USING LEFT-OVER LOTS

from Sunset magazine May, 1919

By Persis Bingham

When civil engineers lay out residence tracts in hilly districts there are sure to be several "remnant" lots that nobody seems to want. These left-overs, lots which usually border canyons or ravines, are often queerly situated. The average well-to-do man scorns their irregular contours and limited area, but to the man of moderate means who possesses an active imagination they present interesting opportunities. One of these lots, which has been remarkably well improved, lies along the edge of a thickly overgrown canyon winding through San Diego's most popular residence section and has been admired for years.

The lot is about thirty feet deep and extends along the canyon's brink for about one hundred and fifty feet. On the narrow foundation two attractive little houses have been built, ingeniously connected by a vine-covered arch which gives them the appearance of being one dwelling. So narrow was the lot at the south end that much of the yard had to be filled in and supported by a cobblestone wall, but this has only added to the picturesqueness of the group. The houses overlook a shrub-lined, green-brown ravine, with a perspective of stately eucalyptus trees and the shining Pacific. Both dwellings are exactly alike as to plan, having been designed as units of a community dwelling scheme that could be continued indefinitely. A glance at the floor plan will reveal a marked resemblance to the now popular "court scheme" of building; in fact these two units might be called the advance guard of the court scheme, but the plan is as up-to-date as that of any modern bungalow court. The outer shell of the house is square, the most economical shape to construct from the standpoint of labor and material. There is only one door to each house; a glance at the contour of the lot will show why, but there are two methods of approaching this door. One is from the rear alley, the other from the foot-path following under the brow of the hill, in front of the houses.

French double doors lead into a tiny entrance hall, conveniently fitted with a full-length mirror in the south wall. To the left is the bedroom hallway, and straight ahead, entered through a cased opening is the living room. In the house farthest south the living room has been furnished in blue, a soft warm shade having been chosen, the shade that contrasts most snappily with occasional dashes of bright orange. The room is twenty feet long by fourteen wide and has both western and southern exposure. At all times of the day it is flooded with sunlight which adds greatly to its general atmosphere of cheerfulness. The most interesting feature of the room is a jolly little blue window-seat occupying the south-east corner. Two seats each six feet wide, run at right angles to each other, each seat having a wide view-window above it and two long-hinged casements at either side. The seat upholstering is of plain blue, curtains above it are of white scrim with cretonne side drapes of deep blue foliage against a night-black background with orange-gold moons peeping through olive-green pine boughs. These side drapes form a fitting frame for the view out doors--the blue of the sky harmonizes with the blue cretonne, the green vines trailing down from the eaves find an answering echo in the pine branches, and the black background forms a setting for the whole. A little white breakfast table placed in the angle formed by the seats furnishes a cozy breakfast nook, just the place to sit and read the morning paper over a cup of coffee.

In the center of the east wall is a dark red brick fireplace, six feet wide and extending to the height of the window head casing. The hearth has been raised nearly a foot above the level of the floor and projects eight inches out into the room. The edge of the hearth has been raised the width of one brick so that ashes will not blow into the room, and continuation of this ledge furnishes a low seat close by the fire, quite comfortable on a cold winter's night. Above the mantel shelf the brick-work has been recessed back eight inches to make room for a shelf of books and the family bronze Bengal tiger. A nearby case of full red-leather encyclopedias blends well with the brick fireplace; a blue stenciled rug on the dull red brick floor, a narrow framed picture against the light tan wall set in panels of white woodwork, a reading lamp on the library table, a Maxfield Parrish and Alexander's Pot of Basil complete the simple furnishings of this very comfortable room.

From the living room a door leads to the tiny kitchen. A wood-stone draining board and sink extend the full length of one side with the space above occupied by roomy cupboards. To the right is the gas stove and work table with window above and more cupboards on either side. The floor area is barely sixty square feet. From the entrance hall a smaller hall leads to the bathroom and bedroom. The latter is furnished in pink and white with white woodwork, window curtains and furniture. The wall is tinted a warm gray shade, pink rugs are on the floor and a pink cretonne curtain hangs between the roomy clothes closet and bedroom.

This comfortable little home was designed by Irving J. Gill, architect, and was one of the first in which he tried out flush-finish windows and door jambs and slab doors. The success of his experiment is ably attested by the marked popularity of these two little houses and the fact that they stand today as clean, as livable and in as good repair as the year they were built. Woodwork has been repainted, of course, walls retinted and plastering patched, but the shell of the house is as firm and solid as ever. Wooden doors throughout have been made with absolutely flat surfaces; no molds or panels to collect dirt, and all baseboards, door and window jambs are constructed flush with the plaster instead of being nailed over it. The floor is made of large dark red bricks, laid flat and covered by a thin coat of cement which has sunk down into the mortar joints just enough to lend an interesting texture to the surface. This has been painted, waxed and oiled and, according to those who have lived with it, is far superior to a wood floor.

Editors note: although Bingham does not mention it, she and her husband, draftsman/architect Robert Cassiday, rented this house during 1919 from Irving's nephew Louis Gill.

New conditions and new materials form a just basis for deviation from the accepted forms in architecture, and much that is unusual is to be found in the work of Irving J. Gill, a California architect, who, disregarding dead traditions, has fixed his attention upon the newest building material, concrete, and upon the practical requirements of modern living conditions. In the examples of his work which are shown on these pages may be seen the beauty which is attained when mere ornament is eliminated and the aim of the architect is excellence of craftsmanship and the perfect suitability of each part of a house to its proper use.

Mr. Gill has done and been all those things which he deplores and decries. In that post-Columbian period when it was decreed that America must forswear the crudities of her youth as she had forsworn, unhappily, certain graces of her infancy, and become consciously and determinedly "artistic." Mr. Gill, like many another architect, became a shameless imitator. Like the others he built near-Greek schoolhouses for little American girls and boys, near-Gothic churches for non-ritualistic Methodists and Baptists, houses with a dash of Swiss or English or Black Forest or other foreign flavor for plain every-day American citizens.

So well did he succeed in this, that a famous landscape architect took him to Newport to build for him a house on a point of rock jutting into the bay. He also built a house for Mr. William Hunter at Sunnyside Farm, for Mr. Louis B. McCagg at Bar Harbor, for the Misses Mason, for Mr. Louis Butler, and for many others besides these.

Hailed as an apostle of "artistic" architecture, Gill then went in for unique combinations of shingle and cobbles, for box-beam ceilings and low-pitched overhanging roofs. He went the limit of the ultra-foolishness born of a determination to be artistic or die in the attempt, and he did it with a certain grace and with success.

Quite at the height of his Newport popularity, with all the commissions any young architect could desire, this architect experienced a complete revulsion of feeling. He paused to ask himself for what reason he was continuing to go on and on with the refining of details which were in themselves wholly useless and void of meaning. It seemed, all at once, a senseless waste of energy, this elaborating of caps and moldings and door panels, this polishing of machine-turned newels and jig-saw ornament that served no purpose but dust-catching. Beyond question, he decided, the twentieth century must have a word to say for itself in architecture. America with its new and great needs can not remain forever inarticulate save as it babbles unintelligently the strange jargon of its elders among the nations.

So in the midst of his success at Newport, this artist dropped his work and went back to California and built for himself a house designed to express something of a new purpose. He built it quite near to one built in the manner that had won him his vogue. The first one had hand-patted plaster, beamed ceilings, fractables, and other effects deemed the height of art. The new one was monastic in its simplicity. Concrete was just coming into use, and Gill saw in it a medium for the expression of his purpose-a purpose dominated by simplicity and sincerity.

He began a ruthless elimination of all features that had come to seem useless. He left off picture-moldings, chair-rails, baseboards. He had to use wood door and window frames, but these he made absolutely plain, without molding or beading. Gradually he reduced them in thickness, then sunk them flush with the plaster. And when he had reached this limit, by common consent and his own confession, a Gill interior was about as ugly as anything could be. This was because he had brought himself face to face with an ugly truth,--that building had become in the course of a century a cheap trade. It was no longer a craft.

His aim was to remedy this condition, and to accomplish it he became builder as well as architect. He selected his workmen carefully and dogged them ceaselessly until he made them put something beside eight or ten hours a day into their work. Then he himself designed a steel door and window frame that would perform the structural function of the old wood frames and thus eliminate a feature that had become a mere irritation; this was frankly a compromise-to his clients with their memory of what had been, to himself with his vision of what was to be. A hard smooth plaster that would neither chip at a glance nor crumble at a touch, was adopted, and the plasterers were urged to a perfection of their work that stops little short of art.

The placing and groupings of windows were reconsidered and plans worked out that gave them a new significance. Doors were reduced to sheer slabs of beautiful wood, hand-finished and swung on invisible hinges. For a time, stairways were banished from their dominant place in the hall; later they were brought forth again, but only on condition that they must dominate the hall by an intrinsic merit, not from a mere habit of thought. This merit may lie in the hand-wrought, hand-polished spindles of specially designed balustrades or, as in the case of one of his most recent houses, the success may be founded on what seems an utter contradiction of the architect's principles-a machine product.

The architect shows himself a modern among moderns in that he seeks not to belittle but to glorify this age of machinery. He scorns the use of machine-made tile, of machine-turned grill or newel, of machine stamped cornices, for they are a cheap imitation of something done better by hand. But he delights in a mahogany veneer that has been brought to absolute perfection by machinery. In some of his houses he has used for library or billiard room a mahogany veneered paneling which spreads around the room seamless, guiltless of cap or molding that might distract attention from the perfect joining and finish, with no cracks or creases where dust may lodge and elude detection. His finest example of this work is in a hall which is paneled from floor to ceiling and on the stair landing to the ceiling of the second floor. It is impossible to detect a seam, and the effect is rather of something laid on in plastic state. A buttress newel rises sheer and capless, and the balusters and rail of the balustrade on the upper landing are square-cornered. It is a triumph of machinery and wholly out of range of competition by handicraft.

By leaving off useless ornament Gill has been led to see defects in proportions and so has given more and more attention to proportion, to the harmony of a house and its surroundings, to the perfection of those details which are really essential. The mail-box, the outside doorway of a refrigerator, the kitchen sink, the butler's pantry, the servants' quarters, all come in for the same care as the drawing-room mantel, a window box, or the front door.

Quite unconsciously this architect drifted into the maelstrom of the modern art movement. He was steering a solitary course with a definite eager purpose. He wanted to fit present day houses to present day needs; he wanted to do away with dust and dirt, to make home-building a craft instead of a trade; and he wanted, incidentally, to glorify utility qnd stability. And by his process of elimination, he found himself reduced presently to the use of straight lines, simple curves, plain surfaces. All unwittingly he was saying what the cubists were saying in their picture, a little more intelligibly, perhaps, to the layman.

By his works rather than by any words, one comes to understand the principles on which he works. He has passed those periods when he had to compromise with clients too conservative to follow him to the limit of his doctrine. His later exteriors proclaim to all the world the new gospel of simplicity and sincerity. His houses are a frank challenge. One either likes them or does not like them; no one can be wholly indifferent, and gradually more and more people have come to like them. Stripped of the artifices under which architects are wont to hide not only their lack of originality but any sincere purpose they may have, these houses force those who see them to think before they build.

With ever so little belief that a useful thing may have a beauty of its own, those who study his houses begin finding that beauty. These houses built with the purpose of banishing dirt have the essential beauty of perfect craftsmanship. With less than perfect craftsmanship, they would fail of their purpose. Freed from the distraction of meaningless ornament, the eye finds satisfaction in subtle proportion, in the dignity of unbroken surfaces, in the grace of a perfect arch, in plastering well done, in the play of light and shadow on a wall.

While Gill will not admit that his primary object was other than the practical one of a positive cleanliness, he could not have been unmindful of the incidental esthetic result of the magic wall tone, which he uses almost invariably in his interiors. This tone is seemingly neutral, but it plays incessantly with the color of every object in the room or outside the windows, it responds to all the varying lights between dawn and twilight, leaving one bewildered by an exquisite sense of elusive coloring. The exterior walls of his houses are sometimes white, sometimes softly tinted, and invariably the trim of the narrow door and window frames is the green of verdigris. At first glance some critics accuse this architect of Puritanism. He is rather sybartic in his joy in the delicacy of reflected color, as is revealed in his introduction of vivid color effects in the tile mosaic of wall fountains, in the lining of small pools, and in the windows on a certain stair landing, where he has used narrow deeply beveled panels of glass that break the suns rays and scatter them in rainbows over the wall.

His love of color is shown, too, in the overmantel of a recent house, designed and wrought in the spirit that made the periods of the French Louis immortal. Instead of copying the over-worked fleur-de-lis and garlands of those periods, he took as his Motif the leaf and berry of the California holly, for it is part of his creed that we should consciously assume the attitude of ancestor and not be content to remain perpetually the descendants of others. It is here that he joins hands with the futurists. He hopes gradually to combat our Puritanic fear of color and intends to introduce color more and more into his work. But he would not have color distract the eye from defects in the essentials, but merely enhance the beauty of otherwise perfect details.

In some of the houses built by this architect, cement floors have been substituted for the accepted floors of polished wood. By careful attention to technical detail these are made most sanitary and comfortable, and by special treatment with color and oil they have developed exceptional beauty, suggesting the texture and richness of old Spanish leather.

Trees, shrubs, vines, and flowers this architect proves to be a hundred times more helpful to the architect then the jig-saw and all its endless litter of flimsy ornament, or the machine that fashions sheet metal into the form of carved stone. Fill makes nature a full partner in all his work, and assigns her a definite part. He leaves wide wall spaces for vines to cover with delicate tracery or deep arabesque, with shadow tinting and bold splashes of color. He counts on a rose hedge, an Italian cypress, a palm, or an oak tree for special service in the general scheme; and as time ripens his work, many who come to criticise remain to praise. His walled gardens are open-air additions to the house, charming in their privacy, a refuge from the street front with its din and distractions. His negation of the non-essential has resulted in a positive affirmation that use has a rare beauty, that beauty based on simplicity of line, bold mass, perfect proportion, and harmony between house and garden is more satisfying than in its more artificial and intentional forms.

His California clients are not faddists. They are people who have grown tired of even the best imitations of foreign architecture, who have no desire to live in a modified Chinese pagoda or a Japanese temple or an Americanized English manor-house or a fake French chateau. They want a twentieth-century house built with reference to the twentieth-century needs of twentieth-century Americans. Among them are such people as the Misses Lee, sisters-in-law of Theodore Roosevelt, Mrs. Henry H. Timken, Mr. W.J. Bailey, Miss Ellen Scripps, the well-known philanthropist, and many others in Sn Diego where he has worked longest; in Los Angeles are Mr. Homer Laughlin, Mrs. Mary H. Banning, widow of the owner of Catalina Island, Mr. Walter Luther Dodge, the Chicago capitalist, who recently retired to a fine country home in Hollywood, Mrs. Ella Giles Ruddy, the writer, Mr. Miltimore of Pasadena-one might go on indefinitely for perhaps no one architect has made so vivid an impress on the architecture of southern California as this man of to-morrow.

In the little seaside village of La Jolla, largely through the influence of Miss Scripps, Mr. Gill has had opportunity for the exemplification of his ideal in the grouping of a number of buildings of various sorts and uses. There is a girls' school with a small chapel nearby and another chapel and dormitory are soon to be added, there are also a woman's club house, a community house with public playground, bath-house, and other buildings adjoining, and a few private residences among which is the handsome home of Miss Scripps, standing a little apart on the edge of a picturesque bluff overlooking the sea. But for the rather unaccountable fact that some of the public buildings are without the usual finish of paint on the exterior, this is a striking group and illustrates beyond question that what is most needed in America is more of a community spirit in building and less of that insistent individuality which is content to be different without regard to taste. There may be harmony without monotony.

That is the secret of one man's success. Only when he ceased to copy and began to create did he discover that the enduring essence is the spirit and not the manner of the builder. Gill is not in the least modest about his work. He has the calm assurance of the absolute egoist-the man who knows where he is going and is on his way.

In concrete, Gill sees a medium for the expression of his purpose to build with sincerity and simplicity, for stability and usefulness. Though this house built at Hollywood, California for Mr. Walter Luther Dodge is yet too new to have fulfilled the architect's intentions, it makes clear his plan of making nature full partner in his work, and shows the harmony between house and grounds which results from such a plan.

Undistracted by meaningless ornament about this terrace, the eye may delight in perfection of proportion and of surface, for here plastering is little less than an art.

The walls which surround the gardens of the Dodge house are of a soft rose tone, like the house itself, and set in a recess beneath the pergola is a wall fountain in bright mosaic.

The fine old oak at the garden of the home of Mrs. Paul Miltimore at South Pasadena illustrates the skill with which this architect makes trees and vines fill a special niche in his general scheme.

One may try to trace a likeness of his style to that of the Pueblo Indians, the Persians, the Algerians-to somebody, somewhere, but in the end one finds it more unlike than like to any previous style. Magnificent use of the palm tree as a detail is made at the home of Mr. H.H. Timken, San Diego.

The stairway which dominates the hall by virtue of inherent merit is exemplified in the handsome mahogany stairway at the home of Mrs. Mary Banning at Los Angeles. Baseboards and door frames are seen to be eliminated here.

Not a Roman, a Spanish, or a Moorish arch, is this, but a Gill arch-a simple curve of beautiful proportion, ideal for a vista. This arch forms the entrance to a group of cottages at Sierra Madre, a mountain suburb of Los Angeles.

Walled gardens, delightful in their privacy, give an old-word air to the houses of this ultra-modern architect, and the soft tones which he gives to the plaster are an unending joy to the eye.

From Concrete, May, 1918

Early in the history of concrete construction, Colonel Aiken, U.S. Army, devised a system of casting the walls of buildings in a horizontal position and raising them with special equipment. Numerous buildings were erected, notably at army posts, but the system was not widely used. In the construction of a concrete house at Hollywood, Cal., the walls were pre-cast in a horizontal position and raised by motor-driven jacks. The house was designed by Irving J. Gill and erected under his supervision.

After the foundation for the house had set, the floor slab was laid and on this jacks for the erection of the walls were placed, which are well shown by Figs. 3 and 7. Twelve feet of floor space was required in which to place the jacks, on which tilting tables, built of 2" x 6" rough planks were laid over steel walking beams. The number of jacks used and the spacing of them depended on the weight and size of the wall to be supported.

Door and window openings were laid out, the metal jambs set in place and the remaining surface of the wall form covered with hollow tile spaced for reinforced concrete beams to give proper stiffness; twisted steel rods were then placed vertically and horizontally, and the wall was ready to be poured. Concrete was wheeled up an incline, dumped, leveled off and allowed to set.

The upper surface (the outside of the wall) was finished in its tilted position before being raised.

The power for erection was obtained from a 5 h.p. gasoline engine and transmitted to the jacks by a shaft through their pedestals. A worm gear mechanism extended all jacks at exactly the same rate.

From 1/2 hour to 2 hours was required to raise each wall, the time depending on the weight, shape and position of the wall.

Horizontal rods left projecting from the ends of the walls were bound together after two adjacent walls had been raised to an upright position. A form 2" wide was built up the entire height of the wall, and into this concrete was poured, producing a concrete and hollow tile steel reinforced with twisted steel bars.

Roof joists are held in place by anchors, for which provision had been made in the concrete wall, and 1" by 6" sheathing covered by a gravel composition was used for the roofing. Interior partitions are of metal lath on wood studding, and the rough concrete slab has been covered by a finish coat reinforced with wire cloth.

Special metal door and window frames were used, manufactured from No. 22 galvanized iron bent to shape and provided with perforated flanges, through which the concrete forms a key. The plastering finishes flush to the corners of the frames, which act as a corner bead for both exterior and interior wall surfaces. Each side of the frame is bent from one piece of metal so there is no danger from cracks.

Sanitation and fireproofing are the features of the finish, as well as the structural details. There are no moldings or panels on the doors, simply plain slab surfaces easily cleaned or dusted, while the absence of baseboards, ceiling, plate rails, door and window casings and picture molding makes the house as nearly dirt proof as is possible.

The experience gained in the construction indicates that it has possibilities for economy that will recommend its more extended use.