Event

Bankers Hill Walking Tour

The sloped terrain of Bankers Hill, near downtown San Diego, is blessed with pedestrian bridges over canyons and views of San Diego Bay that few affluent professionals and first families and their architects could resist. SOHO's 90-minute guided walking tour contains new content inspired by SOHO's celebration Irving Gill: Progress & Poetry in Architecture. These city blocks are rich in the early 20th-century Modern architecture that Gill pioneered and include the largest concentration of Gill homes built anywhere, on hidden Albatross Street. As the neighborhood grew, other prominent architects, such as William Templeton Johnson, Mead & Requa, and Hazel Wood Waterman, San Diego's first female architect, also designed homes here.

Gills architecture is strikingly Modern in Bankers Hill, with its spare, cubist arrangements of volumes and shapes, such as flat roofs, arches and pergolas, without surface ornament, with the exception of trailing vines and shadows.