This Richard Requa house was built in 1927 for Leslie C. Mills, a civicminded merchant. The sweeping patio overlooks lush gardens and an orchard originally landscaped by Milton Sessions, nephew of the legendary Kate Sessions. It is one of five homes on the 2015 Historic Home Tour, part of the Old House Fair on June 20. (Photo by Andy McRory)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nBut mostly it\u2019s due to who he was. Requa wasn\u2019t 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\u2019t content just to design houses; he wanted to design neighborhoods and communities \u2014 entire cities, even. If he couldn\u2019t 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\u2019 work. He wasn\u2019t pretentious. Or stuffy. He didn\u2019t 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 \u201cRequa\u2019s Rants.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Requa thought big. He didn\u2019t 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\u2019s amazing he had the energy or time to design any houses at all.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Considering all this, it\u2019s pretty amazing that a house Requa personally designed, and whose construction he personally supervised, is part of this month\u2019s 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\u2019s tour as well. It\u2019s a Richard Requa twofer, all within walking distance of the Old House Fair epicenter at 30th and Beech.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s clothes. In Rock Island, Illinois, where Requa was born, his father ran a shop called The Merchant Tailor (\u201cdealer in fine hats, gents furnishings\u201d). In San Diego he managed a rooming house called The Tourist, at 23rd and H Street. At one point, the family lived there, too.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 his sister Rhoda was a clerk. But Southwest Photo Supply wasn\u2019t a financial success. After a year, he and his partner, Fred L Edwards, went back to working for FS Hartwell, an electrical contractor.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
Requa couldn\u2019t 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
In Requa\u2019s second book, \u201cOld World Inspiration for American Architecture\u201d (1927), he makes it clear Mead and Requa were still influencing his thought. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is what people most often get wrong about Requa \u2014 that he was designing in the Spanish Colonial Revival style. He wasn\u2019t interested in historical recreation. He was carrying on Gill\u2019s project of creating an architecture appropriate for San Diego. He called it Southern California Architecture.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 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\u2019s better-known projects \u2014 the Del Mar Castle, for example, the Mills house is human-scaled. It\u2019s a comfortable family home. The present owners have been excellent stewards of this piece of San Diego history.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s innovations, such as the concrete stairs, scored and tinted to look like tile. (And the onyx decoration over the doorway.) According to Rudd,<\/p>\n
Requa was on the site nearly every day during the building of the project, which is full of custom touches.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s an announcement in the same issue about Requa\u2019s 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!<\/p>\n
Requa\u2019s 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\u2019s last house was typical of the traditional minimalist style mandated by the FHA\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u2014P\u00f3ngase en contacto con Michael Good en visitas domiciliariassdun@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"por Michael Bueno<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1306,"featured_media":248755,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11555","_seopress_titles_title":"A house made of onyx and imagination","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11547,11551,11550,11555],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-248754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-news","category-top-stories","category-uptown-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1306"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248754\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/248755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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