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[2] until his death.

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.

[3] Prior to emigrating from Canada to the United States and Chicago Illinois, William's English/Welsh father, Edward, was an inn keeper and before that a wharfinger, and his Irish mother, Mary Dinning, was a school teacher[3] and dressmaker.

[4][5] In 1869, the family of six, then including daughters Jane (Jenny) Dinning and Elizabeth Ann (Lizzie), and sons Edward Jr. and William James, moved to Chicago.

In 1871, the ill-timed move of the Dodd household to West Harrison Street in Ward 9 placed them in the path of the great Chicago fire during October of the same year.

[7] Dodd received his earliest training in drawing and design in the office studio[8] of Chicago architect William Le Baron Jenney, c.

The year usually offered in the histories of Kentucky architects (from Withey to Hedgepeth,[35] to Kleber,[36] to Luhan, Domer and Mohney[37]) for Dodd's arrival in Louisville is 1884, based upon the aforementioned 1897 Courier-Journal article.

[44] He worked throughout Kentucky and across the midwest, specifically Illinois,[45][46] Indiana,[47] and Tennessee,[48][49] creating structures of exceptional craftsmanship and high style, designs which traced the transitional tastes and technologies of the period leading up to Modernism.

[50] On Christmas Day 1912[51] Dodd departed the midwest to continue his profession in the greater Los Angeles area, a period lasting until his death there in June 1930.

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,[56] Thomas Chalmers Vint,[57] Wesley Eager,[58] and Adrian Wilson,[59] 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,[60] 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.

He also designed furniture and art glass windows for many of his best residential and commercial buildings;[63] examples of such work by Dodd are to be seen in the Ferguson Mansion, currently the Filson Historical Society, and the T. Hoyt Gamble house, both of Louisville.

[72] William became acutely ill while traveling abroad with his wife in the spring of 1930, returning home without Ione in early May[73] and dying at Los Angeles on June 14, 1930, in Hollywood Hospital.

[74] The funeral was postponed until June 28, 1930, upon the return of Ione from Europe,[75] his last rites and burial conducted at Forest Lawn Cemetery, Glendale, Little Church of the Flowers.