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The community of Palm Desert was the desert retreat for many Hollywood celebrities, and the Marrakesh Country Club was one of many golf resorts that catered to that clientele. John Woolf was commissioned by John Dawson, an amateur golfer and real…

The personal office and studio of John Elgin Woolf on Melrose Place in Los Angeles, was a multi-building compound with an imposing entrance door, secluded courtyards, and light-filled rooms. The office allowed Woolf to bring his specific design…

The Lobero Theater on Canon Perdido and Anacapa Streets in downtown Santa Barbara, got its start in the 1870s as a vaudeville house. By the early 1920s, it had fallen into disrepair and Smith was asked to design and build a new theater in the Spanish…

George Fox Steedman was a manufacturing executive from St. Louis who commissioned Smith to work with him on designing and constructing Casa del Herrero (House of the Blacksmith) on East Valley Road in Montecito. They created a house and gardens…

The E. Palmer Gavit residence was originally built in 1919 by Reginald Johnson; Smith designed an addition to the main house, as well as outbuildings. The property was originally named "Cuesta Linda," then "Tanglewood," and eventually Madame Ganna…

The blueprints for the elevations of the Director's House (House A) show the Prairie influence on Wright's design. With a long row of clearstory windows, concrete walls, and horizontal lines, the house clearly shows the Wright design. Wright brought…

This Schindler drawing of a wading pool and pergola on the Olive Hill grounds dates from 1925. Schindler continued to work for Barnsdall after she fired Wright, and the pool and pergola are examples of the ongoing work on the property.

In 1925, Schindler altered Aline Barnsdall's bedroom and ensuite bathroom in the Hollyhock House. He altered the layout of the bathroom and paneled the walls and ceiling in oak. Schindler also altered the bedroom for Aline's daughter. These interior…

The original idea for the Barnsdall site was that it was to have an on-site theater, housing for actors and staff, as well as the main house. The Director's House, also referred to as House A was designed by Wright and built with Schindler as the…

The house for James Vance on Hillcrest Road in Beverly Hills is considered another residence with significant Hollywood Regency style and attributes. With a tall brick privacy wall, leading to an oversize entry door, topped with an octagonal standing…

Some of the hallmarks of Schindler's later works can be seen in these interior photographs. The built-in furniture, focus on natural light, and the use of wood on the walls and ceiling are architectural details seen throughout his career in various…

This photograph of the exterior of the house shows the growth of landscaping along the front and patio areas.

The unincorporated community of Hope Ranch was developed in the early 1920s by the Santa Barbara Estates Inc. company, which was owned by Harold Chase, and Peter Bryce was one of the main stakeholders. Bryce was also one of the early residents, with…

The Malcolm Douglas house on Sycamore Canyon Road in Montecito was completed in 1929, and is also known as Los Suenos ("The Dreams"). Douglas, a New York doctor, and his wife, Rachel Peabody Douglas, had Smith design a house to showcase the view of…

This photograph of the front of the house with trees and landscaping was altered (possibly by Davidson himself) to add vines and leaves to the exterior walls and balconies of the house. In this view, the first floor terrace is not yet enclosed, and…

In this 1968 version of the long range development plan, the campus footprint expanded to include the Storke Campus area along El Colegio and Los Carneros Road, and the West Campus area around Coal Oil Point and the Devereux Slough.

This early map shows the existing county roads and the roads on the former Marine Air Base. Hand-drawn arrows indicate traffic flow from Goleta and Santa Barbara towards the new campus. This map shows many of the roads that are still in use today, as…

This is a copy of an image which shows the layout of Marine Air Base Santa Barbara buildings (in yellow), with the addition of the first two University of California, Santa Barbara College buildings (in red). Roads and parking lots are shown in…

This early plan from Charles Luckman Associates shows a greater density of buildings in the central campus core, with multiple buildings surrounding the central and north quadrangles. Physical and Biological Science buildings are grouped on the east…

In 1950, Santa Barbara architecture firm Soule and Murphy developed a master plan for the campus. Initially, the college was to be a small liberal-arts college (with a maximum enrollment of 3500 students), not a large research university. The Soule…

This exterior elevation of the Broadway side of the building displays the detailed calculations involved in designing and constructing a building of this size and complexity of exterior details. The exterior stonework is not specified for each window…

This view of the Ninth Street side of the building shows the second entrance to the lobby, just to the right of the Delivery entrance ramp. This ramp was a motorized vehicle entrance to the two-level basement, which was a delivery access point and…

With other tall buildings flanking the Eastern Columbia building along the west and north sides, the detailed exterior elevations were not needed along the entire face of the side. In this western elevation, only the first three bays are noted as…

The north elevation of the building also abutted another tall building at the time of construction, so the detailed terra cotta workmanship along the north side only extends for two window bays before a plain blank wall is indicated on the plans.…

This sheet of drawings shows the clock tower face, section view of the tower, as well as the structural supports. The top of the building, with the word EASTERN emblazoned on all four sides along with the clock and its' distinctive blue and gold…

This sheet of very specific upper-floor terra cotta details highlights the specific measurements and design decorations used on both the tenth floor specifically, and on the upper floors in general. The sheet contains details, sections, and…

The first floor plan and basement plans shown on this sheet are the basic construction plans. The owner, Eastern Columbia Outfitting Company used their own designers to complete the interiors beyond what was outlined here. The first floor plan shows…

The photograph in the reception area of the office depicts the Mission Basilica San Diego de Alcalá, the first Franciscan mission in New Spain. William Hebbard and Irving Gill (Hebbard and Gill partnership, 1896-1907) stabilized the building in…

The designs from the Hebbard and Gill partnership were eclectic, leaning toward English cottages with Arts and Crafts influence, but included Neo-classical, Gothic, Queen Anne, Mission Revival, and Prairie School styles.

In this drawing of a…

Alice Lee (a San Diego socialite and second cousin of Theodore Roosevelt’s first wife) and Katherine Teats commissioned two distinct house groups from Gill. In 1905 Gill designed a house for Lee and Teats on Seventh Avenue, with adjacent rental…

Hebbard and Gill designed an English cottage for Wangenheim, a civic leader, owner of a grocery store business, and the father-in-law of Melville Klauber, another Gill client. San Diego was a small town and Hebbard and Gill worked with most of its…

Frank Mead worked in the Hebbard and Gill office beginning about 1904. He and Gill formed a seven-month partnership in 1907, when the H & G partnership ended. Before joining the office, Mead, though trained as an architect, worked actively, and…

This house had a simplified exterior form, with a slight Japanese flavor in the tilt of the roof, and a warm Arts and Crafts interior.
Melville Klauber was from San Diego’s growing merchant class, and married to the sister of Julius Wangenheim.…

This is the first Los Angeles building that Gill designed on his own. The house has a classic center hall plan and an enclosed outdoor court. He typically oriented his plans so that one was drawn toward the light and landscape at the back of the…

The austere Miltmore house is generously “ornamented by nature.” Gill sited the house to preserve the many trees on the sprawling lot and placed long loggias alongside the front and rear elevations. The interior is gracious though simple,…

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…

This 18-room house built for the steel manufacturer, Henry Timken, was Gill’s largest to date. Gill placed the house close to the street, leaving room for enclosed courts and a large garden. Eloise Roorbach’s contemporary article noted that the…

Built on 60 acres of orange groves, the Clarke estate was Gill’s last major residential project. Constructed of poured in place reinforced concrete, the house measures 8,000 square feet. Gill’s drawings note that Gill and Pearson built the house…

A book could be written about Gill’s women clients, and Ellen Scripps would be a significant chapter. She helped her brothers build a successful newspaper business and moved to La Jolla in 1897, when the town had “cow paths in lieu of streets.”…

Gill’s notes about the concrete work for the Club and the sequential construction photographs provide unusual detail for one of Gill’s significant civic designs.
Robert H. Aiken is usually credited as the tilt-up pioneer in the U.S; he…

Gill’s intention was to make his buildings as efficient as possible, and that is certainly true for this hospital, funded by Joseph Sefton and built on the grounds of the Children’s Home. The hospital was built of concrete to make it easy to keep…

Gill’s austere clarity was especially suited to pragmatic building programs, such as the concrete Biological Station. Ellen Scripps funded the building, now part of the University of California, in honor of her brother George.

Bishop Johnson lived in Pasadena and the Episcopal Church originally planned to build a preparatory school in Sierra Madre. When Ellen Scripps and her sister Elizabeth Virginia Scripps offered to be benefactors, the decision was made to build a day…

In the Woman’s Club, the La Jolla Playground Community House, and here in the Bishop’s School, Gill used an arcaded screen wall as a unifying element, and to articulate his austere geometry with rhythmic voids. Scripps Hall was built in 1910,…

Gill designed two identical buildings bisected by a walkway from the street to the rear of the property. The floor plan for both buildings shows the mirror image of the first and second floors. Each building contained two two-bedroom apartments, with…

Gill’s site planning was especially successful in this project. He pushed the cottages to the outside edge of the plot to leave a large public area for shared gardens and a loggia. He also placed each L-shaped cottage so that its arcaded porch and…

The Los Angeles Herald published several articles announcing the luxury housing development at Laughlin Park. A 1912 article announced that Gill was in charge of all planning for this Hollywood Hills development on a site of three acres. Another…

The architect and planner Frederick Gutheim worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1930s. His letters to architectural critic Esther McCoy and to Louis Gill describe his friendship with Irving Gill and the Barona Resettlement project they…

Gill designed a number of schools. A 1913 article about his concrete public school for the City of Fontana praised the large outdoor playground and quoted Gill as saying that the basement playroom is “the most glaring evil in school room…

In the last year of his life, with the Depression still strong, Gill designed at least four buildings, of which only the Blade-Tribune newspaper building and a beauty parlor in Redondo Beach were built. In 1936 he was working on a theater with Zara…

Gill designed approximately eight cottages for parcels of land he purchased in San Diego. There is little documentation for these, but all or most of the houses seem to have been built on Albatross, Front, Robinson Mews, and Hawthorne streets.Gill…

Gill helped Schindler and Claude Chase form and raise the tilt-slab walls for the Schindler house on Kings Road, 1921. Invoices in the Schindler archive show that Schindler rented some of Gill’s equipment for the concrete work. Chase assisted Gill…

Thornton Abell designed this house on a very steep lot in the hills of Santa Monica for himself and his family. The three story home featured a rooftop deck, main level terrace, lower level drafting room, and a garden with a pool and guest house.

This house was built in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles for a young family with many children, live-in maids, and a need to entertain large groups. The International Style house that Abell designed also worked well for the Siskin's need for…

This one-story house in the Hollywood Hills area of Los Angeles is sited on a flat lot, with a private pool and outdoor living area. Built with a distinctive roof line, the house allows for indoor/outdoor living through glass walls and atriums.

The house was designed for Rico LeBrun, an artist and teacher. LeBrun requested a large art studio with an outside work area, inside work area, drawing room, metal shop, sculpture room, and large studio with darkroom and plentiful storage. The house…

The steel magnate Gustav Rich commissioned this house from Abell in 1966. The steel frame with stucco also contained long walls of glass and interior walls of walnut.
The house was designated a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument in 2006, after…

This house for L.B. Adelman is sited on a portion of the former Charlie Chaplin estate in Beverly Hills (the tennis court on the property is the original Chaplin Estate court). The post and beam design was designed by Abell and O'Neil Ford, a…

In addition to private homes, Abell also designed schools, stores, and other commercial buildings such as this bank on Larchmont in Los Angeles. The clean and simple facade, overhanging roof, and ample off-street parking have survived the 40+ years…

The Art Building complex at California State University, Fullerton is actually a grouping of four buildings connected by courtyards, loggias, and water features. The classrooms in the Art building were designed to be wide and long, to permit many…

In one of his earliest projects for the Hilton Hotel chain, this airport hotel in El Paso utilized many of the hallmarks of Killingsworth's style. The six interconnected low-slung, two story buildings had walls of glass in the lobby, with a wide…

The Kahala Hilton was one of Killingsworth's first luxury hotels. With 300 rooms and suites, all air conditioned, surrounded on three sides by golf courses and direct beach access, the hotel featured state of the art luxury amenities. The ten story…

The Jakarta Hilton was built using indigenous craftspeople to add traditional cultural elements to the design of the hotel. The 14 story hotel included 406 rooms, with long-term rental cottages also available on the 32 acre hotel property. The hotel…

The Boca Beach Club was a luxury resort in Boca Raton, Florida, perched on a piece of land surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean and the Intercoastal waterway. The hotel featured 212 rooms, 147 oceanfront cabanas, 5 lounges, and two restaurants on site.

The Phoenician Resort, at the base of Camelback Mountain just outside of Phoenix, was designed as a very high end luxury hotel and spa. It initially had 604 rooms, 132 casitas, 9 Steinway grand pianos, and exterior tropical landscaping designed by…

The Princess Reforma hotel was an unbuilt design that reached the stage of having a scale model built and photographed by renown architectural photographer Julius Shulman. The hotel was to feature a tall, thin tower to house the majority of the hotel…

The firm Killingsworth, Stricker, Lindgren, Wilson & Associates designed and built many high-end luxury hotels throughout the world during the 1980s. This Marriott was built close to their home office in Long Beach. It was also conveniently located…

The Halekulani Hotel's name means "House Befitting Heaven" in the native Hawaiian language of the people of the Waikiki beach area. The location for the hotel had been the site of various guest accommodations and hotels since the early 1900s. The 453…

The Mauna Lani Bay Hotel on the Big Island of Hawaii was designed to be one of the top luxury resort hotels in the world. The 345 room hotel also contained separate bungalows designed by the firm, which were each 4000 square feet in size and were…

The Del Ray Hotel / Apartments / Shopping center complex in San Diego, was one of Killingsworth's first multi-family dwelling projects. It was designed to provide for all of the necessities in one location. With a large outdoor pool area, landscaped…

This house for Robert VanWyck Maverick was one of only two houses Smith built in Texas. It was considered one of the best examples of a courtyard-centered house at the time of its construction. The plan for the house was U-shaped, with a fourth wall…

This large Spanish Colonial Revival mansion in the small town of Woodside was built for copper mining magnate Daniel Cowan Jackling and his family. The 17,000 square foot house sat on a 194 acre parcel of land. The property was subdivided and all but…

The Carpenteria beach house for Albert Keep Isham was a Moorish inspired estate directly on the beach. Smith also constructed a natatorium, which was done in an "Islamic" style and contained a large number of decorative tiles around the swimming pool…

The Wesley Gallagher house was a Smith commission just prior to his death in 1930. The Smith files contain these sketches and drawings (most done in Riggs' hand) for preliminary elevations for the house. The Riggs files contain the actual working…

George Washington Smith was commissioned by Alfred Dietrich, an heir to an oil manufacturing fortune who also owned a railroad line, to design servants quarters and a garage for his property on Park Lane. This smaller house was built prior to the…

The Portland Performing Arts Center was designed in association with BOOR/A and ELS Design Group. Myers designed two theaters, the 900-seat Newmark Theatre and the 360-seat Dolores Winningstad Theater, as well as offices, ticketing area, and support…

For the Seagram Museum, Myers used the original nineteenth-century barrel warehouse, which had held up to 6000 barrels of whiskey, as part of the exhibition space. He also used wood beams from the warehouse to clad the new structures. At the time of…

In 1980, the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency was planning to demolish the Bunker Hill area of the city and organized a competition for a team of architects to design a new urban center. A Grand Avenue proposal was created by developer…

The design competition for the civic center of Phoenix placed the main municipal buildings at the center of the city; the Myers plan incorporates the main arteries into how the architecture works with the surrounding area. The low-rise buildings were…

The Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts was the initial phase of building for the Cerritos Town Center development. The arts center was a grouping of buildings designed for theater performances, meetings, receptions, and other gatherings. The…

Myers renovated and expanded the Art Gallery-- renovating the existing 190,000 square feet of museum and adding another 100,000 square feet. The renovations included the re-working of buildings dating back to 1817, and to connect the various new and…

With the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJ PAC), Myers created a multi-building center with theaters, conference rooms, and restaurants to connect existing parts of Newark (a Military Park and the Passaic River) with each other and the new venue.…

For the United States Pavillion at the Universal Exposition of Seville (Expo 92) competition, Myers created a series of buildings connected by courtyards, with theaters, exhibition space, and a water wall, all capped by three 'shade sails' to provide…

The drawings of the Von Romberg house were commissioned for Baron Maximilian Edmund Hugo Wilhelm Von Romberg and his wife Emily Hall Von Romberg. The floor plans show how the design for the house changed over time.

The renderings of the exterior, details, and sections of the Von Romberg house also show how the exterior changed as Riggs and Emily Von Romberg worked together to create a house that would suit all involved.

The three exterior photographs were taken by George Hurrell.

Lutah Maria Riggs worked with interior designer Paul T. Frankl to furnish the Von Romberg house. Photographs were taken by both George Hurrell and Stuart O'Brien.

Burton and Emily Tremaine commissioned Riggs and Shaw to design a ranch house on the Tremaine family ranch near Winslow, Arizona. The circular shape was reminiscent of the nearby Meteor Crater Natural landmark.

These are two designs for an un-built beach house in the Sandyland Cove beach community of Carpenteria, Calif. for Burton and Emily Tremaine. The designs by Riggs and Shaw are for two very different stylistic conceptions.

The Serena Beach Club was to be built on property adjacent to the Burton and Emily Tremaine house that was designed by Oscar Niemeyer. Neither project was realized.

This ranch house was designed by California architect Cliff May, with a local architect from Ireland, Donal O'Neill Flanagan. The architects collaborated to design a house for Warren and Katherine Tremaine and their manager of the Loughtown stud farm…

Katherine Tremaine commissioned Paul Soderburg to design a house for her after her divorce from Warren Tremaine. The house was built in the hills of Montecito in 1972, and extensively remodeled by Soderburg for Tremaine in 1977.

This house was built for Eva J.K. Fudger, daughter of a citrus rancher and wife of a Toronto businessman. Fudger had been living across the street when she commissioned Coate to build this house with a view towards the adjacent Wilshire Country Club.…

This house is a departure from Coate's Spanish and Monterey Revival style. Built for industrialist Ira L. Bryner and his wife Margaret, the house was sited on an irregular hillside lot and bore the hallmarks of a Georgian Revival, with some Colonial…

This house, an interpretation of a Monterey style house, was one of Coate's earliest commissions as a solo architect, after the dissolution of the Johnson, Kaufmann, and Coate partnership. Stafford W. Bixby was a descendant of early California…

The owners of a successful furniture business, Frank and Ruth Wilmot Cowlishaw commissioned Coate to design a large ranch house and stables for their 640 acre working ranch in Arizona. The house was L shaped and centered around a pool in the back of…

The John E. Barber house is an early example of Coate's Monterey Revival style-- a second story balcony, center hall, with the majority of rooms opening onto outside space. Grayson C. and John Edwin Barber were a well-to-do and prominent Pasadena…

This large house, on a prominent hill overlooking the Bel Air Country Club was commissioned by petroleum executive David C. and Irene Norcross. The house features many Monterey Revival influences, as well as some intricate ironwork on a double-height…

Irene Mayer and David C. Selznick, a well-known movie producer, commissioned this house from Coate at the height of the great depression. The house was a Georgian Revival on a large lot in the center of Beverly Hills, surrounded by other movie…

Real estate investor Jacob Stern commissioned this house from Coate in 1928. The over 9000 square foot estate was designed in the Mediterranean Revival style, on a 2.2 acre parcel of land. The 30 room mansion was sited on the crown of a hill,…