Irving J. Gill: Dodge house (Los Angeles, Calif.)

The Dodge house was located on Kings Road, just north of the future site of Schindler’s own 1921 house. Considered Gill’s masterpiece, the design was widely praised for, as historian Leland Roth wrote," revealing a functional asymmetry whose ornament was derived solely from the studied geometry of the sharp openings in plain walls." The house was bulldozed, after a long preservation effort, on February 9, 1970. The shock of that loss helped launch the Los Angeles Conservancy, founded in 1978.
Gill assembled his own crew to build this and other houses in the L.A. area, in order to get exactly what he wanted. The house was built of reinforced concrete, with metal windows and had many modern conveniences. The layering and piling of cubes and rectangular forms in the Dodge and Clarke houses resembles Native American pueblo buildings. Schindler and Wright consciously borrowed from these native structures, but it’s not clear what Gill’s immediate sources were.

Irving J. Gill, architect

Irving John Gill papers, Architecture and Design Collection. Art, Design & Architecture Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara

1914-1916

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