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 five architects - Bernard Maybeck, Irving Gill, the brothers Charles and Henry Greene, and R.M. Schindler - whose work and lives are presented here were seminal figures in American architecture. As Californians they were less influenced than their Eastern contemporaries by the European styles that prevailed in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, and each of them devised an original style that has had a profound effect on younger generations of American architects."--The inside cover

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.

"An important contribution to the understanding of 'modernist' culture in the United States and a perceptive analysis of the achievement of a major American architect, with a European background and an international reputation."--William Jordy, Brown University "This study, part biography and part architectural analysis, is a modern masterpiece of architectural history. The prose is lucid and sometimes elegant--very much like the work of Richard Neutra which it so brilliantly examines."--Peter Gay, Yale University "An important contribution to the understanding of 'modernist' culture in the United States and a perceptive analysis of the achievement of a major American architect, with a European background and an international reputation."--William Jordy, Brown University