1941, Northern California, Field House
1030 Bristol Ave., Stockton
William Wurster
This house and the one following (cf. Sanderson House) are Wurster in his American Colonial Revival phase(Gebhard, Winter, and Sandweiss 1985: 423).
1941, Peninsula, Timby House
621 Knoll Dr., San Carlos
William Wurster
One of those basic Wurster's in a lovely garden (Gebhard, Winter, and Sandweiss 1985: 143).
1941, Peninsula, Chickering house
Woodside
William W. Wurster
Wurster spoke and wrote a great deal about the "room with no name." The 1941 Chickering house has such a space--a large, central loggia which is a link or connector between two rooms. (Strictly speaking, the house does not have what was called a bi-nuclear plan, a term popularized by Marcel Breuer.) The room is a multi-purpose space, either open or closed, freely relating with terraces and gardens, which connects functionally different areas. Formal, yet informal; elegant, yet casual, it is indicative of the effort necessary to understand the specificity of an individual room designed to meet diverse needs (Woodbridge 1988: 140, 141).
1941, Northern California, Turner house
Central Valley
William W. Wurster
The 1941 Turner house is located in the California Central Valley. The great covered porch provides cooling shade and allows enjoyment of outdoor living in the hot climate. The living room, wrapped by the gracious porch, becomes part of the garden through the open, airy quality of its interior space (Woodbridge 1988: 137, 138).
1942, Peninsula, California Canners and Growers (Orig. Schuckl Canning Co. Office Bldg.)
100 S Fair Oaks Ave. NE of intersection with Evelyn Ave., almost under the Fair Oaks overpass across the SP tracks, Sunnyvale
William Wurster
Brutally buried under the new overpass, its urban setting in a once small town at the exposed corner of the great fruit canning works can only be imagined today. Nevertheless, roughsawn, brownstained redwood siding looks perpetually new set off by trim painted a pale salmon color. A classic marriage of Bay Region and International style motifs, and Wurster's masterpiece among his non-residential work (Gebhard, Winter, and Sandweiss 1985: 183, 535).
1942, Pacific Heights, House
3655 Clay St., San Francisco
William Wurster
No comment (Gebhard, Winter, and Sandweiss 1985: 40).
1942, East Bay, Chabot Terrace
Vallejo
Wurster and Bernardi
In the railroad-run decade of the 1870s, great things were forecast for Vallejo--principally that it would surpass Oakland--but this also was false prophecy. By 1880 the place had settled for 6,000 souls. It was this modest town that experienced the stunning World War II invasion of shipyard workers who were housed in every available place including virtual cities built overnight, like Chabot Terrace, Wurster and Bernardi, 1942, which provided 3,000 units of housing but no schools (Gebhard, Winter, and Sandweiss 1985: 243).
At Chabot Terrace, a few miles outside of Vallejo on the north, and Carquinez Heights, south of town, more than 5000 dwellings were erected practically overnight. Some of the Bay Area's most distinguished designers, including William W. Wurster and Ernest Kump, took part in these developments. Their design in hindsight seems almost a caricature of the barracks idea. Hundreds of little identical shelters, lined up mechanically, marched up hill and down dale, without schools, community facilities, without even sewers.
Taken individually, the barracks-like little houses looked right out of the artless Wurster tradition of residential design. They were soundly laid out internally. The triumph, though, in this Vallejo work was the extraordinary rationalization of the construction process itself. Two assembly lines, one based on wallboard technology, the other on plywood, were set up. In production terms, the result must have been among the first real successes in factory-built housing. Perhaps the most interesting incident in the Bay Area with respect to war housing construction appeared as an offshoot of the Vallejo projects and their concern with production processes. Wurster and his team convinced the federal authorities to release a small amount of material and money for experimental work. Largely under the guidance of Fred and Lois Langhorst, who were employed in Wurster's firm, twenty-five dwellings were designed and built as demonstrations of constructional alternatives to the standaridized factory-built barracks. At the time this experiment had no direct influence on the course of war housing. But these twenty-five units received more attention in the architectural press than all the other thousands of houses in Vallejo and the Bay Area (Woodbridge 1988: 238.
1942, East Bay, Martenet House
62 Alvarado Rd., Berkeley
Wurster and Bernardi
A good example of Wurster's simplified Monterey Colonial mode (Gebhard, Winter, and Sandweiss 1985: 279).
1942, 1959, East Bay, Stern Hall
Cyclotron Rd., University of California, Berkeley
Wurster, Bernardi and Emmons
A well-planned complex sensitively sited on difficult terrain that incorporates an older dormitory (Woodbridge, Woodbridge and Byrne 2005: 279).
1942c, Peninsula, Lyman House
Selby Ln. at Osborn Ave., Atherton
Wurster and Bernardi
This house represents the ultimate in artless modesty of design. Its influence may be seen in the early Joseph Eichler development along Dawn Dr. and Sunnymount Ave. in Sunnyvale (Gebhard, Winter, and Sandweiss 1985: 153).
