Gangnes, Arnold G.

Born to Norwegian immigrant parents on May 17, 1918 in Port Alice, British Columbia, Arnold Gordon Gangnes received his formal education in architecture from the University of Washington, graduating in 1942. During school he served as an assistant instructor and worked as a draftsman in a variety of Seattle architectural firms. Upon graduation from 1942-1944, he served in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers achieving the rank of 2nd Lieutenant. After the war, Gangnes entered graduate school, and received his master degree in architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1946.

After working in several offices on the east coast including Anderson & Beckwith, Gangnes returned to the Pacific Northwest and opened an office with a Mr. Draper in 1947. By the next year, he had his own independent practice which continued into the late 1960s.

Involved in a variety of civic and social affairs, Gangnes served on the Seattle Planning Commission from 1946-1950, and was an active member of the Seattle chapter of the AIA serving as its treasurer from 1953-1954 and on its Board of Directors from 1956-1959. He was most involved, however, in the Association for Retarded Children serving in various positions at the local, state and national levels. This included serving on the State Board of Directors from 1952–1955. In 1954, Gangnes began a long time chairmanship of the Architectural Planning Committee of the National Association for Retarded Children, serving until 1969. President Gerald Ford appointed Gangnes to the U.S. President's committee on Mental Retardation in the 1970s.

Gangnes’s early work was mostly residential and included contemporary single-family homes in the emerging Northwest Regional style. Many of his designs were widely published and several received awards. The Michael Klapash House (1948) in Weed, California received national attention when it was given a 1948 Citation Award from Progressive Architecture magazine in 1948. Later in 1954 it won a National AIA Honor Award. Gangnes’s own home in West Seattle also received a lot of press, where it was called representative of “the new trend in design, planning and construction.”

In the late 1950s Gangnes began designing larger-scale, non-residential and institutional projects. Notable projects include the Cherry Street Clinic (1958), a regional office building for the Waterfront Employers of Washington; a storage building for Abbey Rents (1960); the pro shop at Inglewood Golf Course (1961); Valu-Mart Store (1967) in Richland; an expansion of the Seattle Times Building (1967); and the Pacific Maritime Association Building (1959) in Seattle.

Around 1960, Gangnes developed the master campus plan for Western State Hospital in Steilacoom. The commission was a direct result of his long-time commitment to specialized design for the handicapped. Gangnes considered his work in the field his most important and he continued in such ventures for the remainder of his career traveling to throughout the U.S. and Europe as a consultant and lecturer on the topic of specialized handicap design. His later work included three “Halfway Houses” for the Fircrest Hospital Campus in 1969. Gangnes passed away in Canada on May 19, 2003 at the age of 84.