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, 1907, 1904. 1893, 1890, 1870
"In 1908 Gill built numerous structures of concrete and hollow tile, many without projections of any kind. Especially notable was the five-story Wilson Acton Hotel in La Jolla; the recessed balconies were the only ornament on the facade. Even these were omitted on the rear elevation. The Darst house and flats, and the Waterman house used only a 2-inch projection above 4 doors and windows. An interest in abstract design was seen in the Darst flats.
"Gill liked unglazed openings in roofs. He used them in 1909, in the arcades and the sleeping porch at Gilman Hall, Bishop's School and in the shower rooms of the 1914 Scripps Community House. He even used a (p. 222) large opening for the jail in Oceanside, but it was later roofed over.
"Nineteen eight was a decisive year for Gill, two more buildings designed that year marked the beginning of his mature style. They were the Holly Sefton Memorial Hospital for Children, San Diego, and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, La Jolla. Both were utilitarian, with cost a major consideration. This was Gill's opportunity to experiment in concrete monolithic construction, to strip away ornament and projections and to flatten the roof.
"Concrete was a material to which Gill brought a great sympathy, he liked its plasticity, its durability, and its fitness for the "wholly sanitary house." Since the seventies, reinforced concrete had been employed in small buildings on the West Coast, and in 1889 it was used in the Stanford Museum in Palo Alto.
"Maybeck had tried out reinforced concrete in 1907 in his Lawson house and Maurer studio in Berkeley, and then had returned to wood construction. Gill not only brought architectural conviction to the material but developed a body of detailing which made it accessible for general use.
"He fashioned the steel parts to construct these buildings himself: the steel casings for doors and windows; the bull nose, a metal section that prevents corners from chipping; the steel lath. Later, fortunes were made in steel trim, but for years Gill went to the sheet metal shops to have the material broken for him from his own details. He was an inventor out of necessity. He patented nothing.