The Walter L. Dodge House in West Hollywood, California, was an architecturally significant home, designed by Irving Gill in the Early Modern style.

[2] It also incorporated many technological innovations, including a kitchen-sink garbage disposal; an automatic car wash in the garage; plain, flush doors that swung on hidden hinges or slid into walls; a central vacuum cleaning system; sheet-metal doors; natural and unadorned (simply polished) wood surfaces indoors; and skylights and windows that provided for luminous sunlit interiors.

[3] The Dodge House was considered one of Gill's finest works, "revealing a functional asymmetry whose ornament was derived solely from the studied geometry of the sharp openings in plain walls.

Mr Gill thinks there is nothing more arrestingly beautiful than a plain wall across which move cloud shadows or a silhouette of flower, and that no carving or frescoing could more perfectly finish a doorway or window than a vine or creeper.

"[3][7] Second, the following year, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors rezoned the property to R-4, increasing the allowable development from eight to 200 units, making the site attractive for high-density, large apartment-building construction.

[6] The Board of Education gave the Citizens' Committee several months to arrange for the sale of the property to a public agency, or else propose another means of saving it.

A writer in the Los Angeles Times noted that it could pass for a far more recent home and summed up the rationale for the public apathy toward it as follows: In some ways, it's a house only an architect would love.

From the outside, it seems quite ordinary: two stories high, flat roofed, with undecorated white walls, simple rectangular metal windows, and a few arches to remind the viewer that he is in Los Angeles and not somewhere else.

"[3] Efforts to block demolition continued into the late 1960s, as the American Institute of Architects sought a Federal open-space grant to save the house.

Examples of the critical response include the following: Bemoaning the loss of the Dodge House, the Daily News wrote in 1991: "Mention the name Irving J. Gill, and anyone who values our local architectural heritage is bound to rant and fume.

The Times wrote: "Hard to believe this Modernist treasure was torn down to make way for apartments, but it happened 38 years ago, when historic preservation was still an exotic notion here.