1902 McCoy 1960

Esther McCoy Irving Gill 1870-1936 Five California Architects, 1960, Reprinted in Marvin Rand Irving J. Gill: Architect 1870-1936, Gibbs Smith, Publisher: Salt Lake City, UT, Design, Ahde Lahti; Photographs, Marvin Rand, 2006, 238 pp., pp. 219-227, 2006a, 1916, 1908, 1902, 1895, 1893, 1890, 1870

     "Gill's style grew out of what he found in Southern California. He added elements that were missing, and produced an architecture as uninsistent as the (p. 220) change of the seasons. His architecture was integrated into the past, the climate and the way of life so that it blended into the scene as do the houses in a Cotwold village and in Tuscany. The fact that San Diego has something approaching a unity of style is due entirely to Gill, whose work was extensive and widely copied by contractors and various draftsmen who had been through his office.

     "It was an architecture of modesty and repitition. The elements he repeated were the ones which his perceptive eye recognized as good: they had been tried and tried again until they had reached the ideal of appropriateness. Gill was a conservator of the past, building always for the present, in new materials, with new methods evolved through arduous trial and error.

     "He was a romanticist whom time has shown to be a realist. His references to the missions in his work indicated a romantic regard for the past-rather than a sentimental attempt to recapture it. His expressions in light, color and the integration of house and garden were certainly romantic considerations.

     "The voice of the romantic poet was evident in his words: "We should build our house simple, plain and substantial as a boulder, then leave the ornamentation of it to Nature, who will tone it with lichens, chisel it with storms, make it more gracious and friendly with vines and flower shadows as she does the stone in the meadow."-(from The Craftman, May 1916)

     "However, Gill left nothing to chance. He put to work certain principles of which he had a profound knowledge: the principle of the stone, which he translated into concrete; the principle of naturalness, which he used in his coordination of house and garden by pergolas, courts, patios, and porches. He understood shadows and shadings, and they enhanced his walls, but when the vines are stripped away and the trees which cast shadows are uprooted, his sensitive forms remain.

     "Gill's first building in San Diego, the Normal School, 1895, gave little hint of his later creativity. Now demolished, it revealed only that he and the chairman of the board liked columns. But Gill never again used Ionic capitals. His later columns were strong and modest, with small bands and flat caps.

     "Other early works were also highly derivative in style. His Pickwick Theater, 1904, looked as if he had laid tracing paper over Sullivan's Transportation Building and squeezed it into a 40-foot front. A fountain in the San Diego Plaza was reminiscent of the Coragic Monument of Lysicrates. But among Gill's sketches was another study for the Plaza fountain in a style very much his own. The client for both fountain and theater was Louis Wilde for whom Gill, in 1919, planned a duplex in Coronado. His nephew,  Louis J. Gill, later recalled tht Wilde had said, "You build it and then I'll tell you where I want the doors and windows." Gill finally resigned the job. He walked out on one other occasion, when in 1909, the congregation of the Christian Science Church, San Diego, decided to add a dome to his design.

     "The First Methodist Church, 1906, Gill's only attempt at Gothic architecture, was uninspired. Althogh it contained examples of good detailing, he was not at home in revival styles. As Louis Gill put it, "He didn't know one style from another," and this perhaps was his good fortune.

     "In 1898, Gill entered into a partnership with W.S. Hebbard. Out of their office came several amiable brick and half-timbered houses for San Diego and Coronado, all of them remarkable for their simple and direct use of redwood for interiors. In the McKenzie house of 1898, however, the walls were panelled with cherry wood shipped from Japan . . .

     "Gill had a great deal to do with winning clients for the firm, for he had a broad, handsome Irish face-his mother had been born in Ireland-and a sincere and straightforward way of speaking. His passion for dancing was perhaps a reaction to his strict Quaker upbringing; he often went to dances at the Coronado Hotel, where many easterners came to spend the winter months. There he met the Olmsted brothers, Frederick Law, Jr. and Albert, and their sister Marion, the sons and daughter of Frederick Law Olmstead, the famous park planner. Through the Olmsteds he was introduced to the wealthy and philanthropic Mason sisters, supporters of Tuskeegee Institute. As a result of the meeting, in 1902, Gill was commissioned to design a house for them, almost a mansion in Newport, Rhode Island.

     "The house was a sensation in Newport, for thousands of feet of redwood were shipped to Newport to be used for the interiors. The mission influence was evident in the stucco walls, arches and red tile roof, but the scale was eastern and fashionable.

     "Gill was more successful with two other Rhode Island houses he designed the same year, the Birckhead house in Portsmouth and the Albert Olmsted house in Newport. In both he combined indigenous shingle work with California redwood interiors.

     "He took other elements to the East such as the corner window, which he had first used in 1898 in the McKenzie house in Coronado. In several of his eastern houses, he designed windows that dropped into a parapet wall, some of which still operate today.

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 Kelyn Roberts 2017