the modernist movement had caught on nationwide and started peaking in the 1950s; as the first school to be constructed in this new forward-thinking, modern style, the high school was highly anticipated to be a bold statement that the city had entered a new era. The architect chosen for the design of the school was Culler, Gale, Martell & Norrie, a local firm that specialized in modern institutional buildings that was affiliated with Perkins and Will out of Chicago. In high contrast to the past high schools made of brick and mortar with symmetric layouts, Shadle Park High School was clad in a concrete and multi-tiered, asymmetrical glass façade and incorporated glass curtain walls and a variety of construction media including composite materials and on the interior it featured an asymmetrical hallway layout with shiny aluminum door frames and stair railings. As a showcase for modern construction, architecture, and education, the $3 million cost of the building was reportedly the most expensive project undertaken in city history. Shadle Park completed a renovation and expansion in 2008, which preserved its appearance and modernized it for the future. The last high school to be built in the city was Ferris High School in 1963. The design is most notable for its open air campus, with buildings connected via breezeways, a concept that was popular in California at the time but was highly unusual for the area and a problematic choice given Spokane's harsh winters. The high school was renovated in 2013 by NAC Architecture, tearing down all but the original Moritz Kundig designed auditorium and a gym that was added in 2007 to create a single wheel-and-spoke looking structure linking the existing buildings with classroom "wings" surrounded by a central mall.
Residential
Single family homes