Paul Hayden Kirk and the Puget Sound School

Book excerpt: In the third quarter of the twentieth century, Paul Hayden Kirk and the group of architects whose work he inspired--all graduates of the University of Washington--created an architectural style of a quality unsurpassed by any other in the nation in its time. Their unique achievement lies in the design of small buildings--houses, medical clinics, churches, libraries. At the time most American buildings of that scale were built of wood, but for Kirk and his colleagues wood was elevated to be the defining feature and material of choice for interior and exterior surfaces and their always-exposed structures. They detailed the wood to express its own nature, either leaving it in its natural state or with a slight protective stain. Paul Hayden Kirk and the Puget Sound School is the first book to explore their work. It discusses forty key buildings in detail, describing and diagramming the features that unite and distinguish them, and illustrating them in more than one hundred color photographs, most created specifically for this book. It places the architecture of Kirk and his colleagues within the history of great American architecture.