Irving Gill & Modern SD: A Self-Guided Walking Tour of San Diego Irving Gill & Modern SD is a first-timer's flagship self-guided walking tour of San Diego, built around the architect who turned Southern California houses into flat white planes of wall, light, and air. The route covers more than twenty stops, concentrated in Bankers Hill and the canyon between Albatross and Front streets, with the Marston House and the First Church of Christ, Scientist anchoring the ends. You'll walk past mansions, rental cottages, a schoolhouse, and a workingman's cottage that cost almost nothing to build, and you'll hear how one man got from the first to the last. About This San Diego Walking Tour The house at 3733 Robinson Mews is a one-story workingman's cottage, described in its National Register nomination as exactly that, built somewhere between roughly 1902 and 1906. San Diego's landmark register puts it at 1902; the exact year is still uncertain. Sunnyslope Lodge may be the most important small house on this tour, and its scale is almost disarming. Gill believed architecture could cut construction cost, household labor, and wasted space while keeping dignity, privacy, light, and outdoor life, and the smallest houses he built are where that belief got tested hardest. That is one of more than twenty stops on a walk that asks how Irving Gill moved from late nineteenth-century convention to a radically simplified architecture, and what he thought that simplicity could accomplish. The answer is not a single stylistic break. It arrived through eleven years of partnership with William Sterling Hebbard, through arguments with clients about finishes, through plumbing and ventilation, through a canyon full of rental houses commissioned by two women, and through drawings that record the designs Gill lost. Gill's plain walls were meant to do work: he wanted buildings that were easier to keep clean, and he tied architectural simplification directly to reducing what he called household drudgery. Smooth surfaces, flush trim, built-in storage, compact service spaces, garbage systems, and vacuum outlets were his answer, and they put his houses squarely inside the public-health culture of the Progressive Era. The Route: Bankers Hill and the Albatross Canyon The stops sit close enough together that several stages of one career survive within a few blocks of each other. Highlights include: Marston House — one of San Diego's best-known Gill buildings, and it looks nothing like the architecture that made him famous.First Church of Christ, Scientist — designed around 1909 and 1910, when Gill's argument became impossible to miss.Sunnyslope Lodge — a low-cost cottage on Robinson Mews that carried some of Gill's largest ambitions.3506 Albatross — built in 1909 and long identified as the G. W. Simmons House, where the cube phase begins.Alice Lee and Katherine Teats houses — a canyon development of houses commissioned by two women who kept hiring Gill.Ernest and Ileen White House — 1898 rough stone, timber, shingles, and divided windows, from a Gill you would not recognize.George and Maud Easton House — designated by the City in 2024, with a flat roof and broad eaves pressing the house toward the horizontal.Johnson-Puterbaugh Cottage — a 1902 house the San Diego History Center identifies as the prototype for a series of modest cottages.Cossitt Cottage #1 — a 1911 Early Modern rental cottage restored in 2025.Bishop's Day School — a school where outdoor circulation replaced enclosed hallways, later adapted for religious use. You'll Learn About… How Hazel Wood Waterman went from being Gill's client to designing under his supervision, and why the City's designation language names her as a master architect, a correction older Gill-centered histories blurred.Why Alice Lee and Katherine Teats matter to this story as much as the architect: Lee commissioned and developed houses in Bankers Hill, Teats owned and commissioned properties in the same network, and Gill's surviving drawings show an ambitious plan for the canyon between Albatross and Front.What happened at the Melville and Amy Klauber House, a Gill design whose demolition fight became part of San Diego preservation history.How Arthur and Elsa Marston resisted the stucco finish Gill preferred in 1909, and how the surviving presentation studies let you see the alternatives that were drawn and rejected next to the house that got built.Why a facade of broad wall planes and repeated arches is unforgiving to restore: a window slightly too large changes everything, which is why the City's designation report for Cossitt Cottage #1 weighed a later garage, an infilled side window, and altered porch details.How Kate Sessions shaped the planting around the Lee and Teats development, so that building and garden still work together at Burnham House and along the canyon. Who It's For This is a flagship tour for a first-time visitor to San Diego who wants more than a list of viewpoints. No architecture background is needed; the stories are about people, money, housework, and the fights over what got torn down. If you already know Gill's white walls and flat roofs, the early stops will complicate that picture, because the 1898 and 1901 houses refuse to hand you a tidy origin story. Practical Details The walk centers on Bankers Hill and the Albatross canyon, with the Marston House at the edge of Balboa Park as a natural place to begin or end. Most of the route is compact enough to cover in a couple of hours at an easy pace, and it climbs and descends with the canyon in places. It's self-guided, so there's no schedule and no group: play a stop when you reach it, skip one, or come back another day. Weekday mornings and late afternoons are the worst time to drive anywhere in San Diego, so the neighborhood is best reached outside commute hours. Take the Tour Download the app and take Irving Gill & Modern SD at your own pace, one canyon house at a time.
