Something Borrowed Frank Lloyd Wright’s Influence Gives Designers Head Start On Award-Winning Residence

Frank Lloyd Wright claimed he could shake his wrist and new designs would tumble from his sleeve onto the drafting table.

Most architects, though, aren’t so lucky.

They seek inspiration from a variety of muses … not to mention magazines, field trips and, occasionally, even “the master” himself.

When clients came to Gerry Copeland and Nancy McKennon with a piece of real estate fronting High Drive, the architects felt a responsibility, McKennon says, “to put something on the site in keeping with the quality of houses people expect along Spokane’s prestigious boulevards.”

Also important, says Copeland, was bridging the gap between turn-of-the-century lower South Hill and the more modern residences nearby.

“I thought of (Wright’s) Robie House in Chicago that I visited as an impressionable architecture student,” Copeland says. “It’s very urban and has great street appeal.”

Copeland and McKennon wrapped trademark Wright details - wide eaves, concrete-capped brick walls and tall, narrow windows - around a contemporary floor plan.

The result has generated more positive comments than anything else they’ve done.

Jurors in The Spokesman-Review’s 1995 Inland Northwest Home Awards contest were impressed, too, voting Copeland and McKennon a Second Honor Award in the category of new homes with more than 1,800 square feet.

“This house evokes Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie-style architecture with its blocky masses and horizontal sweep,” observed juror and Seattle home writer Fred Albert. “Although its ideas may not be totally original, it is a stunning composition, beautifully detailed.”

Wrote fellow juror and retired architecture professor David Scott, “At a time when the majority of houses have castlelike roofs with dormers both real and false, it’s refreshing to see a house with a roof that gives a sense of shelter.

“The visual message from the street,” Scott adds, “is that of living, with the automobile secondary.”

That’s because MeKennon and Copeland hid the home’s three-car garage with another Wright-inspired detail: a porte-cochere, or roof projecting over the driveway.

Inside, though, the house owes little to Wright, other than its Prairie-style light fixtures.

“It’s a very ‘90s plan,” says Copeland, “right down to the media center.”

“I’m surprised the house has been so popular,” McKennon admits, “because I thought people would say we copied, even though the inside is totally different” from Robie House.

“Actually,” says Copeland, “we do a lot of copyist stuff. But everyone does. Even Wright’s first designs had precedents.”

Meanwhile, Colville-based designers Dennis Sweeney and Patrick Gaughan bristle at the suggestion they would ever copy another architect’s work.

But it’s hard to miss the early California bungalow influence of brothers Henry and Charles Greene in the Liberty Lake home Sweeney and Gaughan submitted to the newspaper’s Home Awards contest.

“There’s no way I’d take credit for this style,” Sweeney admits. “I’ve studied Greene and Greene for so long that their work is thoroughly ingrained in what I do.

“I’m also familiar with Christopher Alexander’s ‘Pattern Language,’ and I’m not ashamed to rely on that, too. There is some consistency in good design, and you can trace it from one source to another.”

Sweeney and Gaughan leaned toward the bungalow style because their clients “wanted something that looked like it had some history to it,” Sweeney says.

Part of what gives the home a sense of history, Gaughan explains, is the use of natural, native materials like stone and wood shingles. “There’s no fakery going on.

“But we don’t copy,” he says, “we synthesize from a lot of different sources. It’s never just, ‘Oh, this works perfectly.”’

Gaughan says many designers today borrow details from historic styles, with varying degrees of success. The problem is not copying, but what people copy.

“It’s important to understand where a certain design comes from, and why it was done a certain way,” he warns. “Otherwise, it’s just pastiche - glue this on here and tack that on over there.”

Copeland and McKennon agree.

“A lot of people try for a historic look but don’t pull it off because they aren’t authentic enough,” says Copeland. “With Wright’s style, for instance, it’s not just giving a house a certain roofline. It’s doing the bricks correctly, the windows correctly, the fascia and soffits correctly - it’s all part of it.”

Borrowing ideas is nothing new. Renowned Spokane architect Kirtland Cutter “was the ultimate copyist,” Copeland says. “He was very good at it … and we’re pretty good, too.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 4 photos (2 color)