Cityscape: Iconic San Diego architect Irving Gill’s Depression-era creativity

Common wisdom has it that Irving Gill, San Diego’s most important architect, designed his most important buildings in the early 1900s, in San Diego and Los Angeles. But an exhibit on view at the Oceanside Museum of Art shows a late-life burst of creativity during the Depression, when Gill was living in Carlsbad, before his death in 1936. 

“Modern Simplicity: The Architecture of Irving J. Gill in Oceanside” runs through April 26 and presents Gill’s designs in historical and current photos along with reproductions of blueprints, drawings and renderings. The exhibit was curated by architect James B. Guthrie, founder and president of the Irving J. Gill Foundation, and Heath Fox, former executive director of the La Jolla Historical Society who has curated many exhibits.

While the show is disappointingly small, occupying a tiny second-level gallery at OMA, it provides a concentrated dose of Gill.

For the unitiated, Gill was an East Coaster, the son of a carpenter, who worked for prominent Chicago architects Joseph L. Silsbee and Adler & Sullivan. He moved to San Diego in the 1890s and partnered with William S. Hebbard on projects such as the historic Marston House (1904) near Balboa Park before emerging as an early modernist in following years.

“Gill began to develop an architectural language that was radically new,” reads the curators’ text. “Inspired by Southern California’s climate, topography, and historic building traditions, he stripped architecture of unnecessary ornament and focused on pure geometric form, flat roofs, white walls, and the honest expression of structure.” 

These qualities are readily apparent in Oceanside, where Gill crowned his career with designs represented in the exhibit: the city hall/library (1934) that is now part of OMA, the Blade-Tribune building (1936, now The Blade restaurant), the Nevada Street Kindergarten (1931, later torn down), the Americanization School (1931) and the police and fire station (1929) on the corner adjacent to OMA, soon to be occupied by the museum. Several unbuilt Oceanside designs are also on view, showcasing the full range of his talent.

The exhibit is partly a lead-up to OMA’s unveiling early next year of the design for its expansion into the station and the launch of a fundraising campaign. The station will complete OMA’s complex of two Irving Gill buildings flanking the main building (2008) designed by Frederick Fisher and Partners of Los Angeles, which already incorporates the city hall remodeled and occupied by OMA in 1997.

One cool thing about the exhibit is that you can explore Gill’s designs in the gallery, then walk along Pier View Way in front of the museum and North Nevada Street by the fire station to consider his work in 3D. 

Gill’s one-story city hall, now occupied by OMA’s gift shop and a gallery, is fronted by an arcade, one of his signature design elements, which connects indoor and outdoor spaces. Long rectangular forms are free from decorative detail, and the building’s vitality comes from the interplay of arches and right angles.

Fisher did a masterful job bringing touches of Gill into his design of OMA’s central main  building. The two-level structure contains a spacious lobby, offices and OMA’s main galleries. Plain white walls echo the walls of Gill’s buildings, while a bank of steel and glass at one corner and a wall of glass along the first level bring contemporary zing. 

While the city hall is basic Gill, his fire and police station building is a collection of cubes and arches that remind one of Cubist paintings. Gill’s color rendering of this building captures the romance of his architecture as he imagined it: flowering vines climb plain white walls, stacked cubic volumes form a striking and symmetrical composition, arcades run along the edges.

OMA has evolved into one of our region’s prime locations for art, especially by local artists (and architects), and Oceanside offers a good sampling of Gill. But the city would have many more of his buildings if his scheme for a civic center on the blocks adjacent to OMA had been realized. Gill’s plan, as shown in the exhibit, takes its cues from the California missions, with long, low arcaded buildings surrounding a plaza. It might have been stunning, if a bit stark, but stalled, partly due to the Depression. 

Instead, in 1990, on these blocks, the city opened a civic center designed by star architect Charles Moore, whose zany style (see: Plaza d’Italia, New Orleans) is the polar opposite of Gill’s. In Oceanside, though, Moore toned it down, and his civic center, including new city hall buildings and a library, has plain walls and arches that mirror Gill’s, but in other areas, wilder forms and arrays of sherbet-colored tiles that flow up along walls and down through a man-made alluvial creek-bed.

For architectural historian and curator Guthrie, 68, who retired from architecture and is currently working toward a PhD in architectural history at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, the exhibit marks a milestone: the 10th anniversary of the Irving J. Gill Foundation that he created to preserve and build upon Gill’s legacy. Along with several exhibits, the foundation’s achievements include tracking down Gill’s long-lost ashes and interring them at Mt. Hope Cemetery in ceremonies last year. 

Gill’s 1936 death certificate gives his occupation as “laborer,” and for many years it seemed that he had died in obscurity. But this exhibit proves his architecture was still vital in his final years, and Guthrie has researched an account of the architect’s final hours that may explain his death certificate.

Following a heart attack in Carlsbad, where he lived, Gill was taken to a hospital in Hillcrest. Guthrie believes that Gill was still conscious there, and he thinks that in spite of being known as a leading San Diego architect, Gill specified that he be identified as a “laborer.” 

Maybe he thought that the humble moniker better reflected a career that began when he built houses with his father, and in San Diego, experimented with concrete buildings. “He saw himself not just as an architect but as a working man,” Guthrie says. “Maybe that’s what he was most proud of.”

Dirk Sutro has written extensively about architecture and design in Southern California and is the author of architectural guidebooks to San Diego and UC San Diego. His column appears monthly in Times of San Diego, and he also writes about houses for San Diego Magazine.