1920c, East Bay, Greenwood Common, No. 7
Wilson side of Greenwood Terr., Berkeley
William Wurster and R. M. Schindler
William Wilson Wurster initiated this postwar development on property that belonged to his house, designed by John Galen Howard (cf. Warren Gregory House); it stands east of Greenwood Terrace but is not visible from the street. Like Rose Walk, this is an exemplary residential enclave, but from a different time. The Modern architects of the Second Bay Tradition are well represented in these modest houses, numbered from north to south around the common (Woodbridge, Woodbridge and Byrne 2005: 287).
1924, Northern California, San Leandro Filtration Plant
San Leandro
William W. Wurster
William Wilson Wurster was born in Stockton, California, in 1895. At home he was encouraged in drawing, in observation, and in reading, but he acknowledge that his was "more an intellectual than a drawing gift." During summer vacation periods from Stockton High School he worked for the well known local architect, E. B. Brown. In 1913 he enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley and graduated with a degree in architecture in 1919. He immediately went to work for John Reed, Jr., a San Francisco architect who did institutional work. While working on Galileo High School he came close to leaving the field, where, as it seemed to him at that point, people were put in niches with little possibility of experiment, communication, and exposure to the real world of building. His chance to change his "niche" came with an offer to become the architectural designer on the staff of the Filtration Division of the City of Sacramento. From 1920 to 1922 Wurster worked on the Sacramento Filtration Plant and moonlighted on four residences. These houses plus his previous experience were the basis for his state architectural registration in April 1922 (Woodbridge 1988: 122).
1927, Peninsula, Heller House (addition)
99 Faxon Rd., Atherton
George Washington Smith; later additions by Wurster and others
The most accomplished of the very few Northern California works of Santa Barbara's acknowledged master of the Spanish Colonial Revival style. The house and fine grounds can be only glimpsed through the gate off the cul-de-sac on Faxon Road (Gebhard, Winter, and Sandweiss 1985: 154, 529).
1927, East Bay, Smith House
2812 Russell St., Berkeley
William Wurster
Who else would have thought of doing a miniature Regency Style manor house in rough-sawn redwood painted white? The low entranceway is a highly successful scale-giving element (Gebhard, Winter, and Sandweiss 1985: 278).
1928, Scotts Valley, Gregory farmhouse
Canham Rd. off Glenwood Dr., Santa Cruz
William Wurster
One of the classics of domestic architecture in California, and certainly one of the most impressive of Wurster's houses. The L-shaped farm house encloses a court yard, and to the front is the tall water tower which is set back from the gates. The Gregory Farm house illustrates this architect's ability to take the simple forms of the California ranch house, add a little bit of period architecture (loosely a Monterey Revival ingredient) and produce an architectural high art object. Nearby are two other Wurster houses, one dating from the 30s (Randall House), the other from the 50s (Gebhard, Winter, and Sandweiss 1985: 488, 529).
Valencia Gardens, one of the [four federal government funded public housing projects completed between 1939 and 1942] was designed by William Wurster, who had made his reputation by designing rustic homes in the California ranch vernacular, such as the Gregory farmhouse (see page 137), for well-to-do patrons. Wurster was influenced by the work of Catherine Bauer, whom he would eventually marry. Bauer had been introduced to modern architecture while living in Paris in the 1920s. In 1934 she published Modern Housing which Architectural Forum described as having the same relationship to architecture that Blackstone, the great British legal classic, has to law. Bauer lauded European modernism but encouraged Americans to develop their own style.
A number of architects were truly innovative, most prominently Willis Polk, Bernard Maybeck, and William Wurster. Polk, Maybeck, and their peers contributed to what is known as the First Bay Tradition. Wurster is associated with the Second Bay Tradition, derived from his blend of modernism and California vernacular architecture, such as nineteen-century ranch houses. These architects were not exponents of a style in a programmatic sense, but they designed some striking buildings. Most of Maybeck's and Wurster's, however, were built outside the city and so had only a limited impact on the city's appearance
One design approach that merged readily with the International Style can be said to have emerged in the Bay Area because of the beauty of its landscape. William Wurster was one of the first local architects to approximate some of modernism's architectural principles, but this was only after having designed a number of houses that traced their roots to vernacular architecture, particularly the simple, unadorned ranch house. A native Californian, Wurster was understandably in love with his surroundings. He wanted to design inexpensive, readily built houses out of local materials that would help bring the outdoors in. In time some of Wurster's designs became more minimalist, more abstract, and more in tune with European modernism.
Houses designed by Wurster [such as the Gregory farmhouse (1928)] and other local architects such as Gardner Dailey, Joseph Esherick, and Henry Hill, became the prototypes for the post-World War II tract home and the California ranch house. The impact of these architects' design innovations, when married to prefabrication and other cost-reducing construction methods, was felt across the country...for better or for worse. Drawing on their work, contractors filled the western and southern neighborhoods of San Francisco with tract homes and boxy, colorless apartment buildings with flat roofs during the postwar building boom. However, the finest examples of homes designed in a modern California style were built in wealthy neighborhoods like Pacific Heights, where inviting the outdoors in meant spacious plate glass windows and breathtaking views of the Golden Gate (Wiley 2000: 67; 126; 136-38).
The editors of Pencil Points in 1938 wrote well of the Gregory farmhouse, "Forms natural to materials and uses, undistorted by any faint suggestion of 'artiness,' give this house the charm of honesty that might have been produced by a carpenter endowed with good taste."8
During the thirties the work of the Bay Area designers was illustrated more and more frequently in the national home magazines and the national professional architectural journals. By the late 1930's no discussion in them could be complete without reference to the work of Wurster, Dailey, Dinwiddie, Funk, Goodman, McCarthy, and others.
In 1940 Henry-Russell Hitchcock visited the West Coast and in looking at the work of these designers, especially that of John Dinwiddie, sensed "a pronouncedly regional quality."9 As an apologist for the Modern, Hitchcock had some serious reservations about Wurster's and Dailey's continued use of historic imagery, and being a European-oriented urbanist he was continually disturbed by the "unexpected harshness" of Wurster's buildings.10(Woodbridge 1988: 6-7).
From his [Wurster's] 1928 Gregory farmhouse, or ranch house, as it is so often called, near Santa Cruz to his 1938 Van Deusen house in Berkeley, he contrasted and played off everything imaginable--space which conveys a Classical order is juxtaposed with space which appears casual, placement of windows and doors seems to deny the hand of the architect, and so on. By the late thirties Gardner Dailey (and to a considerable degree the younger designers in his office such as Joseph Esherick), John Funk, Clarence Mayhew, John Dinwiddie, Hervey Clark, Michael Goodman, and Joseph McCarthy had taken up and begun to play the game of countering the modern with the traditional and the vernacular (Woodbridge 1988: 17, 19).
The most important work of this early period and perhaps the signal work of his career was the Gregory farmhouse of 1926-27 near Santa Cruz, California. Originally commissioned by Warren Gregory from John Galen Howard's son Henry, the work was interrupted by Mr. Gregory's death. Perhaps the family had not been entirely happy with Howard's design. In any case, Wurster was invited to come down one weekend and offer his advice. He was deeply moved by the site, typical rolling coastal ranch country studded with live oaks, and wrote: "The farm is a place of peace and rest, of the realities rather than the formalities of life, and so it seemed imperative to make the house simple and direct, free from any distorted or overstudied look."8
The simple sketch he made on that first visit, according to Gregory family legend, was built almost without alteration. The living quarters of the house form two sides of the courtyard plan, with a simple water tower marking the entrance and low walls forming the rest of the enclosure. As in the earlier Anglo-Spanish ranch houses, the interior of the house is accessible only by doors opening onto the continuous verandah along the court side or onto the terrace on the open side of the compound. The central living space is emphasized by raising that section of the roof. Redwood boards, left unfinished for the floors and painted white for the walls and ceiling carry the visual rhythm of the design.
For all its archetypal California ranch house look, the Gregory house precisely satisfied its owner's needs. It aped no traditional forms. Rather, it embodied the region's essential spirit in a rare moment of creative genius. If any single house can symbolize the Bay Area Tradition in residential design, the Gregory farmhouse is that work.
The relatively small size of the Gregory commission was typical of most of Wurster's work in the pre-World War II period. Although a number of his clients were not severely restricted by the Depression, the times were generally conservative. In any case, a certain austerity was characteristic of the office's clientele; those who craved ostentation went elsewhere.
Wurster took great pride in perfecting the living quality of the house. He believed that building modestly was essential, but his was a vigorous modesty: "we should design up from the log cabin, instead of trying to compress the mansion," he said.9 Organized in design teams, he and his staff worked out house design rules such as always placing horizontal window members so that they never interfered with the sight-line of anyone, whether seated or standing; a standard height for all electrical switches, and a means of coordinating the foundation elements of the house, known locally as the "Wurster footing." It avoided a level change from the outside to the inside, thereby welding the house more completely to the site. All wall siding was butt-jointed to square framing members at the corners instead of using the usual more costly mitered corners, and ways of constructing horizontal and vertical board siding were refined. Double-hung windows and re-sawn, flush-set redwood siding were other signatures of Wurster's work. An absence or simplification of door and window frames emphasized the "carpenter-style" approach.
This deliberate paring away of those very elements considered by most architects to be the life and breath of design did not earn Wurster the universal approbation of his peers. Those who disapproved labeled his work "shanty-style," implying a slip-shod imprecision that was far from true of his work.
Wurster's commonsense approach to design was equally important in the plan of the house, typically a diagram of the client's needs. The flexibility with which the office met those needs, no matter how eccentric, was truly remarkable. Many, many clients take great pleasure in recounting the lengthy planning period during which Wurster asked more questions than would ever have occurred to them to ask. The answers all contributed to the "big idea" of the frequently small house (Woodbridge 1988: 123-25).
1931-32, Northern California, Pasatiempo Country Club and Estates
Pasatiempo
William W. Wurster
The dramatic expansion of Wurster's practice in the thirties began with a commission by the internationally famous golfer Marion Hollins to design her house and other residences as Pasatiempo Country Club and Estates. The site was in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Wurster, along with Miss Hollins, also a friend of the Ellises, chose architect Clarence Tantau and landscape architect Thomas Church to oversee its entire development. This gave Wurster the opportunity of working on numerous houses and it is in this Pasatiempo portfolio of 1931-32 that the aforementioned elements [such as always placing horizontal window members so that they never interfered with the sight-line of anyone, whether seated or standing; a standard height for all electrical switches, and ... avoiding a level change from the outside to the inside, thereby welding the house more completely to the site] of his work emerge (Woodbridge 1988: 125-26).
1931, Northern California, Berry House
2 Hollins Dr., Pasatiempo
William Wurster; Thomas Church, Landscape Architect
One of four houses designed by Wurster for the Pasatiempo Estates, a low density housing development and golf course laid out in the 1920s. The four are typical of Wurster's early houses that loosely employ a variety of stylistic forms ranging from the Monterey Colonial Revival to the Regency Revival of the late 20s and 30s. See also Field House (1934), Hollins House (1931), and Butler House (1931-32) (Gebhard, Winter, and Sandweiss 1985: 486).
1931-32, Northern California, Butler House
41 Hollins Dr., Pasatiempo
William Wurster; Thomas Church, Landscape Architect
One of four houses designed by Wurster for the Pasatiempo Estates, a low density housing development and golf course laid out in the 1920s. The four are typical of Wurster's early houses that loosely employ a variety of stylistic forms ranging from the Monterey Colonial Revival to the Regency Revival of the late 20s and 30s. See also Field House (1934), Berry House (1931), and Hollins House (1931) (Gebhard, Winter, and Sandweiss 1985: 486).
The Butler house is a set of pavilions linked together with an open gallery space called the living porch, which allows the opportunity for simple country living in a quiet protected environment (Woodbridge 1988: 126, 129).
1931, Northern California, Church house
Pasatiempo
William W. Wurster
Wurster always gave special attention to those elements of a design that reflected special needs of the client. In the house of his close collaborator, Thomas Church, the drafting room, designed to maximize the use of natural daylight, is the major form determinant for the whole composition (Woodbridge 1988: 126, 131).
1931, Northern California, Hollins House
33 Hollins Dr., Pasatiempo
William Wurster; Thomas Church, Landscape Architect
One of four houses designed by Wurster for the Pasatiempo Estates, a low density housing development and golf course laid out in the 1920s. The four are typical of Wurster's early houses that loosely employ a variety of stylistic forms ranging from the Monterey Colonial Revival to the Regency Revival of the late 20s and 30s. See also Field House (1934), Berry House (1931), and Butler House (1931-32) (Gebhard, Winter, and Sandweiss 1985: 486).
The Marion Hollins residence of 1931 contains the "kitchen cave," which is perhaps his first inside-outside dining room space and the forerunner of what later becomes Wurster's "room with no name." (Woodbridge 1988: 126, 127).
