1959, East Bay, Strawberry Canyon Recreation Center
University of California campus, Canyon Rd., Berkeley
Wurster, Bernardi and Emmons
A gracefully sited example of the work of this firm, strongly marked by the early California rancho tradition. It houses club and recreation rooms, kitchen, locker rooms, and snack bar for faculty, staff, and students (Gebhard, Winter, and Sandweiss 1985: 272).
1959, Peninsula, House in Burlingame
Burlingame
Wurster, Bernardi and Emmons
Both of Wurster's partners built houses for themselves--Emmons in 1948 and Bernardi in 1950--that captured images from the rural scene. The use of barn framing to articulate the essentially single space of Emmons' house, with its bedroom loft approached by ladder, and the wooden truss supporting the monitors on Bernardi's house were both drawn from vernacular rural usage. In fact, this sanctification of the ordinary, originally Wurster's contribution, was still the most characteristic trait of local architecture at the turn of the decade, although it was soon to mutate under the influence of the economy of plenty. In the mid-fifties the character of the Bay Area Tradition changed from modest understatement to masked opulence. Although architects continued to use the simple, informal life as a frame of reference, it was somewhat stretched out of shape by clients whose budgets and demands were not so limited. Though no longer inappropriate to the times, affluence was still a difficult concept for the Bay Area Tradition, with its Craftsman legacy of the natural house, further freighted with thirties and forties images of the anonymous and the ordinary. Once more it is interesting to compare the work of Esherick and of Wurster, Bernardi and Emmons with respect to their responses to the changing times. In a W. B. and E. house of 1954 in Burlingame there is no vestige of the woodsy, utilitarian house of the thirties and forties. Instead, a stuccoed country villa handsomely painted in ochre and white with a dark frame is formally organized around a central court. The axial symmetry of the composition is carried through by Thomas Church into an equally formal garden with reflecting pool (Woodbridge 1988: 197-99, 200, 201).
1960 [1891], Peninsula, New Woodside Village Church
3154 Woodside Rd., Woodside
Wurster, Bernardi and Emmons; Mark Adams, stained glass
A simple, square cornered "village church" to which a far larger, more seriously artless second village church has been connected by a cloister formed of new Sunday school rooms (Gebhard, Winter, and Sandweiss 1985: 149).
1961, East Bay, First Unitarian Church
1 Lawson Rd., Kensington
Wurster, Bernardi and Emmons
A large church in the Post-and-Beam style originated by this firm. The pulpit and candlesticks were designed by Nancy Genn (Gebhard, Winter, and Sandweiss 1985: 242).
1961-62, Northern California, Coleman house
San Francisco
Wurster, Bernardi and Emmons
The most beautiful and sophisticated of the glazed galleries is in the Coleman townhouse of 1961-62. A crystal wall wrapped around an exquisite garden creates an elegant corridor of light which weaves the garden and the interior spaces together (Woodbridge 1988: 148, 150).
1961-63, North Waterfront, Golden Gateway Towers
Jackson St., San Francisco
Wurster, Bernardi and Emmons; DeMars and Reay
This first major downtown housing development, a Redevelopment Agency project, replaced the city's produce market with slab towers and a neat, suburban village of town houses (Woodbridge, Woodbridge and Byrne 2005: 111).
The setting for a number of San Francisco's modern skyscrapers involved new uses of urban space. In the city's first redevelopment project, Golden Gateway Towers, streets were eliminated and blocks were consolidated to permit large-scale development. Wurster, Emmons and Bernardi worked with landscape designers, such as Lawrence Halprin, to create public and private spaces at and above street level that featured plazas, gardens, and pedestrian bridges connected to adjacent developments. Golden Gateway was very much in the tradition of the International Style, evoking ideas advanced by Le Corbusier (Wiley 2000: 139-40).
1962, North Bay, Wurster house
Stinson Beach
William W. Wurster
The retreat that Wurster built in 1962 for his family sums up the qualities this chapter portrays. It is at the ocean's edge, a special place for relaxation. The simplicity and directness of its spatial organization and the honest use of materials are as deftly handled here as in the Gregory ranch house of forty years before. Overlooking the sand and sea, the room with no name testifies to Wurster's belief that everyday use has symbolic meaning in the making of places.
If by regionalism in architecture we mean a commitment to the expression of the physical, cultural, and historical aspects of a geographical area, Wurster was a regionalist par excellence. When he left the Bay Area during World War II to go to Harvard and thence to MIT, it was as the pivotal intellectual leader in the field for a significant region of this country, a role then duplicated by no other architectural figure.
His influence, seemingly eclipsed by succeeding architectural fashions with different, more formal qualities, is all-pervasive and readily acknowledged by the generation of architects which his office schooled while contributing hundreds of buildings to the scene. Now that the built world has acquired a certain sameness from one coast to the other, Wurster's belief in and celebration of a particular way of life in a special place has crystallized, not as a style, but as a humanizing attitude of mind, a moment of truth (Woodbridge 1988: 148, 152-53).
1962-67 [1893-1915], Russian Hill, Ghiradelli Square (remodeling)
Polk, Larkin, Beach, Northpoint Block, San Francisco
Wurster, Bernardi and Emmons; Lawrence Halprin and Assoc., Landscaping; Ruth Asawa, Fountain
Originally Ghirardelli Chocolate Company (c.1860 to 1916). The buildings (1893-1915) along Northpoint were designed by William Mooser. A wonderful jumble of brick buildings, the oldest of which was still operating in 1962 with overhead belt-driven machinery, has been lovingly transformed into a now famous complex of shops and restaurants. A multi-level parking garage created a series of terrace levels within the block, and the architects added a series of new buildings on the garage and along its north edge. The popularity of the whole attests to the success of its plan (Gebhard, Winter, and Sandweiss 1985: 51-52).
Deservedly one of the city's great tourist destinations, this collection of old (and one new) brick buildings originally housed the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company. It was taken over and remodeled into restaurants and shops by developer William Matson Roth as an almost non-profit venture. The fountain is by Ruth Asawa (Woodbridge, Woodbridge and Byrne 2005: 137).
In San Francisco, between 1962 and 1967, William Wurster and his partners, Theodore Bernardi and Don Emmons, completed the transformation of several historic buildings near Fisherman's Wharf, including the Ghiradelli chocolate factory and a nineteenth-century knitting mill, into a retail commercial complex called Ghiradelli Square that became a mainstay of the tourist trade and a model for similar efforts across the country. Modern architects like Wurster and his associates were looking at the prospects of reusing historical buildings rather than replacing them as Wurster's firm had when the Golden Gateway Towers were built on the site of the city's wholesale produce market (Wiley 2000: 141-42).
1964, Downtown, Garage and Rooftop Bldgs. of Alcoa Bldg.
1 Maritime Plaza, San Francisco
Wurster, Bernardi and Emmons
The city's architecturally undistinguished and colorfully inefficient produce market was urban-renewed by the Golden Gateway Redevelopment Project that converted the area between Battery St. to the Embarcadero bet. Broadway and Clay Sts. into a model image of upper-middle class downtown just at the high tide of the renewal wave. A little too neat to be real, it does fit reasonably well into the city fabric in spite of the still unresolved joint between its second story plazas and the ground floor sidewalks around. The 1959 competition for Design and Development was won by Wurster, Bernardi and Emmons, Inc., and DeMars and Reay. Wurster, Bernardi and Emmons were the architects for the garage and rooftop buildings. Landscape architecture was done by Sasaki, Walker Assoc., and sculpture provided by Marino Marini, Henry Moore, Charles O. Perry, and Jan Peter Stern. Robert Woodweard designed the fountain (Gebhard, Winter, and Sandweiss 1985: 63-64).
1964 [1915], Civic Center, Bill Graham Civic Auditorium
(remodeling)
Civic Center, San Francisco
John Galen Howard, Frederick H. Meyer and John Reid, Jr.; remodeled by Wurster, Bernardi and Emmons; Skidmore, Owings and Merrill
Designed by John Galen Howard, Fred Meyers, and John Reid Jr. Clad in California granite, as are all the buildings in the Civic Center, it is a fairly conventional example of French High Baroque Revival. It is also evocative of a time when a relatively small building such as this could be used for conventions. Among the memorable events staged here were the 1920 Democratic Party convention, at which elegantly dressed hostesses kept the delegates supplied from 60 barrels of excellent bourbon, which, according to journalist H. L. Mencken, were charged to the tab of the local smallpox hospital. For many years the auditorium was the site of the infamous Grateful Dead New Year's Eve Concerts (Wiley 2000: 213).
In 1958 two well-known modernist firms, Skidmore Owings Merrill (SOM) and Wurster, Bernardi and Emmons drew up a plan for the Civic Center calling for a second ring of buildings around the Civic Plaza. The drawings in the report, although meant only to be suggestive, show buildings of glass and steel in a sleek, horizontal style. On its way to orthodoxy, the International Style, which never was a "native architectural style," was having an impact in American cities, and this was one year before the first two modernist office buildings, both designed by SOM, would be built downtown. Modernism reached the Civic Center in 1959, the same year that SOM's Crown Zellerbach Building went up. The result was the Phillip Burton Federal Building [at 450 Golden Gate Ave.], a tall, characterless slab with gestures of verticality that overshadowed the Civic Center.
With the federal government breaking through the Civic Center skyline, a number of tall, poorly designed buildings followed, including Fox Plaza on Market between Ninth and Tenth, which was built after the demolition of the Fox Theatre, one of the city's grand old movie houses. For a time it looked as though the Civic Center would be surrounded and darkened by towering tombstones (Wiley 2000: 209; Woodbridge, Woodbridge and Byrne 2005: 100; Gebhard, Winter, and Sandweiss 1985: 86).
