William Wurster

William Wurster studied at Harvard University, University of California, Berkeley and Harvard Graduate School of Design. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is architecture. Employment is recorded with University of California, Berkeley and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Architecture. Work by William Wurster is recorded in the collections of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Distinctions recorded are Architecture Firm Award and Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.

• Name — William Wilson Wurster • Born — 20 October 1895 • Birthplace — Stockton, California, U.S. • Died — 19 September 1973 • Place of death — Berkeley, California, U.S. • Education — University of California, Berkeley (1919) • Spouse — Catherine Bauer Wurster • Children — 1 daughter • Practice — Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons (WBE) • Significant Buildings — * 555 California Street • Ghirardelli Square • CASBS

Wurster was born on October 20, 1895, in Stockton, California. His family encouraged him to observe, read and draw but Wurster often admitted later in life, to holding more of an intellectual gift, rather than a drawing gift. As a child, he held a close relationship with his father, a banker who, on bank holidays and weekends, would take Wurster to observe the life of the town to show him how it functioned. This, Wurster later reflected, was to show him the workings, rather than the structures of the city. During his years at Stockton Public High School, Wurster worked in the office of Edgar B. Brown, an Englishman known for designing the Stockton Hotel and the Children's Home of Stockton, who was often regarded as one of Stockton's most influential architects. While there, he acted as an office boy, drawing plans, making measured drawings and doing the blueprinting, allowing his early interests in architecture. Once graduating from high school in 1912, Wurster's parents strongly believed he should acquire a university education and encouraged him to attend the architecture school at the University of California, Berkeley, which was headed, at the time, by founding director and renowned architect John Galen Howard. Wurster enrolled at the university in 1913, receiving a classical Beaux Arts education from notable Berkeley teachers such as Warren Perry and William Hays. While there, Wurster joined the Sigma Chi fraternity, where he was taught both to get on with people and express himself. When a physical ailment kept Wurster from voluntary military service in World War I, he studied marine engineering at the University of California, Berkeley and joined the merchant marine in 1918. In 1919, once he had completed a year's tour of duty in the South Pacific, he returned to the University to graduate with honors in architecture.

• Illustration — Ghirardelli Square, San Francisco. Wurster's firm, along with Lawrence Halprin, were responsible for developing the conceptual re-use plan for the Square in the early 1960s. Following his graduation, Wurster briefly apprenticed in the office of John W. Reid Jr., a San Francisco architect who worked mainly on schools, before Wurster became the architectural designer for Charles Dean in 1920. For the next two years, he worked designing the city of Sacramento's water filtration plant. During this time, he also worked independently, designing several small residences. In April 1922, he became a registered architect within California. Following this, Wurster embarked on a tour of Europe, where he encountered art and design he had previously only known through books, before returning to the United States in 1923 and heading to New York where he joined the office of Delano and Aldrich, who were known for their work on the John D. Rockefeller Estate at Pocantico Hills and Otto Kahn's château at Cold Spring Harbor. In 1924 William Adams Delano lent Wurster money to open his own office and he returned to the Bay Area to open it in the Hotel Whitecotton in Berkeley. Wurster remained strongly associated, throughout his forty-five year career, with the Bay Area and its regional style, along with Wurster's mentor Bernard Maybeck, the landscape architect Thomas Church, and fellow architect Joseph Esherick. Wurster designed hundreds of California houses in the 1920s through the 1940s using indigenous materials and a direct, simple style suited to the climate. His 1928 Gregory Farmhouse in Scotts Valley, California is regarded as the prototypical ranch-style house, and a direct influence on the subsequent development of the Northwest Regional style of John Yeon and Pietro Belluschi. In 1930, Wurster hired his first long-term employee, Floyd Comstock, setting the trend of the Wurster office serving as the training ground of many generations of architects who worked within the firm during its life. In 1940, Wurster married Catherine Bauer, an influential figure in her own right in the field of public housing. He had met Bauer earlier that year while she was teaching at the University of California Berkeley on January 21,1940 at the home of Alice Griffith, a member of the San Francisco Housing Commission. Wurster's graduate studies at Harvard were interrupted when he was appointed dean of the architectural and planning school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1945, a position he held for five years. During 1949 and 1950, he simultaneously held the chair of the National Park and Planning Commission. Both Bauer and Wurster withstood accusations of disloyalty from the California Tenney Committee during the Red Scare of the late 1940s. Also in 1945, Wurster co-founded the firm Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons (WBE) with Theodore Bernardi and Donn Emmons. In 1950, he was named dean of the UC Berkeley Architecture school. In 1959, he orchestrated the creation of the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design, which brought the three schools of architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning into one organization. He served as its dean until his retirement in 1963 for health reasons.

• Illustration — Bauer Wurster Hall, photographed in 2016. Bauer Wurster Hall was completed in 1964 on the Berkeley campus, designed by faculty members Joseph Esherick, Vernon DeMars, and Donald Olsen; Bauer Wurster Hall, in which the college is housed, is named in his and his wife's honor. It was originally named Wurster Hall, and renamed Bauer Wurster Hall in December 2020.

• Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, 1954 • Gamma Phi Beta, House] (Eta Chapter), University of California, Berkeley campus, 1932 • Stern Hall, University of California, Berkeley campus, 1942 • Campus Master Plan for University of Victoria, Canada 1962

• Influential adaptive reuse redevelopment of Ghirardelli Square, San Francisco, 1964 (with landscape architect Lawrence Halprin) • Golden Gateway Complex, San Francisco, California, 1967 (with Sasaki, Walker & Associates; Demars and Reay) • 555 California Street, San Francisco, California, 1969 (with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and Pietro Belluschi)

• William Wurster Residence, 1850 Shuey Ave, Walnut Creek, California, 1941 • Case Study House #3, with Theodore Bernardi, Los Angeles, 1949 • Character Residential home communities in the Pasatiempo area outside Santa Cruz, California. • Valencia Gardens public housing project, San Francisco, 1945, razed 2004

• Consulting architect for the Temple Emanu-El, Dallas, Texas, 1957 • First Unitarian Church of Berkeley, with Theodore Bernardi, 1961

• Gregory, Daniel, "William W. Wurster," Toward a Simpler Way of Life: The Arts & Crafts Architects of California (Robert Winter, editor) Norfleet Press Book/University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles London, 1997, pp. 245–254. *