Irving Gill - Biography

Biography

Gill was born in Tully, New York (near Syracuse), the son of Joseph Gill, a carpenter and farmer.

Irving Gill had no formal education in architecture and never attended college. He apprenticed to architect Ellis G. Hall in Syracuse and then moved to Chicago, Illinois, 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's biggest assignment there was work on the Transportation Building for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

He moved to San Diego, California in 1893, for health reasons, and immediately started his own architectural practice, specializing in large residences in eclectic styles. He later had an 11-year partnership with William S. Hebbard that produced good work, important to San Diego County history but less known nationally. The Hebbard & Gill firm was known for work in the Tudor Revival and later the Prairie School styles. The George W. Marston House (now a museum) is its most famous project.

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 he was to be promoted to partner. Irving Gill (known as Jack to his friends) became a pioneer in rational, early modernist design for residences and commercial buildings.

In 1911 Gill lost an important commission for the Panama-California Exposition (1915) to Bertram Goodhue. He did do some early design work as an associate under Goodhue, of which the most notable was the Balboa Park Administration Building, the first structure built in Balboa Park. It became part of the California Quadrangle which Goodhue completed. The building is now the Gill Administration Building of the San Diego Museum of Man, housing administrative offices and the Gill Auditorium.

Gill started living and mainly working in Los Angeles county after this time, although the Gill & Gill partnership lasted until 1919. Multiple projects for the fledgling city of Torrance probably prompted the move. 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.

Gill was commissioned by Ellen Browning Scripps to design the La Jolla Woman's Club building. This prominently sited building (1912–14) is considered one of Gill's masterpieces. It was similar to his other works, simple in style. Gill used the "tilt-slab" construction technique to assemble the exterior walls on-site. This building was the first tilt-up concrete building in California, and despite Gill's association with this building method, he used it in only a handful of structures. The exterior arcade walls only on this building were built with this method, the interior and pop-up center portions were constructed with normal balloon framing. The concrete in the tilted walls in this building was augmented with infill of hollow clay blocks to lighten the weight of the slab.

The most prominent Gill-designed project is probably the Electric Fountain in the center of Horton Plaza Park, in downtown San Diego. Despite being designed in the prime of his modernist period, it is atypical of his work, being in a revivalist style. Gill's design was chosen in a competition among professional architects, and was one of the first projects in the country to combine water and colored electrical light effects.