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, 1908, 1893, 1890, 1870
"In 1890, the twenty-year-old son of a Syracuse, New York building contractor set out for Chicago to work in the drafting room of Adler and Sullivan, and thus it was that Irving Gill took his first step westward, one which led him a little over two years later to San Diego, where he was to develop one of the few wholly original styles of architecture in the United States.
"He had never met Sullivan, nor even written to him, but he was quite aware of his work, just as years later he was acquainted with the avant garde architecture of his contemporaries here and in Europe. Like dozens of young men with an independent way of thinking, he looked upon Sullivan's office as the only true school of architecture.
"Gill had nothing to offer in the way of formal architectural training, indeed his education stopped with high school. The closest he had come to official architecture was a brief period in one of the offices in Syracuse. This may have prejudiced Sullivan in his favor, as Sullivan looked upon schooling as a mere facility for dipping in and out of books.
"Gill had other virtues to recommend him besides his innocence of architecural styles. Poetic and mystical by nature, he had a sensitivity to form, an understanding of how a building is put together, and a passion for simplifying. He firmly believed in the application of democracy to architecture. In addition, he was receptive to the faiths of a great teacher.
"Sullivan described his relationship to his young draftsmen in a letter to Claude Bragdon, "I supply the yeast, so to speak, and allow the ferment to work in them."
"It was the dawn of the age of steel, and Chicago had begun to think in terms of expressed structure rather than literary architectural styles. With engineer and contractor pointing the way, Sullivan anticipated the others of his professsion by integrating steel into architecture. But the lesson of steel offered by Chicago and Sullivan profited Gill only indirectly for the vertical line had no application in the town of San Diego where he did most of his work. His highest building was the 1908 five-story Wilson Acton Hotel. From Sullivan he had learned to acknowledge and respect his material, whatever it was.
"Of far greater value to him was Sullivan's preaching of freedom from Rome and the Renaissance. Sullivan turned the faces of yound men away from Europe and bade them to look to Africa, a land of the serene wall, of earth forms, of decorative details.
"Sullivan's office was a preparation, for defeat as well as success. The inevitable growth of modern architecture did not spare it from periods of eclipse. At the Columbia Exposition in Chicago Sullivan's Transportation Building was the only one that heralded the future, the others were designed in neo-classical style set by the architectural committee.
"The draftsman working on the plans for the Transportation Building was Frank Lloyd Wright, who was two years older than Gill. When Wright's son, Lloyd, was twenty years old, he went to work in Gill's drafting room.
"Before the exposition opened, Gill's health made it necessary for him to seek a warmer climate. But his two years with Sullivan had armored him with faith in his own thinking and enriched him with what Sullivan called "the luminous idea of simplicity." He had grasped well the organic aspects of architecture and regarded a building as a unified whole rather than a series of unrelated strands.
"San Diego was well known in the East, after the Santa Fe Railway had laid tracks into the town in 1885, the population had doubled within a few years. Then the bubble burst, and by the time Gill arrived in 1893, San Diego was feeling the depression of the mid-nineties. Most of the newcomers had packed up and left; the population was again around 17,000.
"He found the country unspoiled and unself-conscious. "The West," he wrote in The Craftsman, "has an opportunity unparalled in the history of the world, for it is the newest white page turned for registration." It awakened all his sensibilities. "In California we have the great wide plains, arched blue skies that are fresh chapters yet unwritten. We have noble mountains, lovely little hills and canyons waiting to hold the record of this generation's history, ideals, imagination, sense of romance and honesty."
"He opened hunself fully to all the things around him, such as the adobe earth forms that gradually began to appear in his own structures; the U-shaped plan of Ramona's Marriage Place, embracing a garden and closed at the end by a high wall. He called the single-wall redwood house, "lovable little camp houses . . . . as natural a part of the foothills and canyons as the tawny mushroom or the gray stone." He described the mission as "a most expressive medium of retaining tradition, history, and romance, with their long, low lines, graceful arcades, tile roofs, bell towers, arched doorways, and walled gardens."