Irving Gill
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Irving John Gill (1870 - 1936) was born in Tully (near Syracuse), New York, USA and is considered an early architectural modernist, having produced some of San Diego's best architecture.
[edit] Biography
Irving Gill was the son of Joseph Gill a house carpenter and farmer. He had no formal education in architecture and never attended college. He apprenticed to architect Ellis G. Hall in Syracuse and then moved to Chicago, working with Joseph Lyman Silsbee and later and more importantly under Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan there. Frank Lloyd Wright was working in the Adler & Sullivan firm at this time as well. Gill moved to San Diego, California in 1893 and immediately started his own practice. Gill (known as Jack to his friends) became a pioneer in rational, early modernist design for residences and commercial buildings. This phase of his career began about 1907, following an 11 year partnership with William S. Hebbard that produced good work, important to San Diego County history but less known nationally. Gill's 1907 partnership with Frank Mead, which lasted less than a year and completed only 4 houses was a time of some of his best work. The important Bailey, Allen, Laughlin and M. Klauber residences were completed by this partnership.
In 1911, Irving Gill's nephew Louis Gill joined Irving's firm as a draftsman, later to be promoted to partner.
Irving Gill was concerned with the social impact of good architecture, and worked with equal skill and interest on projects for the bankers and mayors as he did on projects for reservation Indians, an African American church, and for migrant Mexican workers and their children.
Gill's mature period work, described in publications as "cubist" in his time, was a successful attempt to remove most unnecessary detailing, much as the Arts & Crafts movement of the time was concerned with, but with a Zen-type spirituality and a few local Southwestern architectural references. This architect's best work of the 1910s is identified by: flat roofs with no eaves, a unity of materials (mostly concrete), casement windows with transoms above, white or near-white exterior and interior walls, cube or rectangular massing, frequent ground-level arches or series of arches creating transitional breezeways in the manner of certain Italian and Spanish Colonial buildings.
Gill's interiors are known for minimal or flush mouldings, simple (or no) fireplace mantles, coved floor to wall transitions, enclosed bathtubs, frequent skylights, plastered walls with only the occasional, but featured, wood elements, flush five-piece doors, frequent concrete or magnisite floors, and a general avoidance of cracks, ledges, and unnecessary material changes.
In 1911 Gill lost an important commission for the Panama-California Exposition (1915) to Bertram Goodhue but did some of the early work as an associate under Goodhue. Gill started living and mainly working in Los Angeles county after this time although the Gill & Gill partnership lasted until 1919. Irving Gill returned to live in North San Diego county in the 1920s. Gill's work slowed considerably after 1920 or so due to lingering illness, changing public tastes, and a lessening desire to compromise with clients. After the late 1920s, his work added certain moderate Art Deco or "Moderne" touches.
Despite his pioneering modernism, Gill's reputation quickly faded after his death, and it languished until he was included in the 1960 book Five California Architects by Esther McCoy and Randell L. Makinson. This book helped to renew interest in his work, and in the decades since its publication he has come to be recognized as a major figure in the modern movement.
During the long eclipse of Gill's reputation, one of his major residential works was all but forgotten. Located in Santa Fe Springs, California now a heavily industrialized suburb of Los Angeles, the Clarke estate was built in 1919–21 for Chauncey and Marie Rankin Clarke as their primary residence, set amid sixty acres of citrus trees. When oil was discovered on the land soon after the Clarkes moved into their 8000 square foot house, the noise and odor of the drilling and pumping operations led them to depart. Thereafter, the house languished in obscurity for several decades. Mrs. Clarke died in 1948 and left the house to a relative of her secretary, who lived there until 1986 when the property was purchased by the City of Santa Fe Springs. Both house and gardens now serve as a center for meetings and special events, and the dwelling itself, only slightly altered from its original form, may be the largest intact single family house in Gill's mature style. It is open to the public for tours several times a month.[1]
[edit] Work
- George W. Marston House (1904–05, with W.S. Hebbard), 7th Ave., San Diego
- Walter L. Dodge House in West Hollywood (1914–16, demolished)
- F. B. Lewis Courts in Sierra Madre (1910)
- Horatio West Court in Santa Monica (1919)
- The first buildings at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (1908–)
- The La Jolla "Precinct" including The La Jolla Woman's Club (1912–)
- The Bishop's School (1910–16)
- La Jolla Recreation Center (1913)
- Ellen Browning Scripps residence (1915, now remodeled as the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego)
- Clarke Estate (1919) in Santa Fe Springs, California [2]
