During the first third of the twentieth century, the work of American architect Irving Gill radically redefined the architectural landscape of Southern Californiaespecially San Diego, where his practice was basedand set the stage for a later, more widely celebrated generation of modernists who would continue his experiments with new forms and construction techniques. This first definitive study of the architect traces his journey from his native Syracuse to a Chicago apprenticeship with Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright to the development of his career as an early modernist and his singular role in the genesis of the modern movement. Architectural historian Thomas S. Hines places Gill's work within an international context: as his identification with the modern movement developed, his work evolved from the influence of the East Coast Shingle Style and Wright's Midwest Prairie Style to become closer in spirit to the work of the Austrian Adolf Loos. Hines also explores the social dimensions of Gill's work, notably his interest in the contemporary Progressive Movement and its ethos of social, gender, and economic equality. The buildings shown (illustrated with archival photographs as well as color plates) include the Lewis Courts, Sierra Madre; the Dodge House, Hollywood; and Horatio West Court, Santa Monica.

Thomas S. Hines is professor of history and architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles. His books include Burnham of Chicago: Architect and Planner, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture: A Biography and History, and William Faulkner and the Tangible Past: The Architecture of Yoknapatawpha. He has contributed chapters to other books and has published essays, articles, and reviews in Architectural Record, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and the New York Times, among others. He has received many grants and awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Getty. In 1994 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Introduction

THE STONE IN THE MEADOW

IN 1916 IN HIS ONLY MAJOR PUBLISHED ESSAY, Irving John Gill issued in The Craftsman a cogent manifesto that defined his modernist achievement. "If we, the architects of the West, wish to do great and lasting work," he insisted, "we must dare to be simple, must have the courage to fling aside every device that distracts the eye from structural beauty, must break through convention and get down to fundamental truths." For his essay's epigraph, he quoted a line from the romantic German poet Friedrich Schiller: "An artist is known rather by what he omits."

    Gill was certain that "through force of custom and education we, in whose hands much of the beauty of country and city is entrusted, have been compelled to study the style of other men, with the result that most of our ... work is an open imitation or veiled plagiarism of another's idea." He was convinced that "to break away from this degradation we must boldly throw aside every accepted structural belief and standard of beauty and get back to the source of all architectural strength--the straight line, the arch, the cube and the circle...." In fact, he argued, "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 gracious and friendly with vines and flower shadows as she does the stone in the meadow."

    With the exception of half a dozen turn-of-the-century structures in New England resort communities, all of Gill's documented buildings were in the Southern California counties of San Diego, Los Angeles, Imperial, Tulare, and San Bernardino. Hence his work was more concentrated than that of his Pasadena Craftsman contemporaries Charles and Henry Greene, who, while building primarily in Los Angeles County, also realized designs in Ventura, San Diego, and Santa Barbara counties, as well as in Northern California and British Columbia. Despite Gills's tightly focused geographic spectrum, his buildings in the first quarter of the century were appreciatively covered in the architectural press. Even within his own lifetime, his international fame had begun to develop.

    In 1931, the architecture critic Lewis Mumford saw Gill as a progenitor of the heroic masters of midtwentieth-century modernism and averred in his memorable volume The Brown Decades that the architect had produced some of the modern period's "best early statements of the essential or sachlich house: in his deliberate absence of ornament, he anticipated both the polemics and the practice of Le Corbusier and the De Stijl group...." Mumford also appreciated Gill's social commitments to high-quality housing for people of modest means.

    Equally significant appraisals would continue after Gill's death in 1936 and would proliferate exponentially after the work of Esther McCoy led to his rediscovery in the 1950s and 1960s. Gill's "clarity of form and simplicity of means," historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock observed in the late 1950s, "is more premonitory of the next phase of modern architecture than any other American work of the period." In 1972, historian William Jordy celebrated "the unaffected manner in which the principle of simplicity brought Gill to the brink of the modern movement as this came to be defined in Europe ... as well as the courage and foresight of an architect who literally invented his way in an isolated situation toward so much of what came to be the future."

MY INTENTION IN THIS BOOK is to place and evaluate the achievement of Irving Gill in twentieth-century architectural culture not simply as a "precursor" of modernism but as a major player in the company of such architects as his Viennese contemporary Adolf Loos. Both architects were born in 1870; both died in the mid-1930s. Both espoused an architecture of rational sachlichkeit and minimalist restraint. As such, both were predecessors and models for such members of the next generation as Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler. In the literature of modern architecture, many allusions have been made to the affinities between Gill and Loos. Midway through this study, I will address the Gill-Loos connection to illuminate the differences, as well as the similarities, in their architecture.

    As in my previous work on such different subjects as Daniel Burnham, Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, and Frank Gehry, I remain committed to the historian's obligation to analyze the impact on life and work of timing, contingency, and context. These very old imperatives have recently been reformulated into a "subject" and "object" binary, as in the stimulating book by critic Michael Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject (1992). Modernism, Hays argues, "whatever else we may mean by the term, has something to do with the emergence of new kinds of objects and events and, at the same time, new conceptualizations of their appearance, of the changed ... relationships between objects, their producers, their audiences and consumers."

    Gill seldom used the word modern, though he and others assumed it in references to his work. What did he and his "modernist" contemporaries believe the word to mean? The term and its cognates, according to the Oxford English Dictionary , derived from the late-Latin, sixth-century modernus , roughly meaning "just now," but it was not widely used before the sixteenth century, when it became increasingly necessary to distinguish the period after the Renaissance from the ancient and medieval worlds. In addition to that large but relatively specific meaning, modern continued to convey a floating association with things "characteristic of the present and recent times; new-fashioned, not antiquated or obsolete." Yet in the late nineteenth century, the floating term took on a harder specificity as it became the term for the "new art" of the imminent new century.

    Though most architectural modernists insisted that they followed no "style," they opted for what came to be a cluster of new styles--from the hot, exotic plasticity of Expressionism to the elegantly cool austerity of Rationalism. Gill obviously leaned toward the latter. Like most architectural rationalists, he eschewed historicism and strove, in his mature period, for pure, new, and original statements, effecting a transcendence of things past and a celebratory embrace of the functions of "modern life." Gill's breakthrough to a unique modernist architectural identity came around 1907 and peaked around 1920, the penultimate years of the modernist adventure according to critic Robert Adams in his provocative paper "What Was Modernism?"

    The moment of truth, for Adams and others, came with Roger Fry's Postimpressionist show at the Grafton Galleries in London, an event that moved the novelist Virginia Woolf to the confident assertion that "in or around December, 1910, human character changed." Adams believed Woolf was right about 1910: "Within five years either way of that date a great sequence of new and different works appeared in Western culture, striking the tonic chords of modernism. Ten years before that fulcrum of December 1910, modernism is not yet; ten years after, it is already." Among other examples supporting his argument, Adams included Pablo Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907); Ezra Pound's Personnae (1909); Igor Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps (1913); James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914); and T. S. Eliot's "Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915).

    Citing only painting, music, and literature, Adams omitted comparable achievements in architecture. Yet drawing from the work of three interconnected designers, one could add key works to that auspicious list: Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple, Oak Park, Illinois (1906), Robie house, Chicago (1909), and Midway Gardens, Chicago (1914); Adolf Loos's Kärntner Bar, Vienna (1907), Steiner house, Vienna (1910), and Scheu house, Vienna (1912); and Irving Gill's Barker house, San Diego (1911-12), Dodge house, Los Angeles (1914-16), and Horatio West Court, Santa Monica (1919).

IN PLACING GILL IN THIS MODERNIST PANTHEON, I will analyze his regional affinities and his obvious identity with the California ethos, including its Hispanic past, but I will de-emphasize the "Mission" connection, which I, like others, have previously stressed. Late in her life, Esther McCoy had a similar realization. In a rough, untitled typescript, filed among her collected papers, she admitted, to herself at least, that she had recently had "second thoughts" about Gill's Mission connection: "I inclined to see in Gill's uses of the arch a direct reference to the Missions," she mused. "But they refer just as much to contemporary practices in reinforced concrete.... I write partly in an effort to reinstate Gill to the mainstream of architecture where he has always belonged. My emphasis on the Missions ... had the effect of making him into a regionalist, which he was not, and which I did not intend."

    In his own lifetime, Gill saw himself and was seen by others as a maverick, an innovator, and a modernist. In 1922, when he applied for a job with the Los Angeles architect and developer Horatio Bishop, he stated unequivocally that his work was "very simple and unlike the so-called Spanish or Mission style then being built." For at least three decades after his death, this view, his view, prevailed in all assessments of his work, including McCoy's, despite her late, expressed fear that she had overemphasized the Mission connection. Indeed, her felt need to clarify her position and to set the record straight may have been prompted by the rise and dominance in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s of "postmodernist" architecture and theory, which soon pervaded historical thought as well.

    By the 1970s, modernism seemed to be "out," at least the rationalist stream that led to the International Style. Postmodernist historicism seemed to be "in." The eclectic, hyperactive Victorian architecture, against which Gill's modernist generation had revolted, was once again valorized. To a point, this reassessment was healthy and refreshing. While aspects of postmodernist theory and practice furnished a necessary purgative to the aspects of modernist architecture that had become fatigued and indolent, the resulting swing of the critical pendulum led to an overreaction. After a bracing call for a greater consciousness of architectural history and a diverting splurge of scenographic pastiche, much postmodernist architecture had turned by the mid-1980s into a deluge of historicist kitsch. Many critics and historians joined the procession and began to see Gill's work as emanating primarily from the romantic mists of California's Hispanic past. At best, Gill was seen as a "transitional" figure who merely "abstracted" the arcades and bell towers of the vaunted missions. While that view of Gill is not my own, I will attempt, in chapter three and elsewhere, to evaluate how and to what degree he was affected by California's Hispanic past and to explicate his affinity with the ambient "mission culture."

MY AIM IN THIS BOOK IS TO RECONSTRUCT the interconnected strands of Gill's life, work, and social context. While I have attempted to integrate these realms in my previous work in cultural and architectural history, I am pointedly cognizant of the necessary differences between this book and my studies of such architects as Burnham and Neutra. While those works drew from vast and multifaceted archives and forced me constantly to exclude rich material, the sadly fragmentary Gill archive is scattered and incomplete and demands that every morsel be scrutinized. When Gill moved his office and his personal possessions to Los Angeles in 1913, he left most of the drawings generated before that time in the care of his nephew and partner, Louis Gill, who took charge of the firm's residual San Diego practice. Significantly, it was those materials that Louis later bequeathed to UC Santa Barbara and now constitute the core of Gill's extant archival legacy.

    When Gill himself moved north, he apparently transferred to his Los Angeles office most, if not all, of his personal and professional correspondence, since those files apparently no longer existed when Louis made his bequest to UCSB. Gill's Los Angeles office was also the repository of his personal and professional papers generated after 1914, including the drawings of such works as the Dodge, Clarke, and Raymond houses, Horatio West Court, and the various buildings he designed for the new town of Torrance. When Gill closed this office in 1928, he put into storage what one contemporary recalled as "ten truckloads" of files. Because the storage site was in, or attached to, the home of an unnamed friend, rather than in a commercial storage facility, Gill apparently kept no receipt for the materials and no record of their location.

    At the time of his death in 1936, neither family members nor friends and associates were able to trace and retrieve the stored materials. Louis later confessed his suspicion that portions had been taken by former associates, while the rest had been destroyed or lost. When McCoy began to study Gill's work in the 1950s, in preparation for his 1958 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, she and Louis searched indefatigably for the missing papers and called upon others to do the same--without success. McCoy learned later that at some point after Gill's death, his widow had retrieved certain unspecified drawings, including those of the major Los Angeles commissions. Yet following the death of Marion Gill, these materials were destroyed by her niece Mary Jane Barton, who told McCoy she had not realized they were of value.

    As opposed to the problem of lost and destroyed papers, another even sadder, and heretofore unexamined, explanation of the missing material was recorded as early as 1930 by Gill's Austrian-American admirer Richard Neutra, who championed Gill in his book Amerika , published in Vienna in the series "Neues Bauen in der Welt." In preparing his book, which has never been translated into English, Neutra personally interviewed Gill and based his analysis of the buildings both on his own observations and on the older architect's explanations. Most of Gill's drawings for this period, Neutra averred significantly, no longer existed in actual or published form since "a fire destroyed his office, just as it did Wright's!" Neutra himself then undertook to redraw partial plans of Horatio West Court [figs. 236-242, 244] for inclusion in his book "after a personal inspection and discussion with Mr. Gill."

    Gill evidently told Neutra about the fire in one of their conversations between 1928 and 1930, but Neutra left no indication as to whether Gill said exactly when the fire took place. Did it happen before he closed his office in 1928, leaving enough of his files intact to fill the "ten truckloads" that were taken to storage? Or, more ominously, did the fire destroy his files after they were placed in storage? The former would mean merely that less than a complete file of his work was taken to storage in the "ten truckloads." The latter would indicate that his office files burned after they were stored between the time of their relocation and the unspecified time of Gill's conversation with Neutra. Although Louis Gill had maintained his own practice in San Diego with no professional connections to his uncle after 1919, it is curious that he would not have known about the fire or would not have later recalled it when he and McCoy searched and sent out calls for the missing papers in the 1950s.

    Proceeding, in any case, without those papers, I have combined in this study the methods of the historian with the sensibilities of the archaeologist--attempting to divine meaning from the shards of Gill's experience without the explicative narrative analogues that may once have existed in graphic and literary form. All works of history, all reconstructions of the past, are, to a certain extent, mysteries to be solved by historical detective work. Yet a book on an achievement as underdocumented as Gill's must be fuller than one might wish of troubling lacunae and speculative inferences, of "must haves" and "might haves."

    While the Burnham and Neutra archives, for example, contain large personal and professional correspondence files, virtually nothing of that sort exists for Gill. In most cases, therefore, there is little way of knowing the circumstances under which Gill received particular commissions or the resulting relationships between him and his clients. Except through recollections of a few associates, friends, and family members, little is known of Gill's personal life, too little, in fact, to call any work on Gill a biography. Yet because of the crucial connections of life, work, and context, I have included, whenever appropriate, the aspects of Gill's life that have been recorded.

    While Gill seems, for example, to have been a liberal, left-of-center progressive, there is no specific record of his political affiliations. In the first decades of the twentieth century, like a number of his clients, he could have supported the progressive wing of either the Democratic or the Republican party. Since the radical Upton Sinclair was a close friend of his client Kate Crane-Gartz and may have lived for a time in the Pasadena duplex Gill designed for her in 1919, it is possible that Gill knew Sinclair and supported him politically.

    If readers are vexed by such gaps in Gill's story, they should know that I am equally troubled. Still, I believe that the evidence that does exist is more than enough to substantiate my argument for Gill's underappreciated significance. While dealing, on the one hand, with his regional affinities, and, on the other, with his "premonitory" influence--to use Hitchcock's phrase--I will also attend to the more basic mission of all cultural and architectural historians: to measure Gill's success in realizing in his architecture the two essential qualities of all great building art--a regenerative shelter from the woes of the world and a stage for confronting and enjoying life.

Chapter One

GENESIS 1870-1896

GILL'S PATH TO SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, and to the realization of his achievement, began on April 26, 1870, when he was born near Syracuse in the farming village of Tully, New York. One of six children of Joseph and Cynthia Scullen Gill, Irving traced his paternal Anglo-American Quaker ancestry back through six generations to one John Gill who had immigrated from London to New Jersey around 1700. Cynthia Scullen's ancestry was predominantly Irish. Irving later seemed especially proud of the fact that he was also a descendant of the Anglo-Massachusetts colonist Myles Standish (1584-1656), mythologized in Longfellow's poem "The Courtship of Myles Standish." In the early nineteenth century, Gill's ancestors had moved northwestward into the "Burned-over District" of central New York, so named for the fiery evangelism of its religious and social-improvement movements, a state of mind that would pervade the family's values. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Gills had settled in Tully.

    The Quaker faith played a major role in shaping Gill's character. Founded in England in 1652 by George Fox to protest, among other things, the domination of the state in religious matters, the Society of Friends was based on the belief that the spirit of God dwelled in every person, individuals, therefore, could call on this Inner Light, without the intervention of ministers or church hierarchies, to discover Truth and humane modes of behavior. To protest what they believed to be privileged extravagance in all forms of expression, Quakers chose restrained simplicity, particularly in dress and architecture. While Irving's later buildings would reflect this influence, his clothing would defy it, since he was often described as dressing like a "dandy" in knickers, puttees, and stylish suits of richly textured fabrics.

    The Society of Friends studied the Bible as a source of wisdom and moral teaching and as a part of the continuing revelation of the Divine Spirit, but not as the final word of God. To confirm their strong belief in individual rights and equality of human beings, Quakers, both in England and America, opposed slavery and worked actively to promote other forms of social improvement, including the reform of prisons and insane asylums. Often the leaders in these causes were Quaker women, such as Carrie Mott, Dorothea Dix, Elizabeth Fry, and Susan B. Anthony, the latter of whom devoted her energies to the achievement of women's suffrage. Gill's moral commitments would confirm his loyalty to such ideals.

    Several Gill family members were in the building trades, and Joseph himself was a carpenter as well as a farmer. Indeed, his father's dual occupation anticipated Irving's later inclinations toward the integration of building, garden, and the larger landscape. The impact of his mother on his later life and work was a more indirect one, for in addition to normal memories of filial affection, Gill later told an interviewer that as a child and early teenager [fig. 2] he had become aware of the fact that his mother seemed constantly to be engaged in needlessly hard work. This was, he insisted, one of his major motivations for designing efficient houses requiring minimal caretaking effort.

    After attending Madison Street High School in Syracuse, Gill remained in the city to work, first as a gardener and then as an apprenticing draftsman in the architecture office of Ellis G. Hall, an experience that initiated him in the basics of his chosen profession and motivated him to seek higher and more challenging levels of architectural experience. Restless and impatient to get on with his career, Gill, like many other members of his architectural generation, chose not to attend college or architecture school. Thus it can never be known whether such an experience would have inhibited or enriched his native talent and intelligence. While more traditionally minded novices in the same time and place might have sought success in such established eastern cities as Boston, Philadelphia, or New York, Gill correctly perceived that the more adventurous future, for himself and for architecture, lay to the west in the booming city of Chicago.

    Even before trekking there in 1890, just as he turned twenty [fig. 3], Gill assured himself a smooth landing in the larger metropolis by cultivating his professional connections and securing a job in the Chicago office of Joseph Silsbee, formerly a partner of Ellis Hall's in Syracuse. It was significant that Silsbee, through a different set of circumstances, had in 1887 also cushioned the Chicago debut of a young Wisconsinite, Frank Lloyd Wright, for whose relatives Silsbee had designed a Shingle Style Unitarian family chapel near Spring Green, Wisconsin. In late 1887, the ambitious Wright had left Silsbee and moved to the even more prestigious firm of Adler & Sullivan, which, unlike Silsbee's mainly residential practice, focused on the design of the tall commercial towers that would come to be called "skyscrapers."

    Gill may or may not have met or heard of Frank Lloyd Wright through the Silsbee connection. Yet in 1891, when Gill also moved from Silsbee's to Sullivan's office, he worked for two years under the supervision of Sullivan and his chief draftsman, Wright. Years later, between 1912 and 1914, when young Lloyd Wright worked for Gill in San Diego and Los Angeles, he conveyed to his father Gill's expression of fear that the senior Wright would not remember him. "He is, to say the least, appreciative of your work.... To the inspiration he gained at that time, he lays a great deal of his success." Lloyd then quoted Gill's confession that "still you are as vivid a character to him as when he saw you last some twenty years ago."

    Even later, in 1932, when Lloyd described Gill to an architectural journalist as "the most original of all the architects ... on this coast stemming from Sullivan and the Chicago group" and sent a copy of this statement to his father, the senior Wright responded with characteristic hubris: "No. Gill worked for me at the office of Adler and Sullivan.... Met Sullivan not at all [ sic ]. His work was inspired by the straight line and the flat plane of my own work and he liked to refer to himself as my disciple." Wright then became momentarily more generous as he admitted that Gill did ultimately "carry on a line of experimentation along his own lines."

    Despite Wright's fantasy of having had Gill to himself, the latter worked closely with Sullivan on the design of the Transportation Building for the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, one of the fair's few official structures to eschew an academic neoclassical historicism [fig. 4]. The huge arch of its "Golden Door" must have lodged in Gill's mind as a vestigial model for the smaller and plainer, if no less noble, arches of his own mature work. Among the many things Gill took from his years with Sullivan was an appreciation of the simple clarity of the vernacular architecture of Arab North Africa. Lloyd Wright concluded from conversations with Gill and with the senior Wright that Sullivan "turned the eyes of his draftsman to the silent walls of Africa."

    During his formative Chicago years, Gill was also exposed to Sullivan's startling new skyscrapers in Chicago and elsewhere, including the epochal Wainwright Building, St. Louis (1890), completed the year before Gill entered his office [fig. 5]. In those same years, moreover, Gill could not have escaped the towering presence in the Chicago Loop of Burnham & Root's elegantly plain Monadnock Building (1889-91) [fig. 6] or of Henry Hobson Richardson's Marshall Field Wholesale Store (1885), a building whose boldly simple and ordered design became a major reference in Sullivan's own work. In the early 1890s, moreover, Gill would also have been introduced to the early residential work that his supervisor, Wright, was beginning to build in the Chicago suburbs, most notably the Winslow house, River Forest (1893) [fig. 7], completed the year Gill left Chicago.

    Gill's personal and professional journey to this point foreshadowed that of another great twentieth-century minimalist--the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969). Like Gill, Mies was strongly influenced by his craftsman father. He had no formal college or architectural education, but honed his talents and developed his ideas by apprenticing in the major Berlin design offices of furniture maker Bruno Paul and master architect Peter Behrens. Behrens, like his contemporary Sullivan, was renowned for his mentoring of promising talent, which included, during the time that Mies was in his office (1908-11), such other young prodigies as Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier.

    In addition to inspiring advanced architectural achievements, Chicago in the early 1890s was brimming with social and cultural activities that would coalesce into what would come to be called the Progressive Movement. A prime example of this ferment, which Gill would have encountered through Sullivan and Wright, was the progressive social activism of Jane Addams (1860-1935) and her colleagues at Hull House. After graduating from Rockford College in 1881, Addams had traveled to Europe and Britain, where, in London, she had been especially moved by the social-reform movements emanating from the "settlement house" Toynbee Hall. In 1889, with her friend Ellen Gates Starr, she founded an American equivalent, Hull House, in the slums of Chicago, which worked effectively toward the amelioration and enrichment of the urban immigrant experience.

    Addams's influential institution also served as a training ground for younger social reformers, who would transplant the Hull House idea to other regions and cities. Addams fought relentlessly in Chicago for better housing, schools, parks, and playgrounds, while working in the national and international movements for women's suffrage, working-class entitlements, racial equality, and world peace, causes that would retain Gill's sympathy and would indirectly affect his work. Hull House was also a cultural cornucopia in its sponsorship of concerts and lectures, including an appearance in 1901 by Frank Lloyd Wright. In attempting to combat the frequently destructive antagonism between artists and craftsmen, on the one hand, and the Industrial Revolution, on the other, Wright issued a significantly modernist call for integration in his aptly titled lecture, "The Art and Craft of the Machine."

    Louis Gill later recalled his uncle's confession that in Chicago he "realized what a wonderful training he was receiving under Sullivan, and, literally, nearly worked himself to death. He finally became very ill with ptomaine poisoning and was told by the doctors that he must get to a warmer climate for the winter, away from the cold and windy Chicago." Unfortunately, Gill confused the exhaustion of his immune system with emotional and professional failure and "downhearted and discouraged ... decided to get as far away as possible from the scene of his failure. San Diego answered the requirements of climate and was about the farthest spot from Chicago in the United States." It was for this reason "and no other," Louis concluded, that in 1893, Gill moved to San Diego. Gill may have known that Sullivan had visited the area in 1889 and found it appealing. San Diego "was a crude town, but of promise," Louis observed. "It restored his health and made possible another try at his chosen profession. He always loved it and never left Southern California during the rest of his life."

ON SEPTEMBER 28, 1542, 351 years before Gill's arrival, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, a Portuguese navigator sailing for Spain, had become the first European to discover San Diego Bay, naming it San Miguel. A subsequent explorer, Don Sebastiano Vizcaino, arrived in 1602, renaming it San Diego. A century and a half later, in 1769, the Franciscan padre Junipero Serra walked northward from Loreto, Mexico, to establish a presidio and mission near the bay, but conflicts between soldiers and natives prompted him in 1774 to move the mission to its permanent site further inland. Use of the harbor by British and American shippers was well established by 1822 when Mexico won its independence from Spain and extended its rule to California. In 1846, the Mexican War brought United States troops to the bay under John C. Fremont, who raised the American flag over San Diego Plaza. With California's admission to the union in 1850, San Diego became an American city.

    The first lasting San Diego newspaper, the Union , began publication in 1868, the year before Alonzo E. Horton purchased and began developing a thousand-acre tract of land that would soon become the public, commercial, and early residential heart of the city. In 1885, when the arrival of the California Southern Railroad linked San Diego with the East, the city's population increased within two years from five thousand to around forty thousand people. This quickly led to vast amounts of building, residential and commercial, in the traditional historicist styles of the day. Yet suddenly the boom went bust, and people left the city as frantically as they had come to it. By 1890, San Diego's population had leveled off at about sixteen thousand people, with a resulting surplus in building stock, a situation that worsened with the onset of the national depression in 1893. At the same time, the number of the city's architectural firms shrank from fourteen to four. By 1893, San Diego had had electric lights for only twelve years and telephones for only seventeen. It would be another decade before automobiles appeared on the city's dusty streets or airplanes in its skies.

    Because of the economic depression, national and local, it was a less than auspicious moment for establishing an avant-garde architectural practice. To make ends meet, Gill had for some years to take whatever jobs he could get. His illness, Louis Gill observed, "had drained away his savings and he had to have work." This often meant that he had to jettison temporarily the principles he had learned from Wright and Sullivan that form should follow and articulate function and should find expression in an elegant simplicity. Even Wright and Sullivan in their own early careers had confronted variations of the same dilemma.

    In the California climate, Gill recovered his robust health and set up a small, one-man office. Yet, even in such modest circumstances, his personal charisma was sufficiently appealing to attract an interviewer from the San Diego Golden Era , who reported in August 1893 that "Mr. Gill intends nothing short of revolutionizing the country architecture of this fair `Italy' of ours. Many of his graceful and suitable designs are already in the hands of the carpenter." The word many was probably hyperbole, since no evidence exists of any such magnitude.

    To increase his prospects, Gill entered a year later into an architectural partnership with Joseph Falkenham, a local purveyor of "Queene Anne" Victoriana. After the two designed several fashionably eclectic houses and a downtown commercial building with large plate-glass windows, the peripatetic Falkenham left San Diego, and Gill found himself once again on his own.

    Yet from the beginning of his stay in San Diego, Gill had sufficiently established himself to receive commissions from prominent families, including the minimally ornamented residence for Daniel Schuyler (1893), his first San Diego building [fig. 1]; the gambrel-roofed, Shingle Style house for George Garrettson (1896); and the large, restrained, "neo-Georgian" Abel Frost residence (1896) [figs. 8, 9].

    The most unusual of Gill's early buildings was the eccentric Windemere for John Kendall, La Jolla (1894), a small, two-story house shaded by pagoda-like roofs with widely flaring eaves supported by large carved wooden brackets. A pergolaed front porch shades the lower floor. Interior stairs to the second story are framed by a handsomely plain spindled railing. Composed a year later, the earliest of Gill's surviving architectural renderings reveals a modest, if sprawling, seaside bungalow for Gail Nichols (1895). The fetchingly meandering vacation cottage, later destroyed by fire, was situated so effectively on Coronado Island that on clear days its view extended all the way to Mexico [fig. 10]. Neither residential nor commercial, the Grainger Music Hall, National City (1896), is a plain, long, oblong structure, with Sullivanesque interior ornament and large round porthole windows. Designed for concerts and for securely housing a rare collection of Stradivarius violins, the hall originally contained an elaborate organ.

    Of all of Gill's early efforts, the most prescient was the Horton house, National City (1895), an engagingly simplified abstraction of prevailing Victorian modes [fig. 11]. As Gill himself had done before, the Boston-reared financier David Horton moved to California for reasons of health. A large shareholder in the San Diego Land and Town Company, Horton was persuaded to migrate by his local associate, Frank Kimball, who argued in the best booster rhetoric that "no other place can compare for healthfulness of climate. You will get more comfort living here for ten years than a lifetime in any other place. While a person remains on the terrestrial globe, there is no better place to live." Gill would have fervently agreed.

    With its bold geometry and its strong, unornamented wall planes dramatically punctured with large, plain, plate-glass windows, the Horton house shared affinities with similarly stripped-down, late-Victorian houses of the 1890s by Frank Lloyd Wright in the suburbs of Chicago and by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in the suburbs of Berlin. More than any of Gill's early buildings, the Horton house quietly predicted his revolutionary work to come.

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