Gill-Designed Church Gets Reprieve : Restoration: Christian Science congregation decides to preserve structure rather than start from scratch.

The First Church of Christ, Scientist on 2nd Avenue near downtown San Diego doesn’t look much like a masterpiece. Stark and boxy, it represents the height of poorly executed 1950s modernism. But its bland and foreboding stucco exterior conceals one of the best buildings ever done by San Diego architect Irving Gill, who died in 1936.

Convinced of the beauty of Gill’s 1909 design, which disappeared beneath a 1950s remodeling, the church has dropped plans for a new building on the site in favor of restoring Gill’s original. Design work is well under way, and construction should begin early next year.

In light of the loss of other Gill buildings over the years, the preservation of the church is particularly significant.

The original structure is an essential link in Gill’s legacy, representing the turning point between his youthful work of the 1890s and early 1900s, and the emergence of his mature, bare-bones modern style beginning around 1908.

On buildings such as this one and the La Jolla Women’s Club (1913), he used arched arcades as inviting transitions between indoor and outdoors spaces. He combined carefully placed windows and doors with bold, simple building forms into deceptively simple wholes, the architectural equivalent of haikus.

Many of Gill’s best buildings, including the Klauber and Timken houses in San Diego and the Dodge house in Los Angeles, were torn down during the 1970s, when Gill’s star was only beginning its contemporary ascent, which began with his inclusion in Esther’s McCoy’s 1960 book, Five California Architects.

Some architectural historians now believe Gill deserves a place in history alongside Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan, both of whom Gill worked with early in his career.

Three years ago, the First Church of Christ, Scientist decided to upgrade its 2nd Avenue facility, but their initial idea was to replace it with a new one.

Cliff McMillan, a Christian Scientist who is serving as project adviser on the restoration, credits historians with redirecting the church’s thinking.

When they heard that Gill’s building might be demolished, David Gebhard, a professor at UC Santa Barbara and expert in California architecture, and Bruce Kamerling, a San Diego historian specializing in Gill, both wrote to inform the church of the building’s merits.

The issue was put to a vote, and the idea of restoring Gill’s building won out over a new building.

Gill’s signature style was a crisp, straightforward abstraction

of earlier Mission and Spanish Colonial elements. Although his interiors don’t always show the innovative genius of a Frank Lloyd Wright, Gill’s exteriors are masterfully proportioned and detailed.

Original drawings for the church show how Gill’s personal style evolved, even while he was designing this building. An early rendering shows frilly plaster detailing at the roof line. But the final design is spare and minimalist, classic Gill.

The church illustrates how attitudes toward architecture change over time, and how Gill’s reputation has evolved.

When he was hired to do the building, Gill had already collaborated with architect William Hebbard on a more conservatively designed Christian Science church on 3rd Avenue and Ash Street downtown, completed in 1904 and still standing. By 1908, he had split with Hebbard and was gaining favor in San Diego. The church wanted to strengthen its image with a statement building by this emerging young talent.

Then in 1910, Gill, an early favorite for the job of designing the buildings in Balboa Park, lost out to Eastern heavyweight Bertram Goodhue. Instead of Gill’s minimal Modernism, the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition opened with ornately decorated Spanish revival buildings that set the tone for the next 20 years of San Diego architecture.

Gill kept busy in the years immediately following, but, by the time he died in 1936, his spare, modern approach had been eclipsed by nostalgic Mediterranean revival modes.

By the 1950s, Gill was all but forgotten. In its desire to keep current with the times, the church hired an architect named Earl Giberson to remodel its building, and Giberson obliterated Gill’s original.

Arched arcades and windows were covered over, replaced with conventional boxy windows and doors. A landmark, tile-roofed corner bell tower was removed, along with a rooftop glass skylight dome plagued by chronic water leaks. In the main sanctuary, the original, huge pipe organ was hidden from view.

The changes were detrimental not only to the building’s appearance, but to its functions.

The loss of windows and the rooftop dome proved especially damaging. Where the sanctuary was once flooded with natural light, it is now a cold, dimly lit space.

Needless to say, Giberson has since been rightfully relegated to obscurity, while Gill has emerged as the leading light of 20th-Century architecture in San Diego County.

Cost of the restoration is estimated at $1.1 million. The church is now raising the money and has retained Del Mar architects Bokal/Kelley-Markham to do design work. Jim Kelley-Markham is a longtime Gill buff. He helped lead the unsuccessful fight to save the Klauber house and supervised the restoration of a large Gill house in Lakeside.

The renewed church will look nearly identical to the way it did in 1909, with Gill’s signature arches, arched windows, corner tower and dome brought back, and the pipe organ uncovered.

Inside, though, the church plans to reconfigure Gill’s layout to better suit its current needs. Two new rooms--a reading room and a Sunday school for children--will flank the sanctuary, enclosed by new interior walls that will reduce the capacity of the sanctuary from 873 to 300.

The new interior walls will be designed to match the original building, and McMillan believes their windows will admit plenty of natural light to the sanctuary. But with the sanctuary enclosed on two sides by interior instead of exterior walls, the quality and quantity of natural light are bound to be less than what they were in Gill’s original.

It is unfortunate that Gill’s scheme is being slightly altered, but a blessing that his overall design is being preserved.

In addition to purely aesthetic improvements, the church will be brought up to current seismic standards. The building is made of steel-reinforced brick, covered with plaster, and will need reinforcing.

Even so, engineers told McMillan that Gill was well ahead of his time. For example, he increased the church’s rigidity by attaching brick walls to floor joists with steel straps embedded in the walls--a practice that didn’t become common in California until many years later.

San Diego has a rocky history of historic preservation. Aside from the many casualties among Gill’s buildings, there have been other significant architectural losses. These include downtown buildings lost to redevelopment during the 1960s and 1970s, the Art Deco-era Aztec Brewery downtown, demolished in 1990, and dozens of quaint Craftsman bungalows replaced by elephantine apartments over the years.

One of the most recent blows came last July, when architect Bob Mosher demolished four turn-of-the-Century Craftsman-style cottages in La Jolla to make way for a hotel.

When the church project is completed in 1994, it will contribute a rich slice of history to a neighborhood that’s a mixed bag of architectural styles and periods.

As such, it will serve as a fine example of the importance of preserving historic architectural gems as the city grows and changes around them.

* Architect Jim Kelley-Markham will explain the importance of the building and the restoration at a 1:30 p.m. public meeting April 4, at the church, 2442 2nd Ave.