By Michael Good

A rare Richard Requa headlines the Old House Fair Home Tour in South Park

(Editor’s note: The Old House Fair takes over South Park and Golden Hill on Saturday, June 20. More coverage here.)

Considering his reputation as one of San Diego’s most influential and prolific architects, it’s surprising there aren’t more historic houses with Richard Requa on their plaques in the Uptown area, where there are scores of Irving Gills and historic homes by other early 20th-century masters.

You’d think we’d be awash with Richard Requa houses — rambling ranches, Spanish casitas, Moorish masterpieces. Some of this absence may be due to poor record keeping, some may be because many of the houses he designed are in ritzy neighborhoods and have been remodeled beyond recognition. Some of it may be due to the way he worked — Requa seemed more than willing to delegate, share credit, even design anonymously.

But mostly it’s due to who he was. Requa wasn’t just an architect. He was a photographer and filmmaker, a book author and a newspaper columnist. He was a lecturer, mentor, inventor, and champion of good design and taste. He wasn’t content just to design houses; he wanted to design neighborhoods and communities — entire cities, even. If he couldn’t do it himself, he would try to persuade others to follow his lead. He liked to tell a story, enlighten and entertain, elevate his profession and the quality of his contemporaries’ work. He wasn’t pretentious. Or stuffy. He didn’t mind poking a little fun at himself. (His column, which essentially told homeowners and builders, politely, that they were doing it all wrong, was called “Requa’s Rants.”)

Requa thought big. He didn’t just think outside the box, he thought about the box, both inside and out, and then he thought of dozens of little boxes arranged around a courtyard, with red tile roofs on them. Requa designed the town of Ojai at age 32, perhaps the first planned community in America. In the 1920s, he laid out Rancho Santa Fe and supervised the design of the public buildings and many of the homes. He was the supervising architect of Kensington Heights. In the 1930s, he played a similar role in Presidio Hills and a development near San Diego State University. He designed commercial buildings, apartment buildings, military buildings and barracks. He ran a busy office and collaborated with many architects, both in his employ and out. He shared his insights with others, through lectures, movies, photographs, books, and newspaper and magazine articles. It’s amazing he had the energy or time to design any houses at all.

Of the houses we know about that he designed solely himself, most were model homes for housing tracts, designs for influential people, or part of a project dear to his heart, like the Houses of Pacific Relations he designed and built for the 1935 Expo in Balboa Park.

Considering all this, it’s pretty amazing that a house Requa personally designed, and whose construction he personally supervised, is part of this month’s Old House Fair Home Tour in South Park and Golden Hill. Better still, El Tovar, an apartment building he designed on 28th Street, is included in this year’s tour as well. It’s a Richard Requa twofer, all within walking distance of the Old House Fair epicenter at 30th and Beech.

Both structures are remarkably intact. Were they in La Jolla or Coronado, they would have been restored beyond recognition, as has happened to other Requa designed houses.

Richard Smith Requa came to San Diego with his family in 1900, at the age of 19, from the tiny town of Norfolk, Nebraska, where his father sold men’s clothes. In Rock Island, Illinois, where Requa was born, his father ran a shop called The Merchant Tailor (“dealer in fine hats, gents furnishings”). In San Diego he managed a rooming house called The Tourist, at 23rd and H Street. At one point, the family lived there, too.

Requa was a photographer before he was an architect. In 1904 he opened a studio and photo supply store on Fifth Avenue. It was a family affair — his sister Rhoda was a clerk. But Southwest Photo Supply wasn’t a financial success. After a year, he and his partner, Fred L Edwards, went back to working for FS Hartwell, an electrical contractor.

In 1907, after working as an electrician for six years, Requa managed to wrangle a site superintendent job from Irving Gill. Five years later, while Gill was turning his attention to the planning of the industrial city of Torrance, Requa struck out on his own. In 1912, he partnered up with the much older and more experienced Frank Mead, who had worked with Gill (and for a brief time was his partner).

Requa couldn’t have picked two better mentors. Mead was experienced yet eccentric, famous for traveling around the Mediterranean in the back of an ox cart, in native dress, sketching everything he saw. Gill taught drafting and mentored many young architects. Gill spent the first part of his career trying to figure out how to reduce architecture to its basic, purest form — and the second part trying to persuade people to let him do it. Like Mead, he was impressed by the simple cubist structures of North Africa and he believed the architecture of the Missions, ranchos and other simple buildings of early California held the key to a new type of architecture for 20th-century Southern California.

In Requa’s second book, “Old World Inspiration for American Architecture” (1927), he makes it clear Mead and Requa were still influencing his thought. “The greatest obstacle in the path of architectural progress in America is the prevailing notion that a building of architectural pretension must be designed in some recognized ancient and exotic style. … Seldom is such a building in harmony with its environment or a true expression of its materials and purposes.”

This is what people most often get wrong about Requa — that he was designing in the Spanish Colonial Revival style. He wasn’t interested in historical recreation. He was carrying on Gill’s project of creating an architecture appropriate for San Diego. He called it Southern California Architecture.

The OHF Tour house on a hill in South Park is an ideal example of the type. It was built for Leslie B. Mills and his wife Eunice. Mills was in the trade — he owned and ran an onyx and marble mine in Baja, and a tile factory in San Diego. He was active in the Ad Club and the Chamber of Commerce, as was Requa. Unlike some of Requa’s better-known projects — the Del Mar Castle, for example, the Mills house is human-scaled. It’s a comfortable family home. The present owners have been excellent stewards of this piece of San Diego history.

Rudd Schoeffel, who owns the house with his wife Sally, is a font of knowledge about the place, the era, Requa and the previous homeowners. Rudd, a long-time real estate professional who has owned a number of historic houses, can point out Requa’s innovations, such as the concrete stairs, scored and tinted to look like tile. (And the onyx decoration over the doorway.) According to Rudd,

Requa was on the site nearly every day during the building of the project, which is full of custom touches.

The house was big news: It made the front page of the San Diego Union in 1927, as construction was about to start. Coincidentally, there’s an announcement in the same issue about Requa’s then-new column. This was the sort of brilliant synchronicity that Requa would no doubt lecture the Ad Club about at their monthly meeting. Two write-ups in one issue. Another Requa twofer!

Requa’s plan for a Southern California style of architecture was stymied by the Great Depression. Although he worked in the style for the 1935 Expo, most notably the Casa Del Prado and the Houses of Pacific Relations, Requa’s last house was typical of the traditional minimalist style mandated by the FHA’s lending guidelines. (The same guidelines made Mediterranean flavored houses hard to finance, turned La Jolla into an exclusive enclave and made South Park a magnet for low cost housing.)

Requa died at his desk on June 10, 1941, at age 60, his dream of a new Southern California style only partly realized. But we can still gaze upon what Requa wrought in South Park and imagine what might have been.

—Contact Michael Good at [email protected].