Henry Hill (architect)


Henry Hill was born in England to American parents. His mother was Anita Jeffress-Hill. His mother and her children moved back to the US and settled in Berkeley, California near the Claremont hotel. He studied architecture at the University of California, Berkeley graduating in 1936 and at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, where he worked under the renowned Walter Gropius. After earning his master's degree in architecture in 1938, he returned to the Bay Area, joining the office of John Ekin Dinwiddie in San Francisco and making partner in 1939. During World War II Hill served as a captain in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. When the war ended, he rejoined Dinwiddie and a new partner, Erich Mendelsohn, a well-known German architect who had fled the Third Reich.

Henry Hill Houses

Hill helped define the woodsy Second Bay Tradition, which combined the rigors of the International Style with regional, vernacular influences.
Hill designed as many as 500 houses, several stores, commercial buildings and larger projects, primarily in the Bay Area and Carmel, from the late 1940s to 1979. Hill designs can also be found in Southern California, Connecticut, Kentucky, El Salvador and Austria. Hill's architecture is romantic and dramatic, emphasizing light and shadow, views and natural textures. John Elkin Dinwiddie, Gardner Dailey and William Wurster also helped define the Second Bay Tradition.

Archives

The Henry Hill archive is at the Environmental Design Archives at UC Berkeley.