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
"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 architectural 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 profession 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 young 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 Neoclassical 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 unparalleled 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 himself 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."
"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 repetition. The elements he repeated were the ones which his perceptive eye recognized as good: they had bee 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."-(fromThe Craftsman, 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 that 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. Although 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 paneled 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 Olmsted, the famous park planner. Through the Olmsteds he was introduced to the wealthy and philanthropic Mason sisters, supports of Tuskegee 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.
"After his success in the East, Gill returned to San Diego to find himself much sought after at home. In 1904 he designed a Christian Science Church, four residences and a theater; he also built a house for himself that year.
"He was still the young eclectic working mainly in brick and half-timbered style. In his own house, and in others he built, in 1905, he began to find his direction. But it was not until after 1906, when his partnership with Hebbard ended, that he was on sure ground.
"In the meantime his interiors had already developed in the direction of elimination and simplification typical of his mature work.
"The redwood was used in dimensions large enough to register the nature of the wood, often 12-inch boards. Moldings were 2 by 3/4-inch stock with sanded edges. Balustrades were made of square or rectangular sticking, a practice Gill continued up through the Dodge house of 1916. The only finish given the redwood was a sanding and hand polishing. He (p. 221) considered it a sacrilege to use oil, stain, or even wax on redwood. In the Christian Science Church he omitted moldings entirely, although they were added later "to give a finish touch." On the third floor of the Marston House, he tried out doors made of five pieces of redwood, a step in the direction of his slab doors of 1907. He used magnesite in bathrooms and kitchens, and designed and cast in brass the hardware for all his buildings.
"He was impatient with the infinite number of parts in a house; the wood frame seemed to him to be something hooked together, and he set himself to the business of simplifying structure, of eliminating, and making one piece do the work of ten, According to his nephew, "He was always trying to do something better. A window had 24 parts, and he designed one with four; then he found out the cost was the same. He looked for ways to apply plaster in his half-timbered houses to prevent it from shrinking away from the wood. He never stopped. He was never satisfied."
"When he built a minimum house for himself in 1904, he experimented with structure. For some of the interior walls he tried out 1 by 4-inch studs, 4 inches apart, over which he placed diagonal lathing and plaster. The finished walls were 3 inches thick, and they tested equal to the 2 by 4-inch studs 16 inches on center, which made a 5 1/2 inch wall. Plaster filled the openings between the 1 by 4-inch studs, so there was no spaces to act as fire flues.
"Pleased with his experiments, Gill used the system for exterior walls and partitions in a house he designed in 1905 for Miss Alice Lee, the first of three commissions he undertook for her. The house was significant for another reason. The exterior was entirely of stucco, the form more compact, and the roof lower in pitch. Although he continued to design a few houses in half-timbered style, and did two shingled ones in 1906, he was moving toward the adobe forms of the mission builders, who had neither the time nor the tools to be other than frank.
"Between the half-timbered and shingle houses and the ultimate ones in concrete, there were a number between 1906 and 1912 that showed the influence of the Prairie style in their strong horizontal lines and broad sheltering roofs.
"At a time when houses were dim, Gill's were invariably bright. This came from the direct approach of the Chicago school to lighting office buildings. Sullivan's three-division window, with fixed glass in the center and an operating pane on each side, was typical of Gill's design.
"By 1907, after ten years in California, he began to find what he was looking for. His changes in style always followed closely his changes in systems of construction. In the Melville Klauber and Homer Laughlin houses of that year he used concrete and hollow tile and furred out the interior walls. The tile was an excellent insulating material, and as the concrete did not shrink away from it there was less possibility of cracks.
"The Klauber house had a gable roof with a slight Japanese curve in the pitch, while the roof of the Laughlin house was low and covered with tiles. Another change came in the interiors of the Laughlin house, where a minimum of wood was used. For about eight years, Gill had coved his kitchen and bathroom walls into concrete floors; in the Laughlin house he carried this treatment throughout the entire house.
"His inventiveness was applied to more than structure. A garbage disposal in the kitchen dropped garbage to an incinerator in the basement; an outlet for a vacuum cleaner in each room carried dust to the furnace in the basement through a pipe in the wall. The ice box in the kitchen could be opened from outside the house so it was unnecessary for the delivery man to enter the kitchen; milk could also be delivered through a slot. In the garage an automatic car washing device sprayed the car's entire surface; and a mail box flush with the front door emptied mail inside the house.
"Gill summed up his practices in The Craftsman, May, 1916: "In California we have long been experimenting with the idea of producing a perfectly sanitary, labor-saving house, one where the maximum of comfort may be had with the minimum of drudgery. In the recent houses that I have built , the walls are finished flush with the casings and the line where the wall joins the flooring is slightly rounded. so that it forms one continuous piece with no place for dust to enter or to lodge, or crack for vermin of any kind to exist. There is no molding for pictures, plates or chairs, no baseboard, paneling or wainscoting to catch and hold the dust. The doors are single slabs of hand-polished mahogany swung on invisible hinges or else made so that they slide into the wall. In some of the houses all windows and door frames are of steel."
"His sinks were set in magnesite, which was cast in one piece with the walls, and all the corners rounded, "so not a particle of grease or dirt can lodge, or dampness collect and become unwholesome. The bath tubs are boxed and covered with magnesite up to the porcelain."
"Superficially Gill might well have been classed as a rationalist, but his approach to work was that of the humanist. His passionate interest in sanitation and light was the basis for much of his simplification. His memory of his mother's inconvenient kitchen led him to devise ways to lighten the tasks in the home.
"Indeed his houses were planned around women. Frederick Gutheim, architectural historian, said, "He spoke often of the practical details of housework, of the obligations of a hostess, of the house as a place for individual creative expression and activities, including gardening." In his low cost house he wanted a tree in every back yard so that a baby's basket could be hung from a limb.
"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 form 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.
"Before the hospital and the Scripps building there had been evidences of Gill's initial gropings in architecture; now he had arrived at what was dominant. In the following year, 1909, he used monolithic construction in three buildings-a Christian Science Church, Scripps Hall at Bishop's School in La Jolla, and Bishop's Day School in San Diego.
"At the same time Adolf Loos, in Vienna, was preoccupied with similar matters. In 1897 he had begun a crusade to strip ornament from buildings. In a series of newspaper articles he called down moral judgements on the Secessionists, a group of Viennese architects who had broken with the Baroque tradition but continued to use ornament. However, it is unlikely that these articles reached Gill in the small town of San Diego, although he may have heard rumors of Loos' crusade. While he was with Sullivan, Gill had learned the way the wind was blowing; he was aware of the work of Otto Wagner in Vienna, and Charles Rennie MacKintosh in Glasgow. But he could not have been influenced by the work of Loos because Loos' first opportunity to put these theories into practice did not come until 1910, with the Steiner house in Vienna. This house, whose facade curved so awkwardly into the roof, and whose stark rear elevation lacked any feeling for scale, showed Loos to be more of a polemicist than an architect. His architectural performances never quite shed the paper on which they were drawn. In contrast, Gill was first of all a builder; his first forms grew out of structure. His development of cubic masses in the Holly Sefton Hospital, however, revealed a definite relation to the Cubist painters.
"He expressed his beliefs in the May, 1916, issue of The Craftsman, "There is something very restful and satisfying to my mind in the simple cube house with creamy walls, sheer and plain, rising boldly into the sky, unrelieved by cornices or overhang of roof . . . I like the bare honesty of these houses, the childlike frankness, and chaste simplicity of them."
"How did San Diego receive this reduction of the house to its simplicities? There were rumblings about "shoebox houses," but Gill's sincerity produced a feeling of trust. According to Louis Gill, he was not only interested in every aspect of the design, but had a passionate interest in saving the client's money.
"Eloise Roorbach, who often wrote of his work in The Craftsman, told me, "People of wealth liked him for his forthrightness and honesty. His ideas had great refinement, although he often expressed them roughly. He didn't deify his work, but when he made a plan he stuck to it."
"According to Lloyd Wright, "He didn't win his clients to his style by any sociological arguments, but by his great charm."
"Gill performed an enormous service to his profession at a time when, in the West, the contractor was considered the proper person to design everything except public buildings and large residences, which were almost invariably done in revival styles. The wide acceptance of an architect in a town under 25,000 in the first decade of the century was extraordinary, and Gill deserved much of the credit. He was on [the list] of the first ten members of the American Institute of Architects in San Diego.
"According to Louis J. Gill, who went to work for him in 1911, "His office was larger than any of those in Syracuse, and San Diego was then still a small town. He had six draftsmen, an outside superintendent and a secretary."
"Gill was responsible for turning his nephew to architecture. In 1902, Louis, a junior in high school, worked during the summer on the construction of the Mason house. Louis's father was the building contractor; he had built two of Gill's houses in the East.
"Louis Gill recalled that when he entered architectural school his "Uncle Jack" was not too approving, but asked him to study German so he could translate some articles for him. These may have been the writings of Otto Wagner, the Viennese architect whose work, according to Lloyd Wright, interested Gill.
"Soon after Louis entered his uncle's drafting room, Gill made an interesting purchase. Searching for a quicker and cheaper way to handle concrete, he bought some equipment from the United States government which had been used, without great success, in the construction of tilt-slab barracks during the Spanish-American War. His first opportunity to try it out was on the Banning House in Los Angeles.
"Sunset magazine described the curiosity of the neighbors as they watched men wheelbarrow loads of concrete onto a huge table, tilted at a 15-degree angle by supporting jacks. On the table were rows of hollow tile-the forms for the wall. They were divided by 4-inch vertical steel bars which served for reinforcement, as well as a traffic way for the wheelbarrows in dumping the concrete. Metal frames for doors and windows were integrated into the forms. When the concrete had cured, (p. 223) it received a top coating of fine cement. After this step, the neighbors observed a wall, "smooth finished and complete with window and door openings, projecting window boxes and small balconies, raised to perpendicular by means of a single little donkey engine. They kept on guessing as the house took form in simple cubic units, the walls rising sheer and roofless without cornices or trim of any kind."
"Gill used tilt-slab construction even more successfully in the 1913 Women's Club, La Jolla, an exquisite building with superbly planned gardens. In 1914, he-now in partnership with Louis Gill-added another building to the expanding Scripps group, the Community House for the playground, and raised walls 60 feet long.
"There were low-cost structures, as were Gill's later slab-tilt houses in Los Angeles. But since the equipment often stood idle for weeks at a time, he had difficulty in finding contractors to build for him. He finally formed the Concrete Building and Investment Company, to develop the slab-tilt system for low and medium cost houses. However, it was not a success, and Gill lost heavily in the venture.
"Architecture was a broad subject to Gill; it included garden and interior decorations as well as structure. From the first he was enchanted with the natural growth in the canyons, the hedges of geraniums, the windbreaks of eucalyptus, the bougainvillea burning with color on cottage roofs. Eloise Roorbach wrote in the Architectural Record, December, 1913, that Gill "artfully embodies the permanent principles in the straight line and circle, then starts the impermanent principle embodied in the vines and creepers, to move across the face of the buildings, graciously breaking their severity."
"He worked a great deal with Kate Sessions, who had come to San Diego to teach Latin in the High School, and stayed to open a nursery on a small piece of land, now part of Balboa Park. Her 1905 planting for one of the Lee houses on Seventh Street is still almost intact. A certain unity in the planting of San Diego was due to her interest in native plants and her sturdy importations, and to Gill's constant efforts to simplify the garden.
"Today some of his houses are entirely covered with the Bignonia tweediana which he envisioned as tracery, and the Ficus repens meant as embroidery now strangles many a pergola. But when a gnarled and twisted leptospermum trunk and lacy foliage is glimpsed through the clean lines of an arch in Scripps Hall at Bishop's school, Gill's ability to extend architecture into planting becomes beautifully clear.
"He liked the dark glossy greens of pittosporums and the Coprosma baueri as screens, or as cool depths to look into from porch or terrace. The trim on his houses was invariably dark green, borrowed from his plantings. One of his favorite effects came from massing red geraniums near the house.
"The geraniums, in Eloise Roorbach's words, "took a second blooming upon the walls of the rooms," because Gill devised a paint which reflected color. What first appeared to be monotone walls were sensitive surfaces which received the impressions of all colors inside the room and [in the garden]. The paint was a mixture of primary colors, added to white. By varying the proportions of the pigment, a wall could be keyed to the blues, the violet, or any color he wished.
"Colored tiles in geometric Arabic patterns appeared often in his gardens. They created a rich effect and at certain hours of the day their colors danced on the walls. Living in one of Gill's houses was "like living in the heart of a shell," Eloise Roorbach said.
"Although Gill's social architecture was less well known than his other work, it was a continuing interest throughout his career.
"He had built residences for most of the wealthy families in San Diego, and designed churches, schools, and public buildings-all of which were financially rewarding-but his greatest satisfaction came from poorly paid ventures in low-cost housing.
"He was the first West coast architect to give attention to company towns, barracks for laborers, housing for the unemployed, and that vast segment of the population who had to be content with hand-me-downs. His favorite of all his designs was the 1910 low-cost garden court for Sierra Madre.
"This phase of his career began in 1908 when he built two contiguous houses on a two-acre tract he had bought for experimentation. The land, cut by canyons, appeared to be useless, but to Gill the rise and dip of the terrain added to its beauty. A single house was already on this land; he had built it for himself about four years earlier. It marked the beginning of his dissatisfaction with the standard framing and plan and also reflected a simple and austere way of living. For example, in the ceiling of the main room there were hooks by which the bed was lifted during the day.
"The units in his first venture in group housing were flush with the street. as was customary in the Mexican house, where there were no setback requirements. The garden wall and house wall formed a continuous surface. The front door of each house was a gate in an arch of a high walled garden. Here, for the first time, the possibilities of a variety of outdoor living spaces on a narrow canyon ledge were explored. Each house expanded through French doors to a brick terrace; one portion of the terrace was roofed, another shaded by a vine-covered pergola, and the remainder was an open garden.
"The walls were mainly of 1 x 4-inch construction, but in some he used 1 x 12-inch uprights, butted together, lathed over and plastered. He also tried out Maybeck's scheme of plastering over burlap, according to Lloyd Wright.
"The houses had a Mediterranean feeling: casement windows outset from the cement plastered walls, and lattice work copied from iron gratings. The floors were concrete, a material which pleased Gill because of its relation the earth floor. He had first used the concrete floor in 1894.
"In the December, 1915, issue of Sunset magazine, he wrote, "If half the thought and time and money had been expended on perfecting the concrete floor that had been spent on developing wood from the rough board sidewalk to fine parquetry flooring, everybody would want concrete. (p. 224) To overcome the popular prejudice against concrete floors is the business of the architect."
"He mixed color with the cement, "usually tones of red and yellow, red and brown or yellow and brown, slightly mottled. Tempered by the gray of the cement these colors produce neural tones that are a splendid background for rugs and furniture. When quite dry the cement should be cleaned with a weak solution of ammonia and water, given two coats of Chinese nut oil to bring out the color, then finished with a filler and waxed like hardwood. Well done, this treatment gives an effect of old Spanish leather."
"In 1910, when Gill designed his [ ], a colony for low-income families on a square block of land in Sierra Madre, he followed the same scheme as the 1908 houses, a continuous wall flush with the street on the north and west sides. One cottage was separated from the next by a long shallow porch intended for lounging or sleeping. On the south and east sides were cottages spaced in such a way that they did not interfere with garden areas or light and sun for the row houses.
"Each unit had its own private garden, leading into a community garden, with a large pergola in the center. Less than a third of the land was used for dwellings.
"There was a reverence for the individual in the plan that has never been equalled in the field of minimum housing. For years it stood as a superb example of site planning, until its meaning was changed by the construction of additional cottages in the community garden.
"Gill had demonstrated that he could build a good house at a price which would allow a landlord to rent it for a nominal sum. But the court was such a success that rents were fixed beyond the means of the workman for it was designed. Gill was angered by this turn of events because it thwarted his hope of benefitting the low income groups always ignored by architecture. Gill believed that these groups had the reputation of being poor householders because no one had ever taken the trouble to design houses that would help them be orderly. They were used to badly arranged and poorly lighted kitchens. In many of Gills minimum houses he placed the kitchens on the front, and built drains in the concrete floors so they could be washed easily. Both kitchens and baths were skylighted, and had five coats of white paint on the walls. There was a sense of compassion at work, in plan and in detail.
"In 1911, Gill persuaded the Riverside Cement Company to let him design barracks for Mexican laborers and their families. This was the first time that an industrial concern had attempted to create a green and pleasant environment for its unskilled Mexican laborers, instead of following the usual custom of throwing up shacks. Gill's sketch for the project showed two quadrangles, separated by an avenue of eucalyptus. The four outer sides of both quadrangles were continuous walls, and all rooms opened onto the garden in the center. A pergola stretched along one side.
"The finished barracks are no longer in existence but photographs show that the material was clapboard siding and that instead of Gill's twin quadrangles, a single one was built. However, the scheme still had the virtue of enclosing a garden, and Gill's hand could be seen in the large vine-covered patio.
"In 1913, Gill's chance to express himself fully in low-cost housing seemed on the point of fulfillment. He had just completed the Echo Park Court, a group of four-room, well-lighted houses which faced an off-street garden. This was believed to be the prototype of the court system, now so entrenched in California, until Pasadena claimed an earlier one of redwood. Echo Park Court was the urban counterpart of Sierra Madre Court.
"Soon after Olmsted and Olmsted, sons of Frederick Church Olmsted, famous park planner, were commissioned to lay out the model industrial town of Torrance, to the south of Los Angeles. Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. proposed Gill as chief architect. Pacific Electric, Union Tool and Llewelyn Iron Works had received a franchise from the Dominguez Land Corporation for the use of 700 acres near Los Angeles, on which to build shops, a civic center, a railway station and houses for their employees.
"Gill was ready for a major work. By this time his planning had matured to the point where he was perfectly capable of unifying a city. His plot planning in the Scripps Group for La Jolla was a great achievement in the creation of a leisurely and logical flow of space between buildings. He had arrived at a technical mastery over concrete; he had captured the plastic feel of the material, and successfully brought his forms into a single mass. The subject of his architecture was always man, and he had the insight to plan for many as well as one.
"Gill's enthusiasm for the project was so great that he moved his office up to Los Angeles, leaving his young nephew Louis in charge in San Diego. A year went into the planning of Torrance. First to be built was Gill's bridge into the city, then the Pacific Electric Station and one office building. But of the hundreds of cottages planned, only ten were completed.
"According to Frederick Gutheim, who recalled Gill's account of the affair, "The plan had been completely accepted by management and was in the course of execution when difficulties were encountered by the opposition of labor. They objected to the plan itself, from which many traditional work details had been eliminated, because of the extreme simplicity and economy which characterized the dwellings. The climax appears to have been a public meeting in which the design of the dwellings was criticized and the architect faced a hostile and unrelenting audience."
"Work on Gill's concrete houses ceased and wood houses in traditional styles were erected.
"Torrance now (1960) is the major industrial city in Los Angeles County and has a population of 100,000. The Olmsted city plan was octagonal in shape with the city hall at the center; industries were placed in an outer ring. Before the city hall could be built the large site was preempted by the Los Angeles Board of Education, which agreed to operate a school in the new city on condition that the building be erected there.
"Gill's graceful three-arched viaduct is now used to carry freight into the city, and the long, low station is a freight office. No trains were ever visible from the street, for the tracks were behind the station and below street (p. 225) level. Across from the station were two three-story office buildings designed by Gill; they have been razed to make space for parking lots.
"Gill's houses were set back over 25 feet from the street and the house walls extended to form garden walls. The off-street entrance was through an arch in the garden wall-a favorite device of Gill's which loses none of its graciousness with time.
"The porches of the houses are now enclosed, rooms have been added, and the interior wall between living room and dining room removed. The skylights in the bathroom and in the interior hall are the features most appreciated by the owners. Few houses contemporary with Gill's in Torrance are still standing, and those built two decades later are already out of date.
"There was one last time when Gill's talents in social architecture found an outlet. In 1933 Gutheim was instrumental in arranging to have Gill design a number of cottages for the Office of Indian Affairs as well as a chapel for the Rancho Barona Indian resettlement in Lakeside. He readily accepted the post even though he had to live on the site, design a project to be built by the relatively untrained Indians, and stay on and supervise construction.
"On two other occasions Gill sought projects in low-cost housing. He made a trip to Ensenada, Baja California, in the late twenties, to try to interest officials in group dwellings for Mexican families. And just before his death in 1936, he was concerned with a project for a series of houses for the unemployed in Santa Barbara.
"Up to the time of the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Diego, which opened in 1915, Gill prospered and achieved his purpose without great resistance. But his work was considered a threat to the rising school of atelier architecture in San Diego. "A dangerous kind of work," Elmer Gray, the Pasadena architect, called it in a letter to Bertram Goodhue.
"Nevertheless it was assumed that the buildings of the Exposition, which was to commemorate the opening of the Panama Canal, would be in Mission style, and that Gill would be the chief architect. The chairman of the Grounds and Building Committee was George Marston, a wealthy department store owner; Gill had designed a house for him in 1904, and one for his daughter in 1906. Also on the committee was Julius Wagenheim, who had commissioned Gill, in 1904, to design a half-timbered house.
"As the idea of the Exposition grew, the more grandiose it became. In 1910 Olmsted and Olmsted were commissioned to lay out the park on a site donated by George Marston. Other architects were considered for the post of chief architect, among them John Galen Howard, head of the School of Architecture at the University of California, and Myron Hunt of Los Angeles. But at the end of 1910, Gill was still favored.
"Then on December 28, 1910, Bertram Goodhue wrote to Elmer Gray, the former partner of Myron Hunt, about "a position I want very much indeed, but I have just heard that it is not for me. I wasn't at first going to tell you what it is, but I think I will change my mind as follows: the post is the directing architect of the San Diego Exposition . . . They have a perfectly lovely problem and one which Olmsted thought I was better fitted to deal with than any other architect, thanks to my studies of and book on Spanish Colonial architecture in Mexico. Needless to say that I am bitterly disappointed at the turn affairs have taken and it is equally needless to ask you to regard this information as approximately confidential and not to take any hand in it unless you think the circumstances warrant you in so doing."
"When he received the letter, Gray called his former partner, Myron Hunt, who telephoned at once to San Diego. Hunt's call occurred at the moment the Building Committee was meeting. As a result Goodhue was summoned to San Diego; he arrived three weeks later prepared to design all the Exposition buildings. The people of San Diego were delighted with "such a distinguished gentleman who had made such a deep study of Spanish Colonial . . ."
"Gill with other San Diego architects lent their services to the fair and continued to do so for a while after Goodhue took over. Gill's departure had nothing to do with Goodhue. By chance he had discovered certain graft in buying supplies for the buildings, and was so enraged that he walked out. "He could never put up with any sort of dishonesty,"according to Louis Gill, who recalled similar actions on the part of Gill's stern Quaker father.
"Gill would not have remained anyway, for when Goodhue was asked by the Building Committee to select a local architect as an associate, he brought out his own staff from New York instead. They took charge after Goodhue returned to his office in the East. One of his associates, Carlton Winslow, remained in California after the Exposition work was completed. In the late twenties he designed a chapel and a Spanish Renaissance tower at Bishop's School to replace a square forthright one of Gill's.
"A difference of opinion arose between Goodhue and the Olmsteds over the location of the Fair buildings. The Olmsteds preferred a knoll at an edge of the park, because of its accessibility to visitors, while Goodhue who was more interested in dramatic effects, wanted to create a Spanish-Mexican village in the center of the park. When the problem was taken to the board, the members supported Goodhue and the Olmsteds withdrew.
"However, Goodhue did recognize Gill's importance. In a letter to Elmer Gray, dated December 29, 1914, he wrote, "I do think that he has produced some of the most thoughtful work done in the California of today, and that for the average architect his theories are far safer to follow than mine or even perhaps yours."
"In 1914 Gill was commissioned to design a house in West Hollywood by Walter L. Dodge, whose fortune had come from the product Tiz, "for tired feet."
"The preliminary plans were dated August 10, 1914, but the house was not finished until 1916. This was due to the extraordinary amount of detailing and, perhaps, also to the war in Europe. The building covered 6,500 square feet, and there were over 1,100 square feet of porches. Compared to the approximate rectangle of most of Gill's houses, the plan was sprawling, with a porch cutting a U into the north side and a walled court (p. 226) taking a corner from the south. The court, reached through the French doors of the dining room and breakfast room, served as an unroofed living area. The interweaving of inner and outer space was well suited to living needs; and the floor plan was unusually fluid.
"The 300-square-foot entrance hall was one of Gill's most beautiful rooms. The walls were entirely paneled in boards of Honduras mahogany, so meticulously matched that they gave the impression of a single slab of richly patterned wood. Although, today, plywood produced by machine methods achieve a similar effect, the character of the room lay deeper than in the fine craftsmanship or the historical importance of the flush detailing.
"It was the light from the stairwell that gave the room much of its beauty. Entering through 10-foot-high windows, which filled the north wall, the light extended the upper spaces and determined the shape of the room. It warmed the wood to life, and emphasized the chasteness of the balustrade and the fine joinery of the handrail.
"The paneling of the first floor was continued in the second-floor hall as a wainscot. Another fine detail was the hall's flush storage cabinet for linens.
"The plan for the master bedroom was unusual for 1914. The bath tub, shower and toilet were placed in skylighted compartments, which could be entered from either of the two large dressing rooms. Storage cabinets and wardrobe closets filled two walls of each dressing room.
"In this reinforced concrete house, Gill accomplished what he had started out to do in 1908, when he first began his study of concrete construction as an art. It was to bring concrete to the architectural importance of stone.
"The Dodge house was not only a fulfillment, it was also a promise of change. The plan was freer than usual and the elevations were varied, puzzlingly so upon first encounter. The south elevation with its rhythm of arches did not predict the severe west elevation. The north side, with its deeply inset porch and the play of roof stack forms against the masses, showed a preoccupation with depth.
"The plan spread out in ranch-like fashion to include a raised swimming pool and garage. The romantic gardens to the north, with their fountains and loggia, gave way on the east to propagating sheds, a corral and pergolas in wooded settings.
"In the early forties, Theodore Dreiser lived across the street from the Dodge house and could often be seen strolling through the neglected grounds; his last book contains a description of a crumbling pergola overrun with vines.
"What might have developed out of this new turn Gill's work was taking can only be guessed, but it seems clear that something was happening to his style. However, almost thirteen yeas passed before he build his next large structure. The small Horatio West Court in Santa Monica of 1919 did, however, confirm his interest in experimentation. The bands of glass on three sides of the second-story living rooms of the five-room units indicated a new concern with transparency.
"In Gill's two major works in 1929-a Civic Center for Oceanside and a Christian Science church for Coronado-there was a suggestion that waiting had deprived his talents of some of their limberness.
"In the small cottages for the Indian resettlement, among his last work, he came full circle returning to the freshness with which he saw his first adobes in California. The little Rancho Barona houses were curiously touching in their simplicity, but the simplicity was of a kind that came from a lifetime of architectural concern.
"The house for Miss Ellen Scripps in La Jolla, planned in 1915 and finished in 1916, followed the Dodge house chronologically. And it marked the end of Gill's classic simplicity, a style which had already been modified in the Dodge house. The Scripps house did not make any new statements in form or materials or plan. It was not experimental, but rather it summed up a period of Gill's thinking and feeling. It was bold but not imperative, tranquil but with no touch of softness.
"Since the death of Miss Scripps, the house has been occupied by the La Jolla Art Center, and numerous alterations have obliterated Gill's work. This could not have been an easy task, for it requires a pneumatic drill to destroy a Gill building-and a lack of understanding of his work.
"After 1916, Gill gave up his practice in San Diego. There was little work for him in Los Angeles outside of remodeling and he was often busier with experiments than in his drafting room. One day Eloise Roorbach found him in the back yard of his Los Angeles office, on Ninth and Figueroa, working on some concrete 2-inch by 4-inch's.
"Although he was a modest man, Gill was aware of what he had accomplished, and knew that he was part of a movement to simplify structure. While his time was finding little use for him, he watched others in the United States and Europe discovering some of the essential architectural qualities he had realized, and put into practice 10 to 15 years earlier.
"At the end of the twenties there was a brief respite. Gill received two commissions, the Christian Science Church for Coronado, and the Oceanside City Hall, Fire Station and Police Station. It was while this work was in progress that he married for the first time at the age of 58. His wife was Mrs. Marion Brashears of Palos Verdes. Although he had always been enormously popular with women, he appeared to have committed himself to one woman happily enough-judging from a letter written during a brief separation just following his marriage. "My wife," he wrote, "how beautifully the word is. A word I've always wanted to use." The couple went to Palos Verdes to live, but less than ten months later he wrote in his notebook "Moved to Carlsbad 1:50 p.m. Thursday March 7, 1929."
"The move came seven months before the market crash. In Carlsbad he lived in a house set in an acre or two of orchard belonging to his wife. It had no inside plumbing or gas for cooking and heating. Shortly after his arrival Gill had a heart attack; although he was weakened. he continued to work. He designed two schools for Oceanside in association with John Siebert. In one, a kindergarten, 1931, on Division and Center Streets, he used 18-foot openings, glazed with French doors leading from classrooms to play terraces; this was presumably the first instance of opening the entire walls of school rooms to the garden.
"Among his drawings were a city plan for Oceanside and numerous projects for Carlsbad, but it was the depression years, and few jobs were executed. By 1933, Gill had suffered a second heart attack, but he eagerly accepted the Indian resettlement project for Lakeside. According to a letter in his files from the Department of the Interior, his fee was $540.
p. 227 "As his health and financial situation worsened there were such entries in his notebook as "Picked 123 pounds avocados, received checks for $26.75 from Safeway and El Cortez Hotel . . . Breakfast 40 cents, dinner 60 cents, cat meat 5 cents, magazines, 24 cents."
"In 1936, the year of his death, he designed a small building for Redondo Beach. His time sheet read: "Plans ordered to be drawn May 16. I.J. Gill received $20 advance. Floor plans and clerestory plans completed May 17. Elevations, sections and roof plan finished May 19. (The client) returned this date and ordered changes in plan. Details completed May 22. Work done at owner's request under full speed."
"The client obligingly took Gill's tracings to the blueprinter. That was the last Gill saw of them When he tried to collect his fee, his client 's lawyer wrote indignantly that Gill "didn't build the building, he only designed it." No settlement was made before Gill's death four months later.
"In a letter to his wife during his last winter Gill wrote, "Have been almost free from pain today . . . It seemed mighty good to feel myself getting back into shape again. Bad luck, dear, cannot always last; so hold your strength and be ready for the good things to come. Let's help each other make the wish come true."
"He died on October 7, 1936, almost forgotten, but on the West Coast which he had called "that newest white page turned for registration," Gill had already left his mark.
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