William J. Dodd

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The John Stark House, ca 1898, designed and engineered by partners WJDodd and Arthur Cobb in Louisville's St. James Court. Source: "The Victorian to the Beaux Arts: a study or four Louisville architectural firms" by M.P.Hedgepeth, Univ. of Louisville, 1981.

The "Chateauesque Grouping", ca 1895, on Old Louisville's 4th Street at Hill may be a Dodd design; not characteristic of his more normative classical styling, this work, if his at all, may reflect the fashion taste of a client. NRNF (National Register of Historic Places) details of 1976 (Kinsman) and 1981 (Hedgepeth) suggest a likely Dodd attribution on style grounds but posit no extant documentation to settle the issue. See Discussion entries adjunct to this page.

William J. Dodd (1862-1930) ~Distinguished American architect and designer. Canadian-born, of Irish and English parents, William James Dodd may well come to be regarded as among the most accomplished architects working in Louisville, Kentucky and Los Angeles, California between 1890 and 1920; certainly one of the most prolific, his works are not limited to those two cities. Some of his best known extant structures include: the original Presbyterian Seminary campus (now Jefferson Community & Technical College), the Weissinger-Gaulbert Apartments, and the old YMCA building, all three on Broadway in downtown Louisville; the Western Branch of the Louisville Free Public Library, a Carnegie library which was America's first public library to serve African Americans; the Pacific Center and Hearst's LA Examiner Building in downtown Los Angeles, California and San Gabriel Mission Auditorium (the latter two in Mission Revival style) also of greater Los Angeles. His designs of Teco pottery remain among the most sought-after and rare of the Arts and Crafts movement products introduced by the famed Gates Potteries near Chicago Illinois. He also designed furniture and art glass windows for many of his best residential and commercial buildings examples of which can still be found in the Ferguson Mansion, currently the Filson Historical Society, and the Hoyt Gamble house, both of Louisville.

Dodd rises from the so-called Chicago School (architecture) and design innovations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries apprenticing under William Le Baron Jenney and Solon Spencer Beman; his first employment appears to be as a draftsman of Beman's designs for the planned city of Pullman Illinois. See Pullman, Chicago. In his nearly 25 years in Kentucky, with Louisville as his base of operations, Dodd created magnificent work of exceptional craftsmanship and high style throughout the region including cities in Ohio and Tennessee, designs which trace the transitional tastes and technologies of the period before Modernism provided new aesthetics and arguments about design, artifice, form and function. While in Kentucky, Dodd partnered with Oscar Wehle, Mason Maury, Arthur Cobb, and Kenneth McDonald. Strong evidence suggests that Dodd also did a great deal of free-lance work. A newspaper article from 1897 in the Louisville Courier-Journal states that Dodd was employed for two years by the New York architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White; scholarship has not yet supported this claim though it was likely so during 1885 and 1886, two unaccounted-for years in the Dodd historical record.

Departing the midwest, Dodd enjoyed a second career in the greater Los Angeles area from early 1913 until his death there in 1930. Besides the old downtown financial district around Pacific Center are still found Dodd structures: around Hollywood in Laughlin & Hancock Parks; to the west in Rustic Canyon, Playa Del Rey and Long Beach; southeast to San Gabriel, and possibly northeast in Altadena. In Los Angeles, Dodd partnered briefly with J. Martyn Haenke and later, his longest partnership, with William Richards.

Dodd married Ione Estes of Memphis TN in 1889; their marriage produced no surviving children. Ione Estes was from a large family of some political and historical importance in post-Reconstruction era Tennessee and in the surrounding upper south region.