Career
Dodd spent nearly twenty seven years in Louisville. During this time his professional partners were Oscar Wehle, Mason Maury, Arthur Cobb, and Kenneth McDonald. Also, Dodd's output from these years contained many free-lance projects. He worked throughout Kentucky and across the midwest, specifically Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Tennessee, creating structures of exceptional craftsmanship and high style, designs which traced the transitional tastes and technologies of the period before Modernism. On the east coast, extant Dodd structures from the early 1890s can be found in Norfolk, Virginia's historic Ghent neighborhood.
In February 1913 Dodd departed the midwest and began a second career in the greater Los Angeles area which lasted until his death there in June 1930. In Los Angeles, Dodd partnered briefly with J. Martyn Haenke (1877–1963) and later, his longest partnership, with William Richards (1871–1945). Dodd's buildings are to be found in the old downtown financial district around Pacific Center, around Hollywood in Laughlin and Hancock Park, to the west in Rustic Canyon, Playa Del Rey and Long Beach, southeast to San Gabriel, and possibly northeast in Altadena. Related to Dodd's Los Angeles work are residences in Oak Glen and Palm Springs, California.
From as early as 1893, and to the end of his life, Dodd was a mentor to talented younger designers who were new to the profession, designers with now well-known names like Lloyd Wright, Thomas Chalmers Vint, and Adrian Wilson, often outsiders without a developed practice and contending with a new client base and fast evolving licensing standards in cities enjoying rapid expansion as was Louisville after the American Civil War and Los Angeles after World War I. The architect Julia Morgan, a mostly free-lance architect from upstate San Francisco, and rare as a female in a male-dominated domain, formed a team with W. J. Dodd and J. M. Haenke as her LA facilitators and design partners for William Randolph Hearst's Los Angeles Herald-Examiner Building, a landmark downtown project completed in 1915.
William Dodd's design work extended to glass and pottery. His designs of Teco pottery are among the most sought-after and rare of the Arts and Crafts movement products introduced by the famed Gates Potteries near Chicago Illinois. He also designed furniture and art glass windows for many of his best residential and commercial buildings. Examples of his work are to be seen in the Ferguson Mansion, currently The Filson Historical Society, and the Hoyt Gamble house, both of Louisville.
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