1307 North Mangum Street
Durham, NC, USA

National Register of Historic Places - Dillard-Gamble Houses

Statement of Significance:

The Dillard and Gamble houses, built for two generations of a wealthy Durham family, create one of the city's architectural landmarks. The Dillard House, erected in 1917 for Richard E. Dillard and designed by the prominent Washington, D.C., firm of Milburn and Heister, is one of the more lavishly built Colonial Revival houses surviving from Durham's early 20th century boom period. It has long served as a landmark to travelers entering the city. The Gamble House, built the adjoining lot given by the Dillards to their daughter Paul Dillard Gamble and her husband, shows the change in taste that occurred in less than 20 years. Designed by the Asheville firm of Greene and Rogers and influenced by Walter Gropius via Harvard professor Walter Bogner, it may be the earliest full-blown example of the International Style in North Carolina, and certainly the first in its region of the state. A celebrated novelty in Durham when built, the house integrates technology and esthetics and combines metal, glass, and poured concrete in a design for a new open spatial vision boldly expressing the principles of the Bauhaus. The two contrasting houses are linked by their common family history and the landscaping between them.

The significance of the Dillard and Gamble houses may be discussed from two major points of view--as reflections of personalities who played active roles in Durham's affairs and as innovative representatives of distinct architectural styles. With regard to both of these aspects, each house could be discussed individually; a third approach which may be interwoven with the first two, however, concerns the relationship of these two houses to each other through the close ties of the Dillard family.

Richard Ewing Dillard was born in Salem, Virginia, on July 28, 1881. In 1912 he and his wife, the former Miss Adelaide Paul, moved to Durham where Mr. Dillard became active in the business and civic life of the community. He made his commercial fortune in banking, livestock, real estate, and other sound investments in various businesses. His enterprises included ownership of the largest livestock company in central North Carolina and northern Virginia and The Dillard Paper Company of Raleigh. A political promotion published during his campaign for mayor which states that Mr. Dillard's interests cover everything that pertains to Durham apparently is true: He served on the executive committee of the Durham Real Estate Board and was one of its presidents, he was a director of the Durham Industrial Bank, the Citizens National Bank, and a president of the Security Building and Loan Association; he was a member of the board of trustees of Watts Hospital, the City Council and the County Com- missioners. He was also on the committee to secure a location for Durham's Classical Revival-style post office, a founding father and director of the Hope Valley Country Club, and a member of the Elks Club and the Durham Kiwanis Club.

It is no wonder that five years after arriving in Durham Mr. Dillard had built for his residence a substantial Colonial Revival house, which in its style, construction, and location expressed his commercial and civic accomplishments. The location of the house on a corner of the city along a major entrance to the city the asymmetrical design and the portico emphasizing the location all proclaim the importance of the family as well as of the structure. The investment in ornament and sound construction methods, such as the double wooden foundation, the effectiveness of which is attested to today by the soundness of the structure in spite of fire and vandalism, were not usual for the war year of 1917. The asymmetrical design of the facade is not typical of the Colonial Revival nor is the one-story convex portico. The use of a convex portico since ancient times derives ultimately from a Roman baroque 17th- century portico by Pietro da Cortona for Sta. Maria Della Pace and has been adapted to succeeding architectural styles, American examples including the Federal-style Thomas Poynton Ives House in Providence, Rhode Island, and one of Frank Lloyd Wright's earliest original designs, the Blossom Residence of 1892 in Chicago.
Another distinguishing aspect of the facade, the deep eaves, happens to originate in Wright's Blossom Residence and became an identifying characteristic of his style." Whether or not these two major characteristics designed by Milburn and Heister and incorporated into the design of the Dillard House were inspired by Wright's designs of 25 years earlier cannot be ascertained; but their distinctive, inventive nature at the local level cannot be questioned. The firm of Milburn and Heister was one of the most prominent in the South, specializing in public buildings. Their main office was located in Washington, D.C., where their prodigious output included designs for the House of Representatives Office Building and the Fairmount Hotel. From their only branch office in Durham, they executed designs for the city's most prominent structures of the second boom period, such as the Duke Building, Durham County Courthouse, First Presbyterian Church, and First National Bank and Office Building. The Dillard House appears to be one of their few residential commissions in the Durham area.

The ties within the Dillard family apparently were very close. When the Dillards only child, a daughter named Paul, married Howard W. Gamble, businessman and noted debater while at Columbia University, they exercised their desires to maintain the family unity. Howard Gamble became an associate of Mr. Dillard in real estate and general business, and about 1934 the Dillards gave the Gambles a large portion of their adjacent property on which to build a house." It is not clear whether or not the Dillards financed the Gamble House. The $61,000 cost of construction was very high for the time, particularly considering that the country was recovering from the Depression, although Mrs. Gamble claimed in an article in American Home that "the expense has been no more to build Modern than it would have been for any other type house of comparable size." Due to its style, the Gamble House became another residential landmark of Durham and as such is a fitting complement to the family's predecessor next door."

When the Gamble House was constructed, it definitely was a curiosity, and consequently criticized. With difficulty, the Gambles finally convinced their friends and neighbors that the house was to be modern, not futuristic." With an attitude more typical of New York City than Durham, the Gambles took an active interest in modern art, architecture, and photography, as their art collection and house, including a darkroom, attest. In Mrs. Gamble's words, we liked everything about contemporary architecture and decoration. Everyone knows that, all through history, furniture and homes have changed to meet the newer ways of living. We knew the Modern building style was very adaptable to our mode of living and felt that living in a Modern home helped to adjust one to the outside contemporary world. Being daily exposed to the twentieth century, we wanted to come home and retain those impressions in a twentieth century environment. To us, Modern meant the things we wanted: simplicity of life, freedom from unnecessary details, an invitation to use bright colors, to let in as much sun and light as possible, to use every inch of space, the functional furniture, and the fact that everything which had its reason for being was there while all else was, excluded. It all seemed so clean, sane, and convenient.

Mrs. Gamble's statement appears in an article for a 1939 edition of American Home. 1953 real estate ad for the Gamble House claims that the unusual style of the house resulted in its also being featured in Better Homes and Gardens (which is supposed to 10 have awarded the house a plaque), American Home Annual, and Carolina Architects Annual. These last three citations have not been located, but the house was listed for many years in the Chamber of Commerce's "Points of Interest in Durham, North Carolina."

The Gambles manifested their ideals through their close collaboration with the Asheville architectural firm of Greene & Rogers. Both partners worked on the project,11 with W. Steward Rogers, a personal friend of the Gambles, drawing up the actual plans." The relationship between the architect and his client is noteworthy in this instance as the Gambles' aesthetic and functional desires were so evident in the design of the house. Mr. Rogers's education was a necessary complement in this project to the Gambles' Avant Garde sense of aesthetics as he had recently completed his studies under the Bauhaus-influenced Walter F. Bogner at Harvard; but Mr. Rogers was by no means committed to International Style ideals. Some of his commercial designs, such as the Bon Marche Department Store and the service station for W. C. Shuey in Asheville, were influenced by the stream-lined art deco, but the body of his domestic work was eclectic." The Bauhaus-influenced Gamble House remains unique for the area and perhaps for the entire state, as the earliest known domestic example of the Inter- national style. A stucco, flat-roofed house with corner windows was designed by Eccles D. Everhart for Winston-Salem family in 1937 or 1939, a rambling, completely one-story structure." In the late 1930s and early 1940s the influence of the International Style became slightly more prevalent in the state. According to Mr. Rogers, several years later another of his associates designed a house in Asheville in collaboration with Marcel Breuer," but no documentation that would verify an earlier International Style has been found. If the Gamble House was not unique for the state, it was certainly a first in its region.

The significance of the Gamble House as a rare North Carolina, or American, domestic example of the International Style promulgated by the Bauhaus must be discussed. Bogner's instruction of Rogers in design at Harvard is an essential link in the chain of influence that resulted in the design of the Gamble House. Bogner received his education through the K. K. Staatsgenergeschule in Austria, the American Academy in Rome, and the Rotch Scholarship." Although some of Bogner's domestic work about the time he would have influenced Rogers is eclectic, probably reflecting the desires of his clients, the majority of his work from the late 1930s on, such as the Boston Back Bay Center and his residence in Lincoln Massachusetts, reflect the influence of Walter Gropius. Many of the Bauhaus principles were learned by Bogner during his study in Europe and according to Robers subsequently were taught at Harvard.

At the Bauhaus in Germany, new principles of design had been developed and applied by Walter Gropius, who strove for the integration of the arts with the machine age. Gropius recognized that the aesthetic satisfaction of the human soul is just as important as structural functions and concise economical solutions and makes possible a new spatial vision which converts building, merely a matter of methods and materials, to architecture." The three basic principles of his New Architecture are the conception of architecture as volume rather than mass, regularity instead of axial symmetry as the chief means of ordering design, and the proscription of arbitrary applied decoration." Each of these principles was applied to the Gamble House in the unbroken wall surfaces and bands of glass, the asymmetrical floor plan, and a minimum of ornamentation, respectively. Gropius believed that through spatial harmony, repose, and proportion a room is humanized and goes beyond the fulfillment of its structural function."

Characteristics of Gropius' New Architecture, which quickly came to be called the International Style, that are essential to this humanization include the opening up of the wall surface by continuous horizontal casements subdivided by steel mullions, made possible by new constructional techniques that abolished the separating function of the wall. Other characteristics are concrete framework and flat roofs which allow lighter, reduce the chance of fire as there are not rafters, and render the roofs usable for recreation and subsequent expansion. The Gamble House possesses all of these characteristics--the best materials including concrete, substantiated by the high construction cost, the horizontal bands of windows, and flat roofs; according to Mrs. Gamble, "Besides the obvious advantages of the deck and lower terraces is the important one that the house may be enlarged at any one of these points, should the desire or occasion arise." The Gambles later manifested this possibility by enclosing one of the upstairs decks for a solarium. Although the house's corner windows are a good manifestation of the negation of the structural function of the walls as well as break the vertical edges, it is interesting to note that they appear in Gropius' glass-sheathed commercial designs rather than in his domestic designs. Corner windows do appear in houses built prior to 1935 by contributors to the development of the International Style not connected with the Bauhaus, such as Mies van der Rohe's Tugenhat House and Richard Neutra's Lovill House."