Hines places his work within an international context: as Gill's identification with the modern movement developed, his work evolved from the influence of the East Coast Shingle Style and Wright's Midwest Prairie Style to become closer in spirit to the work of the Austrian Adolf Loos. Gill and Loos were both admired by the second-generation modernists Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, who studied under Loos in Vienna and learned from Gill in Los Angeles. Hines also explores the social dimensions of Gill's work.

This catalog commemorates the exhibition Irving Gill: Progress & Poetry in Architecture and features essays by four San Diego experts on Gill who approach his buildings from personal hands-on experience, study, and reflection. And, in what may be the first compendium of its kind, we have also gathered the most important period writings by and about Gill and reprinted them here. Lavishly illustrated and published for the first time are historic photographs of Gill buildings made from glass slides circa 1910 that were commissioned and used by Irving Gill in his practice. The over 130-page publication includes essays by Erik Hanson, Paul and Sarai Johnson, and Roy McMakin, with the foreword by Bruce Coons, and introduction by Ann Jarmusch.

The book provides a unique, in-depth and critical analysis of Wright's concrete block houses, set within their historical, biographical and theoretical contexts. In particular, it shows the full impact upon Wright of his contemporaries, architects Irving Gill and Rudolph Schindler. In doing so, it allows a full appreciation of Wright's, Gill's and Schindler's buildings beyond their architectonic and experiential qualities.

Kevin Starr is the foremost chronicler of the California dream. In Material Dreams, he turns to one of the most vibrant decades in the Golden State's history, the 1920's, when some two million Americans migrated to California, the vast majority settling in or around Los Angeles.