Browse Exhibits (1 total)

Irving J. Gill (1870-1936) is known for his refined and abstracted architectural vocabulary, which he described as “the straight line, the cube, the arch, and the circle.” His deceptively simple forms first began to appear in his California work in 1903; his most significant and mature designs date from 1907 through 1920.

This exhibition (on display at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum from September 2016 until December 2016), was the first major view of Gill’s work since Esther McCoy’s exhibit at the Los Angles County Museum of Art in 1958. It traces the roots of his architectural language to the social concerns of the Progressive era and the Arts and Crafts movement, and especially the influence of Chicago architect Louis Sullivan (1856-1924), whose passionate ideas about architecture were linked to a transcendental view of Nature, borrowed from the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and the poetry of Walt Whitman (1819-1892).

Sullivan argued for a “new architecture in America” based on Nature and unaffected by the past or European trends. Gill carried Sullivan’s ideas with him to California when he left the Adler and Sullivan office in 1893, and by 1903 was developing his own simplified, distilled, formal vocabulary. He married his abstract forms-- based on the straight line, the cube, and the circle--to experiments in materials and construction that he hoped would fulfill the need for sanitary, fireproof homes and inexpensive ways to build for the poor and working class.

The exhibition in 2016 was curated by Jocelyn Gibbs, then-Curator of the Architecture and Design Collection, and now Curator Emeritus.