IRVING GILL 1870 – 1936
Esther McCoy, Louis Danziger [Designer],
Marvin Rand [Photographer]
Esther McCoy, Louis Danziger [Designer], Marvin Rand [Photographer]: IRVING GILL 1870 – 1936. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum [in collaboration with The Art Center in La Jolla], 1958. Square quarto. Uncoated photo illustrated wrappers. 59 pp. Exhibition catalog fully illustrated with full page black and white plates. Wrappers lightly soiled and faint lifting to fore edge, otherwise a nearly fine copy.
7 x 7.125-inch perfect bound exhibition catalog with 59 pages devoted to Southern Californian architecture of Irving Gill, and featuring an essay by Esther McCoy, catalog design by Louis Danziger and photography by Marvin Rand.
Irving John Gill (1870 – 1936) has been widely regarded as San Diego’s most prominent and innovative architect. He was born April 26, 1870, in Tully, New York. The son of a farmer, he had no formal education. He began studying architecture in the Syracuse, New York, office of Ellis G. Hall, then in Chicago under Joseph L Silsbee. In 1891 Gill worked alongside Frank Lloyd Wright at the firm Adler and Sullivan in Chicago.
After arriving in San Diego in 1893, Gill experimented with many styles, won loyal clients, and made a name for himself among the community’s leading citizens, Progressive and otherwise. The Arts and Crafts philosophy was just beginning to take hold in San Diego when Gill arrived, but significant Craftsman influences did not appear in his work until about 1905. The Green Dragon in La Jolla (1894), whose cottages Gill designed, drew the finest musicians from around the country to entertain both colony residents and Hotel Del Coronado visitors.
In 1894, he began working on houses with Joseph Falkenham, a member of the city’s Board of Public Works, many in the Queen Anne style. Falkenham left in 1895, leaving Gill to make a name for himself. He succeeded in doing so, lining up a string of prominent San Diegans as his clients and hinting at his future work in the David K. Horton house’s solid lines and clean geometry in National City in 1895.
In December 1896, Gill began working with William S. Hebbard, an architect with academic training who complemented Gill’s lack of book learning. Their partnership was characterized by influences from the Transportation Building and the neoclassicism of the 1893 World’s Fair and by many English-style houses, “from large brick mansions to half-timbered cottages, often with massive stone foundations” and paneled inside with slabs of redwood.
Gill strove to give the humblest and weakest workers of society protection against the elements through elegant and efficient design. Beginning in 1899 and during the next ten years, Gill built experimental cottages on property in the Hillcrest and Sherman Heights areas of San Diego, testing ways to make low-cost housing more efficient and comfortable.
One of the turning points in Gill’s career came when the Landmarks Club of California hired him and Hebbard in 1900 to stabilize the ruins of the Mission San Diego de Alcala. Mission influences appeared in the duo’s work. Gill was impressed with their straightforward simplicity, the economy in the use of materials, and their frank declarations that buildings should be made for use.”
Gill started using the Arts and Crafts elements that would predominate in his later buildings during the Hebbard partnership. Such stripped-down elements included large slabs of unwaxed redwood rather than strips joined together, molding with sanded edges, buildings with no moldings at all, balustrades of square or rectangular sticking, and magnesite counters and sinks in bathrooms and kitchens. These simplifications in architecture reflected Gill’s desire to save labor for both construction workers and housekeepers.
Gill designed the wonderful Arts and Crafts home in 1904-1905 for George W. Marston and several other houses on Marston’s block. He had extensive contact with Marston through the early planning of the 1915 Panama California Exposition in Balboa Park. The first building for the fair and the only one for which the architectural drawings bear Gill’s name as associate architect, is the Administration Building completed in 1912. Goodhue had Carleton Winslow add decorative detail to the entrance. Gill left the Exposition project in 1912.
By 1908, Irving J. Gill was a well-established San Diego architect. Gill’s fountain in Horton Plaza, built in 1909, remains there today. But his mature style, marked by spare designs and ingenious technical details, was just beginning, and his most important commissions were to come. In 1909 and 1910, he designed some of his most ingenious structures: Bentham and Scripps Halls at The Bishop’s School in La Jolla, and the First Church of Christ Scientist at Second and Laurel Streets in San Diego.
One of Gill’s most prominent clients was Ellen Browning Scripps, a self-made newspaper millionaire born in England and raised in the Illinois prairies. She moved to San Diego in 1891 and to La Jolla in 1897. Gill designed many Progressive projects for which Scripps sponsored the money, including the La Jolla Recreation Center and the La Jolla Woman’s Club, which together with The Bishop’s School and her own house formed a “Scripps enclave.”
Of Gill’s ten churches, the 1909-10 Christian Science Church at Second and Laurel is by far the most famous. The church incorporated many of Gill’s most ingenious technical inventions as well as his penchant for light and his desire to bring nature inside. Instead of lining up the pews on a vertical axis, Gill decided to make an auditorium with a long horizontal axis, giving the great space a more expansive feeling.
The Bishop’s School in La Jolla, designed by Irving Gill in 1910, epitomized the idea of campus as village. Long arcades and open grassy areas that allowed indoor and outdoor spaces to interact with each other. The first two structures built of concrete in 1910 were Scripps Hall, a dormitory, and Bentham Hall, which held classrooms and a small chapel. A third building, Gilman Hall, included in the original plans, was not built until 1916.
Gill discussed his ideal of simplicity in his 1916 essay, “The New Architecture of the West.” For him, “the source of all architectural strength” emerged from the straight line, the arch, the cube, and the circle in combination.
Gill’s “social architecture,” as McCoy termed it, included the F.B. Lewis Court (“Bella Vista Terrace”) in Sierra Madre (1910), barracks for the Riverside Cement Company’s Mexican laborers and their families, the model industrial city of Torrance (1912-13), the Echo Park Court in Los Angeles (1912), and cottages for the Rancho Barona Indian Reservation (1932-33) in Lakeside, east of San Diego, whose construction he supervised himself while living on the site and whose inhabitants he invited to La Jolla to see his other work and examine interior fabrics. In the late 1920s, Gill also tried to interest officials in Ensenada, Baja California, in group housing for Mexican families, and just before he died he was involved with plans for housing the unemployed in Santa Barbara.
A bachelor until the age of 58, Gill married Mrs. Marion Waugh Brashears on May 28, 1928, but the marriage was unsuccessful and Gill died at age 66 on October 7, 1936, alone in Carlsbad, California. [Historic San Diego]
“California's Design is a marriage between Walden Pond and Douglas Aircraft.” — Esther McCoy
It has been brought to my attention that Esther McCoy never actually said the above quote, but I’m going to follow John Ford’s dictum and “print the legend.”
As a contributing editor to Arts & Architecture magazine, Esther McCoy (1904 – 1989) was in a unique position to chronicle the brilliant trajectory of the modern movement in California, particularly the Case Study House program. Her insider status gave her unparalleled access to the key figures in the movement.
From the 1989 New York Times Obituary; “Esther McCoy, an architectural historian and critic . . . was a specialist in West Coast architecture and the author of many books and hundreds of articles in leading architectural publications.
“It was she, almost single-handedly, who awakened serious scholars to the extraordinary richness of California architecture,'' wrote Paul Goldberger, architecture critic for The New York Times, when a new edition of Ms. McCoy's 1960 work, ''Five California Architects,'' appeared in 1975. Her book, he added, was largely responsible for rescuing the five almost-forgotten architects - Bernard Maybeck, Irving Gill, R. M. Schindler and Charles and Henry Greene - from obscurity.
“Calling Ms. McCoy ''the pre-eminent writer of California architecture,'' Cesar Pelli, a former dean of the Yale School of Architecture, told The Times in an interview five years ago, ''Our knowledge of Southern California architecture has been primarily formed by her research, her first-hand knowledge and her writing, which is so precise and passionate.''
“She was born in Coffeyville, Kan., and was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. She began her career in New York writing architecture reviews for a number of publishers.
“She worked as a draftsman in the Hollywood office of R. M. Schindler from 1944 to 1947 and began writing about the architects she had come to know. In 1985, she was given the American Institute of Architects' national honor award for excellence.”
From Lou Danziger’s AIGA medalist citation: “Louis Danziger was born in 1923 and raised in the Bronx, New York. At eleven, he was interested in letterforms and was an avid browser of the German language design magazine Gebrauchsgraphik, which he found in the public library. “I discovered that the Germans were doing the most interesting things with book jackets and posters,” he says about these early inspirations, which led him to become an art major at Evander Childs High School. “Although most Americans at the time were either hostile to or ignorant of modern art,” he says, “in my high school? all the art majors were given student memberships to the Museum of Modern Art.” Commercial art was offered as a viable profession for the artistically inclined and, although his parents were less than sanguine about his becoming a commercial artist, Danziger decided to follow this path. After high school, he served in the Army in the South Pacific (New Guinea, the Admiralties, the Philippines, and Japan) from 1943 through 1945 and designed the occasional poster. After being discharged, he moved to California—escaping New York's cold weather—and attended the Art Center School on the G.I. Bill.
Postwar California did not have the media industries that supported modern graphic design in the same way that New York did, but it was a burgeoning hotbed of contemporary design thinking. Other East Coast designers had already trekked to the City of Angels, none having a greater effect on Danziger's life than Alvin Lustig (posthumous recipient of the AIGA Lifetime Achievement Award), who was teaching graphic and industrial design classes at Art Center. Danziger remembers his first encounter with Lustig in 1947 as accidental: “I didn't like school at all, because it was very rigid at that time. But one day I heard this voice coming out of a classroom talking about social structure, religion, and the broadest implications of design. So I stuck my nose in the door and saw that it was Lustig. From then on I sat in on every class.” Lustig connected design to the worlds of art, music, and literature and instilled in students a belief that design was socially and culturally important.
Danziger became part of the Design Group, like-minded designers who had been students of Lustig and were “opposed to mindless, sentimental, nostalgic, commercial design.” In turn, he and his peers aspired to promote attitudes about design that were loftier than the profession itself. He became friends with Saul Bass, Rudolph de Harak, and Charles Eames (who introduced him to Buckminster Fuller's book Nine Chains to the Moon) and recalls the palpable excitement among them that they were missionaries of progressive design. “But I don't think we talked about our work in the philosophical or theoretical terms that are discussed today,” he says. “We were talking about very practical matters.”
Danziger and his colleagues vied for what little work was available at that time. “This was the problem,” he explains. “Any client that had any money went to an advertising agency. Annual reports in those days were designed by printing firms. So the only clients that were really interested in modern work were essentially furniture and lighting manufacturers that advertised in architectural magazines.” Although Danziger did some striking early identity and advertising for Flax Artist's Materials (including a trademark that is used today), General Lighting, Steelbuilt, Inc., and Fraymart Gallery, he was disenchanted with the provincialism of Los Angeles and referred to it as a “hick town.” He returned to New York, working briefly with Alexander Ross, a graphic designer who specialized in pharmaceutical products, and then taking a job at Esquire magazine, where he sat in the art department next to Helmut Krone (later chief art director for Doyle Dane Bernbach). At the time, Krone so admired Paul Rand that his work area, covered with Rand's tearsheets, was like a shrine. Danziger used top hang reproductions of Egyptian and Chinese artifacts at his desk and recalls saying to Krone, “If you want to be as good as Rand, don't look at Rand; look at what Rand looks at.”
Since the Esquire job offered him little chance to do good work, Danziger took refuge in Alexey Brodovitch's legendary “Graphic Journalism” night class at the New School. On the very first evening when the students were asked to bring in their portfolios, Danziger recalls that Brodovitch, who was not given to parceling out praise, “spent much of the evening favorably discussing my work.” Brodovitch taught Danziger to believe in his own uniqueness. “He instilled the idea that you cannot do good work unless you have guts to do something you have not seen before,” Danziger says. He also learned to have “a proper disrespect for design.” Unlike Lustig, Brodovitch did not need to attach world-shaping significance to design. “I always felt that it was the contradictions between my two masters that allowed me to form my own point of view,” Danziger adds.
After finishing the course with Brodovitch, the peripatetic Danziger went west again, this time to study architecture, which he thought was more socially meaningful. At the newly founded and short-lived California School of the Arts, he resumed his studies with Lustig, as well as with architect Raphael Soriano and engineer Edgardo Contini. It was here that he embraced Buckminster Fuller's principle of “de-selfing.” “Most young designers are very much concerned about being present in their work,” Danziger explains. “And Bucky Fuller's idea was that you are invisible—everything is objective. And a very important thing was the idea of doing a great deal with very little—maximum performance with minimal means.” Danziger was also influenced by Paul Rand's book Thoughts on Design because it clarified issues that had been running through his mind, “particularly where he talked about symbols and metaphors,” he says. “Finding something that stands for something else. Being able to encapsulate ideas in a single image.” For Danziger, it was equally important to be astutely analytical enough to understand the essence of what needed to be communicated. “You can always find the appropriate symbol for the wrong message,” he cautions.