In the old classic days students did not go to schools as we now know them, but went to live in the home of some renowned scholar, became a member of his family, sat at table with him, walked with him over the hills, talked with him on life, philosophy, the arts and all the important questions of the day. Youths who wished to fashion things with their bands, to see the thought of their minds grow into visible beauty under their forming fingers, went to live with master craftsmen. Knowledge in those days which produced work that is still the inspiration of modern scholars and artisans was not "tacked upon the mind" by a system of memorizing certain unrelated facts, dates, rules and theories, but was "blended into its very substance" by days spent during the early formative period of their lives with men and women of culture and skill, in an inspiring home atmosphere.

Signs of the modern tendency to revert back to this wholesome old-time way of molding youthful ideals by daily association and by stimulating environment are apparent in the new school courses and school buildings being established throughout our country There seems to be a growing acknowledgment that the best teachers are men and women who live inspiring lives and not those tutors who must needs refer the child to the biographies of famous people for their ideals; that the best text books are the environments that call forth individual power, guiding rather than directing mental and physical activities, and that the best school buildings are homelike, beautiful structures, simple, dignified, airy, flooded with sunshine and above all sanitary.

Irving J. Gill, an architect of San Diego, California, whose progressive methods of design and construction keep critics divided into warring ranks of admirers and scoffers, has recently built a school at La Jolla down by the sea, known as the Bishop's School for Girls, which embraces the most radical theories. Its originality must certainly remain unquestioned. It is of concrete throughout, absolutely fireproof and sanitary, almost indestructible and so free from superfluous ornament that it furnishes a new standard for architectural simplicity.

In England, architects are seriously discussing the question of the possibility or impossibility of formulating a new style and are also sadly concerned over the "lamentable end of traditional architecture, due to the craze for reinforced concrete." They say they are awaiting the genius "who will breathe a soul into armored concrete." There should be no doubt of man's ability to formulate a new style, nor should there be questions of his ability to put vital beauty in lifeless concrete. Since it is "the privilege of the artist to pass the art of the ages through the crucible of his own personality and thus produce a new thing" the world is bound ever to produce new styles, for it holds many men of fresh, vigorous, fearless and original personality.

This school is an indication that a new style is actually being formulated in America, a style formed upon a foundation of classic simplicity of design and imperishableness of construction. The design is original, inasmuch as it goes directly back to the first principles of the line, the circle and the square for its inspiration, discarding every architectural device of every intervening age. It takes boldness to reject every applied ornament, to rely serenely upon proportion and upon masses of light and shade for beauty. But Mr. Gill has never lacked in courage and has won out in his long and fearless championship of simplicity. His houses which are now to be found throughout Southern California are powerful object lessons. It is impossible for one of his buildings to pass unnoticed, hence there has been no escaping their influence. People who once ridiculed their unadorned severity have come to call them beautiful, seeing something fine and chaste in their simple dignity, something that makes their ornamented neighbors seem cheap and artificial.

This school embodying as it does Mr. Gill's most radical points of revolution deserves detailed attention. The exterior depends for its beauty upon man's formal use of the line and curve (the first architectural principles taken from the horizon line of ocean and the arch of the sky above it) and upon nature's informal finish by tracery of vine. His buildings are never complete, and should never be judged, until after the gardener has taken hold of the work and brought it to a finish.

With the exception of a mosaic of broken glazed tile embedded in the plaster around the openings of the tower there is no decoration on the building. Even this little band of delicate color is a concession, a decided departure from his usual strict denial of ornament. But the brightness of the California sky and the sparkle of the ocean so near seemed to demand this bit of color, as a sympathetic link. The interior walls throughout the building are tinted a uniform warm gray and the ceilings white. The effect is by no means monotonous, for they have been treated in a way peculiarly his own, that is, surfaced so that they will catch color from sky and garden, from sunrise or sunset, until they glow like opals. Gardens bloom with reflected beauty upon these walls in a romantic, visionary, ever shifting, ever charming way. Every room is alive, changing constantly with the direction of light. Applied color seems set, stiff and lifeless compared with this shimmering, sensitive, will-o'-the-wisp coloring.

All the floors, even the floor of the assembly-ball stage, are of concrete finished smoothly and treated with a coat of paraffin applied hot. This is then rubbed down and waxed like a hardwood floor, making an excellent surface for dancing. One also that does not wear down, is easily kept in perfect order, and is absolutely sanitary. There are no cracks nor are there baseboards to catch and hold dust and germs for they were coved with the wall. The stairs also are of concrete made in one piece with the walls. All woodwork is flush with the walls, and the doors are of a single panel of wood. Door and window frames are of metal, also flush with the walls. Thus there is very little opportunity for dust to collect anywhere in this building.

Another interesting departure of this school is the use of the exterior courts, paved with concrete, and the arcade, as outdoor study and recitation rooms, for dancing and gymnasium work. All the graduation exercises, including the Bishop's reception and commencement dances, also take place in these large outdoor courts. The effect of gaily dressed people leaning over the parapets, standing under the arches and strolling over the lawn, against the plain white walls, is picturesque in the extreme. Under the night sky lighted with lanterns and flaming torches, the color effects obtained are even more noticeable.

The modern efforts to encourage individuality instead of molding it along arbitrary lines is again shown in the girls' bedrooms. Every room is severely plain, identical in finish and furnishings, in fact merely a white page upon which each girl may express her individuality. They are certainly eloquent and convincing object lesson s to professional decorators, for they are as varied as the girls themselves. Each girl is permitted to exercise her own taste in color, pictures, hangings, decorations, etc. Some rooms become overcrowded, others retain their nunlike simplicity. Some are rich of color, others exquisitely soft. If they ask help of the teachers in decorating their rooms they are advised to have few rather than many things, one good picture instead of the many trifling meaningless trinkets that make a room look cheap. The refinement of the general reception and dining rooms naturally has a marked effect upon their taste, and many rooms, filled at first with a foolish jumble of things, after a time are cleared of all but the best objects and pictures rehung with better taste. The personal supervision of this building reminds one of the old days of the master builders, when architects personally directed the workmen, and did not consider their work finished when the plan was completed. Each detail of this building was watched over with the zealous care that makes his work set a standard for others to follow. No definite formula for mixing concrete was given in the specifications, because a different strength was to be demanded of it for different parts of the building. Each day samples of concrete were taken from the forms and tested to various tensile strains. Samples of cement were constantly being subjected to severe tests and the sand put through a laboratory screen that it might be kept strictly to required meshes. This careful supervision of material enabled him to use smaller portions of cement and also to keep the reinforcing steal to the minimum quantity. The amount saved in this building compensated many times over for the expense and labor of constant overseeing and testing. Concrete walls are usually made far thicker than needed in order to allow for possible poor material. There was no need for such allowance in this case, for the material was of the best and constantly measured and tested. Such rigorous insistence on perfect quality and perfect workmanship also safeguards the construction.

In the school chapel Mr. Gill has made a gracious concession to the historic Mission spirit of California, as the facade of this simple little chapel is intended to keep the neighboring old adobe Mission of San Diego in remembrance. The arcade walls roofed with a trellis over which vines will some day be twining has materially helped in creating around this simple building an unusually sweet, reverent atmosphere. Its proportions and lines so well balanced and disposed, its walls so white and clean, its graceful bell tower and its setting of green lawn, palm trees and rose fences combine in making a most refreshing and satisfactory picture, one which is appreciated to the full by every passerby.

Ruskin tells us that it is a noble thing for men to make the "surface of a wall look infinite and its edge against the sky like a horizon"; to make a plain wall upon which one may mark the play of passing light upon its broad surface and to "see by how many artifices and gradations of tinting and shadow, time and storm will set their wild signatures upon it." Mr. Gill catches in his buildings the imperishable beauty of passing storms, noonday sunshine, witching moonlight and sensitive vines.

This is for America at least, a new ideal of architectural beauty. The ideal of giving to a permanent building the charm of a subtle, ever changing beauty, a beauty of mood, of expression as it were, like the play of varying emotion on a friend's face is well established in some old countries when they have had to deal with strong contrasts of sunshine and shade. There they have learned to appreciate the delicate tones that unite these contrasts, the overtones, the chromatic scale of lights and shadows.

Concrete Curves and Cubes

From The Independent. August 28, 1913

.

It is worth while to get a glimpse at the work of a Western architect who has deliberately limited himself to the cube, the hemisphere, the rectangle and the segment of a circle in developing a style of architecture that is not only unique but beautiful in its simplicity. Perhaps it is the American architecture so long looked for and not found except in sky- towers. The plain surface, unbroken by a cornice or window ledge, the severe arch without column as support, and a rectangular skyline, only occasionally relieved by the curve of a hemispherical dome are the contours and surfaces used by one of the most successful house planners on the Pacific Coast, Mr. Irving J. Gill.

In San Diego, the impress of his art is a characteristic feature of the city, for he has built there many beautiful residences, churches and monuments, which can be instantly recognized as his work, just as the technique of a Rembrandt or a Velasquez immediately identifies the canvases of those masters of another art. This is rare in architecture. Few indeed are the buildings we can place instantly as the creation of this famous architect of his equally prominent colleague, but a Gill house cannot be mistaken.

Two of the principal features on which he lays stress are the harmonious arrangement of masses and lines and the contrasting of the purely artificial and the purely natural. In the latter proposition, stress is laid upon foliage; the trees, vines and shrubs are not merely incidental decorations for a Gill residence, but are main factors. Thus, while a Virginia creeper obscures and renders meaningless the elaborate decorations of most buildings, it becomes a vivid decorative feature when climbing over the absolutely plain white surface of a wall. The charming irregularity of the tree or shrub forms the perfect complement of the rule-and-compass design of the simplest façade. The unexpected curves of a palm front afford exquisite relief to the severity of the right angle and the semi-circle.

Another point on which Mr. Gill bears hard is the delicacy of reflected colors upon a white, unbroken surface. This is too subtle for the average man, to whom a brick house is red and a whitewashed wall is simply white. To the observer of color, the white plain surface is composed of the most delicate and changing hues, taking tints from the green of the lawn, the shade of the tree, the blue of the sky, the crimson of the geranium bed, and with the varied lighting of morning and afternoon, clear weather and cloud, producing effects that are a delight to the trained eye.

One of the most successful works of this unusual genius is a building in Sierra Madre, on the slopes of the hills above Los Angeles, California. To call it an apartment house gives no hint as to its appearance. It is designed for several families, however, but there its resemblance to the apartment house ends.

It is built on two sides of a large lot, a one-story building that follows the irregular outline of the hillside, with a broken line of cubicles, joined by arches. The grounds are terraced and set out with palms and cypresses, and by way of contrast to the formal outline of the walls, the use of rough, unhewn blocks of granite is effective.

There is practically no limitation in building materials for this style of architecture.

The interior is treated, as the exterior, with extreme simplicity and with a dependence upon the decorative effect of flowers and furniture against unrelieved walls of neutral tone.

from Sunset Magazine August, 1915

CALIFORNIA'S FIRST

CUBIST HOUSE

By Bertha H. Smith

Too much "gingerbread" work on the outside. Too much dust-harboring finish on the inside. Too much flimsy material and too much shoddy workmanship both outside and in.

These were some of the charges brought by a Los Angeles woman against the ugly average American house when she summoned an architect to help her plan a new home. She didn't want a Swiss chalet, or a Mohammedan mosque, or an Italian villa, or an English manor house, or a French chateau, or an Irish thatched cottage, or a Japanese tea-house. These are all right where they belong, but they don't belong in the United States. She wanted just a simple, beautiful, useful house that would have a Made-in-America look about it and reduce the hard work of living to a minimum. The result is a unique and very interesting house. It is so simple in design that you can't understand how she dared to do it. It is so beautiful outside and in that you don't half believe it at first sight. It is so practical in all its details that even the servants are happy in it.

When Mrs. Mary Banning decided to build a house she was so ill it took two people to help her rise from an invalid's chair. But that did not matter. She had waited more than seventy years for a house that would be all she wanted it to be. And she meant to have it.

She had a lot of definite, original ideas about this house. And she had learned of an architect who had bolted all the customs and traditions that have achieved for the United States the distinction of having the ugliest domestic architecture of any country on the map. This architect sat by her chair and talked plans by the hour, humoring her whims, sure that she could not live to see the house started. But at last she urged him to begin it, thinking it would be finished in five or six months. It was not finished for a year, for as the work went on and new ideas came and, wanting everything the very best, both in material and workmanship, she had it all done by day's work and nobody scrimped and saved and sacrificed to insure a contractor's profit. Before the first wall was up, she was out of her invalid's chair and she counts that year one of the happiest of her life.

And the house? Well, if one must refer it to a definite style, it's a cubist house. Like all cubist art it makes you think and guess and imagine.

It kept everybody in the neighborhood guessing when they saw men day after day wheeling barrow loads of concrete onto a huge table supported at an angle of forty-five degrees by steel walking beams and still more when they saw a seventy-three-foot wall, smooth finished and complete with window and door openings, projecting window-boxes and small balconies, raised to perpendicular y means of a single little donkey engine. They kept on guessing as the house took form in simple cubic units, the walls rising sheer and roofless without cornices or trim of any kind, cutting boldly across the blue sky. Many are guessing yet, and some shake doubtful heads over this architectural heresy, for it does give a jolt to minds accustomed to the vagaries of orthodox frame houses with peaked roof, generous eaves, front stoops, broken lines and an excess of jigsaw ornament, as a stark truth shocks one trained to flattery and deceit.

But here is where the imagination comes in. The vines are only beginning to creep up the walls, the window boxes are not yet full of blooming plants, the garden is still too new to play its part. Trees, palms, shrubs, vines, flowers, all will have a definite object in relieving the monastic severity of the frank and simple outlines. Meanwhile, if you are susceptible to the subtle charm of true proportion, or a perfect arch, of shifting light and shadow on a wall, or a sky made bluer by the sharp contrast of a sheer white façade, you are the one to appreciate cubist architecture in the raw. It is for those who have eyes to see more than is patent to the average eye. Presently, when Time has ripened the work, slaves of the obvious will perhaps perceive more than they do now.

The outward form is merely an expression of the spirit within, of absolute simplicity, absolute sincerity, absolute independence. The most radical departure from orthodoxy on the interior is the almost complete absence of wood. There is no moulding for pictures or plates or chairs, no baseboards or paneling or wainscoting, no wooden window or door frames. The doors are beautiful, hand polished mahogany slabs swung on invisible hinges when they do not slide noiselessly out of sight in the walls. They are of such perfect craftsmanship that they need no apology of panel or beading.

In proof that this war on wood is not a matter of prejudice nor the architect the victim of an idee fixe, there is a rarely beautiful stairway in the hall with a balustrade of slender hand-turned spindles ending in a great swirl at the newel-post, and in the dining- room an elaborately carved sideboard that would otherwise have lived very inharmoniously with the rest of the dining-room furniture, of a distinctly different period. In the library, too, mahogany has been used in seeming contradiction of the general scheme but with obvious purpose and entire consistency.

With these exceptions the rooms are all free from the distracting, feverish attempt to divert attention by means of excessive ornamentation--false beams, elaborate beadings and mouldings, grotesque mantelpieces, what not?--from essential deficiencies, as one tosses a baby and shakes gay colored things before its eyes to make it forget it has the colic. These walls dare to be plain and unbroken because the man who plastered them is an artist and the plastering in itself is a thing of beauty; because also there is something satisfying in the proportion of the rooms and of the doors and windows. They dare to be of one finish from drawing room to farthest servant's chamber because the tinting that seems at first a monotone of grayish, drabish, pearly white is a living sensitive composition of strong primary colors which reveal themselves in the reflection of the red of mahogany or of a tile floor, the blue of an oriental rug, the gold flare of a bed of poppies outside a window or the many hues of a California evening sky. At no two hours or the day are these walls alike in color, nor to the eyes of any two people. It is like living in the heart of a shell and what may at first seem an expression of chronic asceticism proves to be rather the result of a sybaritic delight in color that glories not in obvious effect, rather in the occasional moment when the beveled glass of a western window on the stair landing filters the sun's rays into its primal colors and fans them over the walls and floor, or in the play of light and shadow from a passing cloud or a waving frond.

One might naturally wonder if a house like this requires special furniture. Mrs. Banning was besieged at every turn by professional decorators and furnishers to whom she wisely paid no heed. She had no intention of parting with any of the household treasures accumulated through the long years and seasoned with pleasant associations. Against much advice she moved them all into her new house where they settled themselves more friendly than before, many pieces gaining new value against a background that does not obtrude.

One might wonder, too, if attention to esthetic features has caused a sacrifice of practical details. It has not. No article in this new architectural credo is more strongly emphasized than the beauty of use. No more thought has been squandered on stair window or front door or wall tinting than the planning of a mail box that can be filled by the postman from outside and emptied by someone from inside, or the placing of a small door reached by a tiny stair through which the ice-man can deliver ice direct to the refrigerator without entering the house, or the convenient arrangement and sanitary equipment of kitchen and butler's pantry and by the best possible means of garbage disposal. The new gospel of simplicity reaches out to maid as well as to mistress, striking at the very root of the high and troublous cost of living.

In any event Mrs. Banning would have built a simple, beautiful, useful house, for she was determined upon that. But it would not have been just this particular sort of a house if she had not called to her aid the most daringly original architect in California, Irving J. Gill. Like Don Quixote riding forth against windmills, this visionary long ago set himself against the popular taste for gimcrack ornament, cheap and tawdry construction and against the false effort and effect that are the inevitable result of our continued content with being cheap imitators of every other age and country. Right and left he smashed non-essentials, getting down to elemental forms and the necessities of our own mode of living. Gradually, doggedly, against all opposition, he has evolved a type of house that is the beginning of a realization of our perennial vision--a truly American style of architecture--unless, of course, we choose to recognize as such that middle-western affair of clapboard and shingle which to date has been our only intelligible word on the subject.

The Banning house is not the only example of the Gill style.. He has built many houses in San Diego, La Jolla, Pasadena, Hollywood, Los Angeles. He has built churches and schools and railway stations and a booth in one of the San Francisco Exposition palaces--this last under protest of a director who balked at the boldness and baldness of his design when everybody knows a booth in an exposition should be a showy affair of mouldings and cornices and gewgaws of sorts.

But with a client so sympathetic in thought and purpose as Mrs. Banning, he was able to preach his gospel in a louder voice than usual and already many who came to scoff have remained to pray.

From House & Garden Magazine. July, 1914

Creating an American Style of Architecture-

Mr. Gill's Distinctive Concrete Houses-The Gospel of Simplicity And Straight Lines

By Bertha H. Smith

An American style cannot be discovered. It must be created.
Architecture, like all creative arts, depends upon the process of
evolution, and the periodic manifestations of this great art have been the
result of development as deliberate as the ways of God. For such a
manifestation in the United States we must have patience to wait. No one
man shall arise and with touch of magic wand or donning of a wishing cap
cause the vanishing of what is and the substitution of a full-fledged
style.

To those of large or little faith there is interest in the architect
who evinces any tendency to break with the traditions of the past, and set
himself squarely to the task of considering the conditions, necessities,
ways and means of this, our own time-in other words, one who seeks to
glorify his own and not another age. There are a few of these
secessionists East and West. One of the most radical is Irving J. Gill,
whose work is a simple, frank, audacious protest against the fad for
imitation Rhine castles, Swiss chalets, Italian villas, English
manor-houses, French chateaux, and the indigenous growth of flimsy frame
houses whose most characteristic features are excessive jigsaw
ornamentation and a front stoop. That the borrowed styles are beautiful
or well copied is beside the point. They are mere imitations, and as such
are fundamentally false and insincere when transplanted bodily to the
United States.

It happens that Mr. Gill has done most of his work in California, which
gives rise in some minds to the thought that he has found his inspiration
in the work of the mission builders. This he would quickly deny, save
such inspiration as comes to any other builder in contemplation of the
works of others who wrought in sincerity, with definite purpose, striving
for and achieving fitness. Such inspiration may be found in a bird's
nest, a beaver's dam, a Greek temple, a log cabin on the frontier, but in
direct proportion as they inspire, they lessen the tendency toward
thoughtless imitation.

He sometimes uses the arcade, which has come to be association in the
lay mind with the California missions, but a study of the details that
differentiate architectural manners will show his arcades and those of the
padres widely dissimilar. He may use a Dutch door or a tile roof, but
that does not mark his work as Flemish or Florentine. As a stranger often
remarks in two faces a likeness neutralized by many differences, so coming
upon a Gill house for the first time one may be reminded of something seen
in old Spain, of a villa in Lombardy, a house in Algiers, an Indian pueblo
in the western desert. But closer study reveals essential differences in
detail, dissipating the strength of suggested likenesses. In many of
these houses the walls, like those of an Indian pueblo, rise sheer and
roofless to an abrupt sky-line, and there are courts and terraces similar
to those of a a pueblo, but a Gill house is a far cry from the aboriginal
dwelling.

At the very beginning of his career Mr. Gill conceived that he had a
mission. That mission was to preach a gospel of the beauty of use, and
the use of perfect simplicity. He had that to say which a few were ready
to hear, and while a gospel so artless could not gain instant popularity,
the number of his converts would be flattering to one less in earnest in
his ultimate purpose, and the impress of this unusual genius is
conspicuous even in California, which has won wide renown for
architectural individuality.

Reduced to the utmost brevity, Mr. Gill's credo in architecture is the
negation of the non-essential. He has an unequivocal faith in the
architectural beauty of plain surfaces, simple curves, and straight lines.
And one is compelled by his work, as rarely save by some classic ruin, to
recognize the subtle potency of proportion. In excess or ornamentation
and broken line the average architect takes refuge, but here is one bold
enough to abjure artifices and say frankly and definitely what he has to
say by sheer means of simple line, bold mass, and the interdependence of
house and surroundings.

He has chosen concrete as his medium of expression. One of the oldest
of building materials, used in Babylonia, Egypt and Rome, concrete is also
the newest and apparently destined to universal use. To an incorrigible
modern, an insistent glorifier of his own hour, the choice of concrete is
a natural one. This material, considered by many a bland and
expressionless medium, has been actively advocated by Mr. Gill. It
responds to his frank and simple methods of design and construction. With
concrete and hollow tile walls, and cement floors, his houses are
virtually fire and time proof, which in itself sounds a new note in a land
notorious for its fire waste and the generally transient nature of house
construction.

With consummate daring Mr. Gill has abandoned all orthodox decorative
effects. Yet no necessary and practical detail is too small for his
special thought. A door, a screen, an iron gate, a small outside stairway
for the iceman and the tiny opening in the outer wall of the refrigerator,
an electric fixture, a knocker, a bit of stained glass on a stair landing,
each in turn is of his own careful designing-details now so often the
concern of mechanics rather than craftsmen. The wood reinforcement for
the screen of an upper window forms in his mind the background for the
greenery or color of a window-box. On such a window-box or small balcony,
the occasional reliefs of a severe facade, he lavishes the thought another
would spend on artificial ornamentation.

With all the ceaseless discussion of the artistic, no two are agreed as
to what constitutes art. Why not, then, reasons this apostle of
simplicity, cease the pretense of art and enlist the aid of Nature, who
invariably pleases? She makes no two leaves exactly alike, has no hard
and fast rules, and yet is an architect's most dependable ally. And so
he works in close touch with his landscape gardener, consciously relying
upon aid from the slender spire of an Italian cypress, the bending frond
of a palm, the tangled drapery of a vine, or the play of light and shadow
from a wide-spreading oak or sycamore, for the interruption of what might
otherwise seem too great austerity. Foreseeing nature's part, he is
content to wait for the completion of his plan and he makes others content
to wait.

In California nature is a more willing and generous ally for such a
builder who has doubtless been enabled to develop his gospel of simplicity
more fully and spread it more widely than would be possible elsewhere.
She provides not only a wealth of growing things for decorative effect,
but wonderful settings with mountain backgrounds, vistas of sea and valley
and far blue hills, and a witchery of color that provokes response in an
architect who loves his work and seeks a complete expression of his ideas.

The external form of the Gill House is the spontaneous expression of
the thought which characterizes the interior, for Mr. Gill began his
revolution inside the house. He began it long ago, this ruthless
simplifying process, with the very homely desire of minimizing the labors
of the housewife. The wish, born in the heart of a boy who hated to see
his mother work so hard to keep her home clean, became later in life a
fixed purpose. Even in his first houses of frame exterior, before the era
of concrete, he left off picture moldings, chair rails, wainscotings,
baseboards, every bit of wood not a structural necessity, wherever a
client would permit it. Later he grew more arbitrary, insisting more and
more on the elimination of wood. He merely tolerated it in door and window
frames and casings for wall cupboards, setting these flush with the walls.
Stairways he banished from entrance halls where they have dominated so
long, and for wood floors he substituted cement, softened by a wax polish.

All this time he was hard at work thinking out a steel frame that would
do away even with wood casings, jambs and lintels. With the perfection of
that frame came the culmination of his dreams of twenty years. His more
recent houses have absolutely no woodwork on the interior, and yet there
results a richness and strength scarcely anticipated even by Mr. Gill
during the period of gradual evolution of his idea.

Not every one is prepared to follow this enthusiast to the extreme
limit of monastic severity which is his ideal. It is difficult to
overcome convention and habit of thought, and there are those who can
follow only to the point where the wood trim was reduced to a minimum and
treated with the utmost simplicity.

The wall finish of these interiors was an inspiration. To the color
blind it is grayish, drabbish, dun, neutral. To those who have eyes to
see, it is like the desert in autumn, without definite color but with a
subtle suggestion of all colors. Such an effect is not produced by
negative pigments, but a mixture of many strong colors blended.

Outside a Gill house is always white. He has a delight in color and
would teach you to find it as he does, in the reflected glow from the red
floor of an open court, a bank of flowers, a green terrace, in shadows
cast by a curtain of vines, in all the varying lights of day and evening
as they call from those walls the infinite hidden tones of the painter's
blending.

A Gill house is an open scroll from which the builder determinedly
effaces himself, leaving the dweller the widest opportunity for
self-expression. Does one find pleasure in Oriental rugs, they will
delight as never before: a handsomely carved sideboard gains new
significance in a room that seeks not to rival, but to embrace its beauty,
while the simplest furnishings adapt themselves with unsuspected grace to
these unobtrusive, but by no means characteristic, surroundings.

One of the most remarkable things about this new type of architecture
is the democracy of it. Without and within there is little difference,
save in size, between a laborer's cottage of three rooms and a city house
of twenty; and no appreciable difference in the finish of drawing-room and
kitchen. Every detail of sanitation and practical utility is carefully
studied for kitchens of whatever size so that, whether presided over by
mistress or maid, they make for economy of time and work and worry.

Two features have gradually developed in American houses to a degree
that make them typical in almost every section: the front stoop or veranda
where people sit and watch what goes on in the street, or the neighbor's
yard; and the back door-yard held sacred to garbage and ash cans, clothes
lines and rubbish heaps. This builder is by no means alone in his war on
the ugly American back yard, but he is absolutely relentless, and scarcely
less so in regard to front porches. By the plan of his houses he would
foster a more refined and lofty ideal of home life, curbing the idle,
vulgar curiosity insensibly nourished by constant sight and sound of
neighbors and passersby, knitting each family group into a closer social
unit. His front door is but a formal entrance, giving a sense of
privilege to one who passes within. With the kitchen entrance at or near
the front, so arranged as to be wholly unobtrusive there is an inducement
to develop the once wholly abandoned space at the rear of the house. In
these houses an open court or a roofed arcaded supplants the front porch
and a walled-in garden with vine-covered arbor, shrubs and beds of flowers
gives a sense of seclusion and intimacy.

San Diego, where Mr. Gill has labored longest, presents in interesting
sequence the stages of evolution in his work. In Los Angeles and its many
suburbs as elsewhere in California one crosses more and more frequently
the unmistakable trail of this earnest genius who goes about the business
of house-building with the passionate zeal of a reformer. Laborer's
cottage, town house, suburban villa, apartment house, church, school, one
equally with the other is to him a pulpit for preaching his gospel of
simplicity. If he has any preference, it is perhaps for the building of a
girls' school, believing that as the girl is bent so the woman is inclined
and that the woman, through the home, is the supreme social influence.

To refuse absolutely to build a frame house, to abandon conventional
arrangement, to hold rigidly to an ideal of simplicity in an age when
extravagance and artificiality are rampant, to do this even at
considerable cost in popularity and material prosperity requires courage
and large faith in one's idea.

Photo Captions:

A Gill house is absolutely devoid of any ornamentation save that which is
given by vines. Its beauty comes from composition in mass, yet the idea
of utility is everywhere realized. It is interesting to note how the
profile of the house fits into the landscape.

Arcades represent an individual development; not merely a mirroring of the
mission padre style of house.

The impression of usefulness and strength visible in these houses is
characterized by this sturdy balcony.

A well-designed house gives the impression of fitness. Bare though it may
be, this house imparts the feeling that it belongs to its environment.

An open court or a roofed arcade, with walls in dun neutral tones,
supplant the front porch, giving privacy to the outdoor rooms.

Here, in his almost elimination of wood, the door frames and windows are
sunk flush with the wall.

Wall surfaces are finished in rough plaster, but so careful is their
coloring that they become decorative in themselves without relying upon
paper or hangings.

The architect has experimented until he has produced steel-door frames and
window casings, thus making every part of the house perform some
structural purpose.

High walls pierced by arched gates, providing privacy to rear garden and
balconies, are a pronounced detail.

The approach is as simple as the house itself, with lines and surfaces of
geometric exactitude and evenness. Note the composition in the placing of
the windows.

Gateways, heavy, austere of fashion and generous of proportion.

Unobtrusive interiors wherein are adaptable all types of furnishings.

Concrete his medium; hollow tiles his walls. With these elements he
constructs houses virtually time and fireproof.