Tribute to S.D. Women

Commonly held wisdom has it that Irving Gill is San Diego’s sole legacy to the world of architecture.

Pick up almost any architectural book, and, if it mentions San Diego at all, the reference is usually to Gill.

In one sense, he has been this city’s most significant innovator of the 20th Century, designing clean-lined, modern buildings beginning in 1907 or so, years before Le Corbusier, Mies Van Der Rohe, Loos and others became modern architecture’s heroes.

But there are important San Diego architects and designers largely ignored by history. Among them are the three women featured in the exhibit “In Harmony With the Land,” opening Saturday at the Museum of San Diego History in Balboa Park.

Women in Architecture and the San Diego Historical Society are teaming up to present the show, which will run through the end of the year.

Opening at the same time and running through Sept. 10 is “That Exceptional One,” a tribute to 100 years of female architects, dating back to 1888 when Louise Blanchard Bethune became the first woman member of the American Institute of Architects.

Of the three San Diego architects featured in the local show, Lilian Rice is the best known. Also included are Hazel Waterman and landscape designer Harriett Wimmer.

Believed in Total Site Planning

The show’s title is meant to reflect the way all three women believed in total site planning, with close relationships between buildings and their surrounding landscapes.

Rice is best known for the Spanish-influenced buildings she designed in Rancho Santa Fe between 1922 and her death in 1938 at the age of 49 from an undiagnosed case of appendicitis.

Rice was working for Richard Requa, the well-known designer of many of San Diego’s finest Mediterranean-style homes, and his partner Herbert Jackson, when they were commissioned to come up with a master plan for Rancho Santa Fe and design several buildings.

Because the commute from San Diego would have occupied too much of the partners’ time, they turned day-to-day details over to Rice, and she eventually designed many of the buildings on Paseo Delicias in the business district of Rancho Santa Fe, as well as about 60 houses.

Today, these buildings house Quimby’s and Mille Fleurs restaurants, Ashley’s market and other local businesses.

At the time, some of the only buildings in the area were adobe ranch houses dating back to the mid-1800s. With these--and probably the San Diego County missions--in mind, the Santa Fe Land Improvement Co., the developers of Rancho Santa Fe, decided that Spanish-flavored architecture would be appropriate for the new community.

Many of Rice’s buildings in Rancho Santa Fe have tile roofs, deep-set window and door openings, interior courtyards and carefully laid-out gardens linked to the homes by French doors and generous windows. Most have white stucco walls that imitate the thick, plastered-over adobe found on buildings in the Mediterranean.

“She wasn’t a pioneer or innovator; she was carrying out the plan the developers wanted,” said Lucinda Eddy, who completed her master’s thesis on Rice at the University of San Diego in 1985 and helped organize the exhibit.

But there is more to Rice’s work. Outside Rancho Santa Fe, her residential designs have an entirely different appearance. Many use horizontal wood siding and shingle roofs, with interior walls paneled in redwood.

Typical of this style is the rustic ZLAC Rowing Club at 1111 Pacific Beach Drive. A high ceiling supported by heavy redwood beams rises to a peak above a hardwood floor. French doors open out on a veranda at the edge of the beach on the shore of Mission Bay.

Rice learned to love natural materials while studying architecture at University of California, Berkeley, when the department was headed by John Galen Howard, who designed many campus buildings. Buildings such as the rowing clubhouse echo the organic, Craftsman style that Rice saw in the work of Howard, Bernard Maybeck and other San Francisco-rea architects.

Although Rice’s buildings are simple in form and materials, they do a masterful job of manipulating light and space.

“She wanted her structures to be an extension of the outdoors,” Eddy said. “Her houses were intended to be details in the landscape.”

Subtle Innovations

Although it is easy to pass off Rice as a talented but unoriginal designer heavily influenced by her mentors, her best work is innovative in subtle ways.

Imagine replacing the tile roofs on many of her Rancho Santa Fe homes with the flat roofs preferred by Gill, and her buildings show a strong relationship to modernism. Examine the way she masses and composes a home such as the Carpenter residence of 1928, and you see the eye of an artist at work.

Like Rice’s, the work of Waterman, who apprenticed with Gill and his partner, William Hebbard, is also under-appreciated. (Waterman later hired Rice as her own apprentice.)

As Eddy pointed out, Waterman’s success is remarkable considering she had only a year of college work in design and learned architecture from correspondence courses. Gill hired her after he designed a house for her and her husband and sensed she had talent.

Many of her finest designs, including buildings in Balboa Park for the San Diego Children’s Home, completed in 1925, are no longer standing. But photographs of them, and buildings such as her Wednesday Club (1911) at Ivy Lane and 6th Avenue, show that she assimilated Gill’s flat surfaces, arched openings and carefully placed square and rectangular windows.

While Rice and Waterman are well-represented by drawings and historic photos, Wimmer’s work is tougher to document, according to Eddy. Wimmer laid out landscapes mostly in her head, so no drawings ever existed. Instead, her work will be represented by several photographs, and the lineup is impressive.

Working with landscape architect Joe Yamada, who became her partner in 1960, Wimmer handled plant selection and placement for Scripps Institution of Oceanography, areas of the UC San Diego campus, Sea World and many homes.

Next Thursday, in Room 102 at the Casa del Prado in Balboa Park, Sally Bullard Thornton, the author of a biography on Waterman, and Barbara Thornburgh Carlton will discuss Waterman’s work.