Lecturer on Irving Gill Is Tops in Field

When David Gebhard looks at buildings, he doesn’t see isolated structures. Instead, he sees artifacts that tie into the whole fabric of history, as important as fine art, literature, music and politics.

Gebhard will lecture on San Diego architect Irving Gill Friday morning at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, kicking off the museum’s official “50th Birthday Bash Weekend.” The lecture is also the lead-in to a historical exhibition, “San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art: The First 50 Years,” opening at the museum Sunday.

At 60, Gebhard is recognized as the leading living expert on California architecture and is among a group of modern critics and historians who have elevated architecture to a status equal to the other arts.

“He leads the pack, he’s No. 1,” said Sally Woodbridge, the San Francisco Bay Area architectural historian who has collaborated with Gebhard on books including “Bay Area Houses,” the authoritative book on that area’s residential architecture, first published in 1976.

“I’ve always thought of David as being the most dedicated and imaginative historian of California architecture, particularly in Southern California.”

Gebhard is a man of many moods. Although he is obsessed with well-designed buildings, he is no fanatic when it comes to personal style. His hair is often shaggy, bluntly cut. He prefers loose, casual clothes--he’s a roll-up-your-sleeves, working historian, not an isolated academic.

“He has served tirelessly on the Santa Barbara Planning Commission and other commissions. He’s been in public service for years. He hasn’t sat in an ivory tower. He’s been very much engaged in the public process.”

The time is ripe for Gebhard to come to town. The museum plans to break ground late next year on a $9-million project that will include a $6.2-million expansion of its La Jolla building as well as the creation of a new downtown space. Central to the scheme by Philadelphia architect Robert Venturi is a re-creation of Gill’s 1915 house for Ellen Browning Scripps, which, beginning in 1941, was home to the art museum. In 1951, the Scripps house was obliterated by the first of three museum additions designed by San Diego architects Bob Mosher and Roy Drew.

Architectural historians are often stereotyped as nostalgic purists who have little use for contemporary buildings that tamper with history. But Gebhard, who hasn’t taken a close look at Venturi’s plans yet, has an open mind about the manner in which the addition will re-create the Scripps’ house and other Gill elements.

“Being a passionate admirer of Bob Venturi, I would assume the addition would be well carried out,” said Gebhard. “We live in a world filled with reproductions and fakes, real things and unreal things. One’s reaction to something that’s ‘real’ as opposed to a reproduction is almost entirely illogical. If you’re told a piece of furniture is 16th Century, you respond to it one way. If you’re told it’s a ‘20s reproduction, you respond differently. But the little piece of furniture just sits there.

“If Venturi really restores that facade and places a contemporary ‘picture frame’ around it, it may read with more strength than it had originally, but in different ways. We may respond far more abstractly, but to the aesthetic content of the Gill building more forcefully.”

Gebhard, who saw the original Scripps house in the late 1940s, while he was studying architecture as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, has always despised Mosher and Drew’s additions.

“Not just because of what they did to the Gill house,” Gebhard explained. “(Their additions are) just not something I respond to aesthetically, and I never have. There’s a tremendous change of scale between the height of the entrance screen (arcade) and what’s behind it--it’s too pompous for the structure behind it.” But Gebhard stopped short of critically dissecting the building.

“I’d have to take it bit by bit with a picture of the building in front of me,” he said.

Perhaps the only other architectural historian who has achieved Gebhard’s stature as an expert on California architecture is Esther McCoy, who wrote “Five California Architects” (including Gill) and countless books and articles before she died last year.

Gebhard takes a different view of Gill’s contribution different from McCoy.

“Esther McCoy felt Gill was an early modernist,” said Bruce Kamerling, who has been at work, with Gebhard, since the mid-1970s on the definitive book on Gill. “David Gebhard comes from another angle. He thinks of Gill as being ultra-traditionalist, of taking revival styles and creating another step in a succession of steps, rather than the point of view of McCoy, who viewed Gill as breaking away, doing something entirely new. I think there is validity in both approaches.”

Gill is only one among many important 20th-Century California architects whose legacies have been preserved through Gebhard’s writings, his lectures at the UC Santa Barbara, where he has taught since 1961, and through the university’s collection of architectural drawings. These, curated by Gebhard, include the work of Gill and many other architects.

Gebhard’s “Guide to Architecture in Los Angeles & Southern California,” a collaboration with historian Robert Winter, first published in 1977, remains the standard traveling companion for architecture lovers.

Not content with superficial versions of history, Gebhard has dug deep to bring up new information.

Over the years, most of Gill’s finest houses--including the Scripps, Timken and Klauber residences in San Diego County and the Dodge house in Los Angeles, have been torn down.

But Gebhard’s research for the Gill book turned up another long-rumored Gill masterpiece in Los Angeles.

Gebhard was born in Cannon Falls, Minneapolis, where he became intrigued with architecture by hanging out with his uncle, an architect named Dale McNary.

“When I was going to school, I worked in the office to gain experience,” said Gebhard, who holds bachelors, masters and doctorate degrees from the University of Minnesota. “I don’t know how serious I was (about becoming an architect). The first house I designed was for my father, in St. Paul in 1953. It was sort of peculiar, a combination of West Coast woodsy-Bay Area Tradition and Frank Lloyd Wright.” Gebhard also designed the Santa Barbara house he and his family have lived in since 1967.

Gebhard’s first published writings came out during the late 1940s and early 1950s: a catalogue text for a show on Prairie-school architects William Purcell and George Grant Elmslie at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and an article in a scholarly journal on prehistoric rock art, another of Gebhard’s specialties.

Since then, he has written about 30 books and exhibition catalogues, most of them related to California architecture--he just finished the text for a book on Art Deco Streamline buildings and hopes that he and Kamerling will complete their Gill book in the next year or two.

In his talk Friday, Gebhard plans to dispel some myths about Gill, who died in 1936.

“One of the myths is his innovations with construction techniques: concrete, tile, lift-slab concrete. Concrete was rampant from 1900 through the 1920s. Gill participated, but he made no innovative contribution to the technology. Sometimes what he did was not very logical, sometimes it was old-fashioned.

“To judge him on the basis of technique would be, from my point, an error. To me, the contribution that Gill made was the historic process, to abstract the more traditional Mission and Mission Revival forms, to come forth with a strong aesthetic abstraction of that tradition by design.”

David Gebhard’s lecture in the San Diego Museum of Art’s Sherwood Auditorium is Friday morning at 11. Tickets are $10, available at the door. The museum will continue its public celebration from noon to 4 p.m. Sunday with a silent auction of handmade masks by San Diego artists, mural-making activities, docent tours and balloon sculptures for kids. The exhibition, “San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art: The First 50 Years,” continues through Jan.12. For more information, call the museum: 454-3541.