Kansas City’s Homegrown Mid-Century Modern Innovators

While Kansas City has many examples of midcentury modern architecture, few know that KC was home to multiple designers who not only embraced the MCM aesthetic, but also practiced it and elevated it. A few of them became icons of the movement with architecture that survives to this day. Thanks to forward-thinking clients who engaged this dynamic, modernism flourished throughout the Kansas City area.

Bob Wendt

Bob Wendt was born in Herington, Kansas, in 1924, and after his discharge from the Army in 1946, he earned a degree in architectural engineering. He worked as a construction foreman and was hired by a local architect as a contractor and builder, but Wendt discovered his passion for designing, drafting, and building homes based on his own vision, sparking a decision that would drive a career that flourished throughout the 1960s.

Wendt adamantly refused to build tract or spec homes, and his motto was “Custom Built Homes for Owners.” He focused on creating unique, one-of-a-kind homes designed around the needs and personalities of their owners, with most of his work concentrated in Prairie Village and Mission Hills.

Two of his homes, built in Prairie Village in 1961, were featured in various magazines and publications of the time, and another there features a boomerang shape stretching across a corner lot. Like much of his work, they showcase Wendt’s innovative use of stone aggregate slabs to create dramatic visual impact.

They also feature large expanses of glass and open floor plans, while utilizing more traditional elements, including gables that provide shade in the summer and shed snow in the winter. Another characteristic example is a home in Mission Hills, with fixed louvered sections within large-scale fixed windows, which allow abundant natural light and natural ventilation. A double-gabled roof shelters the large public spaces, with bedrooms located on a lower floor, with a walkout basement that also floods the spaces with light.

Wendt’s work left an indelible mark on the Kansas City area, with homes that continue to stand as testaments to his innovative spirit and dedication to quality.

David Runnels

David Runnels played a crucial role in shaping modernist architecture in Kansas City. After graduating from the University of Illinois, he studied at the Cranbrook Academy of Arts in Michigan, where his classmates included future titans of mid-century modern design, including Charles and Ray Eames and Florence Knoll, under the direction of legendary architects Eliel and Eero Saarinen, for whom he later worked.

Runnels settled in Kansas City in 1941, accepting a position as head of the industrial design department at the Kansas City Art Institute and serving as director of planning with the Kansas City Planning Department until 1946. Then, he founded his own firm, which designed the Art School building for the Kansas City Art Institute, a building that still stands and remains in use, largely intact except for some minor alterations.

No elitist, Runnels spent equal time on both custom-built homes and designs for real estate developers. His best-known project in the spec house industry was the Revere Homes project, 14 homes in Prairie Village that drew praise for their low-cost construction and high-quality design. Featured in Life and House Beautiful magazines, the homes were praised as examples of affordable, yet comfortable housing.

Runnels also accepted private commissions, but his more accessible work, exemplified by the Revere Homes, is what has become a lasting legacy in Kansas City’s mid-century modern architectural landscape.

 

Bruce Goff

“The Man Who Made Wildly Imaginative, Gloriously Disobedient Buildings,” declared Bruce Goff’s obituary in the New York Times, and it was no exaggeration.

A native of Kansas, Goff was born in the small town of Alton in 1904, and over the course of a six-decade career that began at the age of 12 with an architectural apprenticeship in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he designed over 500 projects in the Great Plains, Midwest, and western United States. They include three houses in Kansas City that, thankfully, remain intact.

The radically geometric Nicol House, built in 1967, features an octagonal central room surrounded by octagonal bedrooms, triangular windows, and a hexagonal pool. Crown-shaped exterior walls are covered with pale green hexagonal tiles the color of a Neeco Wafer. The house is a fantasia of eccentricity.

A visionary, Goff embraced unconventional sculptural forms, eclectic and unconventional materials, and innovative spatial relationships to create innovative designs for modern living. Influenced by the organic design principles championed by Frank Lloyd Wright and Wright’s own mentor, Louis Sullivan, Goff created idiosyncratic but livable, single-family homes that challenged even the new mid-century modern aesthetic being widely spread through speculative developments that were, in comparison, relatively conservative.

Goff’s work, the scholar David G. De Long has written, “broadened levels of acceptance of the original and the untried,” no small feat given the time and society in which Goff worked.

KC’s Contribution to the Legacy of Mid-Century Modern Design

Mid-Century Modern thrived in Kansas City, flourishing in the many suburbs that sprung up in the late 50s and early 60s. It’s easy to assume it did so as part of a larger trend, but the area can proudly claim Wendt, Runnels, and Goff – among others – as pioneers who brought a regionally specific flair to their projects. Thankfully, many of these works still stand as a tribute to the enduring appeal of the design philosophy and the creativity nurtured in our own soil.

Ashley Kendrick is an enthusiastic MCM lover and an expert at guiding buyers to homes of the that era. Buying or selling, MCM or other home genre, schedule an appointment with Ashley today!