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Irving Gill Deserves AIA Honors
November 2016
By Ann Jarmusch
 This rare image, the only one known, is of the San Diego Architectural Association with Irving Gill and other illustrious San Diego architects. Courtesy SOHO. |
When SOHO board member Wayne Donaldson gave a keynote lecture about Irving Gill in September, he was brimming with information fresh from months spent reading about the architect. "The more research I did, the more mysterious Gill became," he said recently. That's partly because few records remain from Gill's offices in San Diego and Los Angeles, and many important biographical details are missing, like why he moved to San Diego and why he left.
Donaldson noticed that none of the three leading authors of books on Gill mentioned his lack of professional recognition. Yet he served as the first secretary of the San Diego Architectural Association, a group that would later turn into an American Institute of Architects chapter, which exists to this day. We don't have any evidence that Gill joined the AIA, which is an expensive and voluntary proposition open only to licensed architects, but membership is not necessary to practice architecture. It hit Donaldson that Gill, member or not, had never been nominated to become a Fellow of the AIA, one of the group's coveted honors.
When, during his lecture, Donaldson proposed that Gill be nominated for an FAIA by the local AIA chapter as a pioneering modernist of national importance, "everybody clapped and shouted," he recalled. Donaldson became a Fellow in 1992 and has sponsored other architects in their quest for the honor.
His next step is to set up a presentation to the San Diego AIA board, which he feels certain will endorse the proposal. With the chapter's backing, Donaldson would be Gill's sponsor and he'd assemble a team of architectural historians and architects for the rigorous process of producing the voluminous nomination papers, gathering photographs, and soliciting letters of support from around the country. "We'll need a national perspective on modernism," he said.
Comparing the creation of a nomination to a doctoral thesis, Donaldson said interpreting the work and contributions of an architect who has passed away is a challenge. "He had six different partners and we'd have to analyze their influence," he said, giving just one example of the work ahead.
By Donaldson's reckoning, the AIA gets 800 to 1,000 nominations per year, but only about 120 architects become Fellows. If a nomination is passed over, it can be reworked and resubmitted two more times.
Posthumous awards are not uncommon for the national AIA, Donaldson's research showed. Julia Morgan died in 1957, but it wasn't until recently that the San Francisco AIA chapter nominated her to become a Fellow. AIA officials determined she should get the Gold Medal, the group's highest honor for an individual, but one needs to be a Fellow to qualify, so they bestowed both honors in 2014.
Donaldson's research also found that Louis John Gill, Irving's nephew and partner for several years, joined the AIA in 1921 and was made a Fellow in 1941, five years after Irving died poor with "laborer" as his occupation on his death certificate.
If Gill becomes a Fellow, it will bring him wider national recognition and the credit he is due for his early 20th-century modernist and cubist architecture that arguably was way out ahead of other American architects. San Diego also stands to benefit from cultural tourism and increased study because many of Gill's San Diego clients made the daring choice to forsake tradition and "go modern" with the brilliant Irving Gill.
Donaldson's lecture was the kick off of SOHO's six-month celebration of the architect called Irving Gill: Progress & Poetry in Architecture. SOHO is joining with 11 other Southern California cultural organizations to present exhibitions, tours, and lectures as part of a collaboration called Irving J. Gill: New Architecture for a Great Country. (www.irvingjgill.org)
"It's welcoming to see all of the awareness of Gill's legacy being promoted. Long overdue," Donaldson said.
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