Уильям Джеймс Додд: Американдық сәулетшінің шығармашылығы мен мұрасы

American architect and designer

William James Dodd (1862–1930) was an American architect and designer who worked mainly in Louisville, Kentucky from 1886 through the end of 1912 and in Los Angeles, California from early 1913 until his death. Dodd rose from the so called First Chicago School of architecture, though of greater influence for his mature designs was the classical aesthetic of the Beaux Arts style ascendant after the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. His design work also included functional and decorative architectural glass and ceramics, furniture, home appliances, and literary illustration. In a prodigious career lasting more than 40 years, Dodd left many structures that are still standing on both east and west coasts and in the midwest and upper south, among the best known of these being the original Presbyterian Seminary campus (now Jefferson Community & Technical College), the Weissinger Gaulbert Apartments, and the old YMCA building, all three in downtown Louisville facing Broadway. Also notable are his numerous residential and ecclesiastical designs, restored and in continuous use in Kentucky and Tennessee. In California, examples of his extant work include the Pacific Center and Hearst's Los Angeles Herald Examiner Building in downtown Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Mission Playhouse south of Pasadena as well as residences across Los Angeles, in the Pacific Palisades, in Altadena and more distantly in Palm Springs. Some of the earliest attributed and oldest designs of his career may be found in Hyde Park, Chicago.

[[File:LouisvilleKY JStarkHouse. JPG|thumb|200px|left|The John P. Starks House, c. 1898, designed by W. J. Dodd & Arthur Cobb in Old Louisville's St. James Court. Mason Maury (1889–1896), Arthur Cobb, and Kenneth McDonald. Also, Dodd's output from these years contained many free lance projects, and in at least one case Dodd teamed with Ohio architect Frank Mills Andrews. He worked throughout Kentucky and across the midwest, specifically Illinois, Indiana, and Tennessee, creating structures of exceptional craftsmanship and high style, designs which traced the transitional tastes and technologies of the period leading up to Modernism. On the east coast, extant Dodd structures from the early 1890s can be found in Virginia, in the historic Ghent (Norfolk) neighborhood. On Christmas Day 1912 Dodd departed the midwest to continue his profession in the greater Los Angeles area, a period lasting until his death there in June 1930. Upon arrival in Los Angeles, Dodd immediately partnered with J. Martyn Haenke (1877–1963), but only briefly, through October 1913. After a year of free lance, Dodd teamed with William Richards (1871–1945), his longest professional partnership, from 1915 until his death. In southern California, "the Southland", Dodd's buildings are to be found in the old downtown financial district around Pacific Center, above Hollywood in Laughlin Park and Hancock Park, to the west in Rustic Canyon, Playa Del Rey and Long Beach, southeast to San Gabriel, and northeast in Altadena. Related to Dodd's Los Angeles work are residences in Oak Glen and Palm Springs, California. From as early as 1893, and to the end of his life, Dodd was a mentor to talented younger designers who were new to the profession, designers with now well known names like Lloyd Wright, Thomas Chalmers Vint, and Adrian Wilson, often outsiders without a developed practice and contending with a new client base and fast evolving licensing standards in cities enjoying rapid expansion as was Louisville after the American Civil War and Los Angeles after World War I. The architect Julia Morgan, a mostly free lance upstate California designer from San Francisco, rare as a female in a male dominated profession, formed a team with W. J. Dodd and J. M. Haenke as her LA facilitators and design partners for William Randolph Hearst's Los Angeles Herald Examiner Building, a landmark downtown Los Angeles project completed in 1915. William Dodd's design work extended to glass and ceramics. His designs of Teco pottery are among the most sought after and rare of the Arts and Crafts movement products introduced by the Gates Potteries near Chicago Illinois. He also designed furniture and art glass windows for many of his best residential and commercial buildings; examples of such work by Dodd are to be seen in the Ferguson Mansion, currently the Filson Historical Society, and the Hoyt Gamble house, both of Louisville.

thumb|120px|left|Cartoon from 1922 Uplifters Club YearbookDodd was an amateur musical and theatrical performer. For public and private occasions he was known to sing popular airs and, as well, provide recitations of Irish, Welsh & German verse; his effective ear for the Irish Gaelic pronunciation was remarked upon. He served on the founding boards of the Louisville Symphony Orchestra (1908) and the Louisville Art Association (1909), now Louisville Visual Art, and he was a member of dramatic societies in both Louisville and Los Angeles. From 1916 to 1919 he served on the board of directors of the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra, this latter organization being the predecessor of the LA Philharmonic, and he was a mover and shaker in the Los Angeles Gamut Club, an exclusively male music fraternity. In 1918, the journal Pacific Coast Musical Review said "It seems Mr. Dodd has the knack of making artists and others do what he wants them to" and nicknamed Dodd "the Mayor of Seventh Street", presumably a reference to the theater and vaudeville district of old Los Angeles. From 1917 until his death he served on the California State Board of Examiners. In early 1930 he joined the newly founded International Deserts Conservation League as an advisory board member.

William became acutely ill while traveling abroad with his wife in the spring of 1930, returning home without Ione in early May and dying at Los Angeles on June 14, 1930, in Hollywood Hospital. Cause of death: lymphocytic leukemia with hypostatic pneumonia. The funeral was postponed until June 28, 1930, upon the return of Ione from Europe, his last rites and burial conducted at Forest Lawn Cemetery, Glendale, Little Church of the Flowers. Obituary notices of June 15, 23, 27 and 28 make no mention of any religious facilitation of Dodd's obsequies. For enlarged context on Dodd's religious affiliation, see the "Early Years" section above. Ione lived on, accompanied by two widowed sisters Kate & Sallie, in California. Death came for Ione in February 1950 as a patient at Camarillo State Mental Hospital, per death certificate.

thumb|Pacific Mutual Life Building, Los Angeles (in 2012), now known as Pacific Center. Dodd & Richards design of 1919.
thumb|right|Three Dodd Teco designs from 1905 Teco Catalog of the Gates Potteries Co. See External Links below. thumb|Dodd designed Teco vase No. #87 (c. 1902). Size: 12" x 8". See 1905 Teco Catalog in External Links below. thumb|Design of a Cooking Stove 1887 W. J. Dodd, Louisville, Kentucky
thumb|right|Illustration by W. J. Dodd for an 1893 essay "Gondola Days" by F. Hopkinson Smith published by Southern Magazine
thumb|Illustration by W. J. Dodd for an 1895 story on Japanese themes in a magazine.