(At this time John Peter Coia, Jack's much younger brother, was working in the practice, having undertaken his apprenticeship there from 1933 to 1938.) Thereafter Metzstein and MacMillan undertook most of the design work. In 1956 both house and office moved to 20 Park Circus, and in the course of the move a burst water pipe destroyed most of the practice drawings. In 1948 the practice moved out of Hamilton Drive to 19 Waterloo Street and in 1954 Andrew MacMillan joined the practice from East Kilbride Development Corporation. This enabled him to restart the practice, taking on as apprentice Isi Metzstein, who was a refugee, and for a time his own brother John. In 1945 Sam Bunton asked Coia to help with repairing war damage in Clydebank, Kennedy having earlier been asked to help at Dumbarton. In the later war years his income came mainly from work in the family café, such free time as he had being spent on obtaining a degree in town planning. Although admitted FRIBA on, lack of business obliged him to retrench, combining house and office at 7 Hamilton Drive. He quickly re-established himself under the same practice title at 199 Bath Street. The Salmon Son & Gillespie records were lost to salvage at that point but he did manage to retain those relating to his own practice from 1927. When Italy entered the war in 1940, Coia briefly lost control of his office and practice at 239 St Vincent Street. Earlier in the same year he was commissioned to design Knightswood Secondary School and complete Gillespie’s Municipal Buildings at Stirling but both these projects were cancelled. I pontificated on the emergence of abstract art … During the 1938 British Empire Exhibition we slept on the floor of the office an average of three nights a week.' Coia and Kennedy worked closely together but in Kennedy's words 'Jack thought with his fingers. As a student he had been editor of the magazine 'Vista' published quarterly which included articles by Hans Poelzig, Ragnar Ostberg, R H Wilenski and other major names of the 1930s. He returned to Coia thereafter, and remained with him apart from a short period with Honeyman and Jack. Kennedy was born c.1913 and articled to Coia in about 1927, after a brief spell with James Austen Laird. This resulted in a series of important brick-built church commissions of continental inspiration and in about 1938, his senior assistant T Warnett Kennedy was taken into partnership. In 1931 Coia approached Archbishop Donald Mackintosh for work on the programme of church extension then planned. Kidd died in 1928 while the work was in progress and Coia inherited the practice, which now became Gillespie Kidd and Coia, but there was little business apart from the fitting of Leon's shop at 89 St Vincent Street, and Coia joined the teaching staff of Glasgow School of Art. On hearing he was back in Glasgow, Kidd appealed to him to return to assist in the reconstruction of the Smith warehouse as the Ca' d'Oro, for which Gillespie had left only sketch designs. Jack Antonio Coia (born 1898) had been taken on by Gillespie as an apprentice in October 1915 at a salary of 4 shillings a week with no demand for a premium, and had subsequently worked with Alexander Nisbet Paterson and Alexander Hislop in Glasgow, and with Herbert A Welch and Hollis in London, before returning to Glasgow in 1927. When Gillespie died on, leaving estate of £1,950 4s 11d to his wife Agnes, Kidd was his executor and became sole partner. He remained with John Gaff Gillespie after the latter took charge of the practice following the death of William Forrest Salmon, and Gillespie took him into partnership in 1918. He became chief draughtsman in the Salmon practice sometime before 1911, by which time the firm had become Salmon Son & Gillespie. He joined the practice of James Salmon & Son in 1898 as an apprentice and studied at Glasgow School of art from that year until 1902, also attending classes at the Glasgow & West of Scotland Technical College. William Alexander Kidd was born in Greenock in 1879, the son of William Kidd, ironmonger and his wife Margaret Colquhoun Barr.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |