William Wurster, a Stockton native, studied Beaux Arts architecture under John Galen Howard at UC Berkeley and later at the Harvard School of Design.  He became a powerful presence in the Bay Area architectural world as much for his political acumen and strength of personality as for the buildings he designed.  His work earned him an AIA gold medal in 1969. In 1945, Wurster was a founding partner in what would become a 50-person architectural firm, Wurster, Bernardi, and Evans, designers of San Francisco’s Ghirardelli Square (1964).  Together with Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, they designed the 52-story Bank of America tower, then the tallest building in San Francisco.

William Wurster was known for his caustic wit.  Though Parkinson’s disease was taking its toll, in the early 60s he still met with students. Bent over in his wheelchair, it was hard to tell if he was awake or asleep. This author attended several such Tuesday lunch sessions.  Once a firebrand student tried to impress Wurster by discussing the abstract beauty of piles of garbage. Wurster suddenly snapped to life: “I don’t know anything about garbage. What I love are yacht harbors.” In a design meeting for the marble clad Bank of America tower, the question arose about appropriate windows for a marble clad high-rise building.  Wurster burst forth with great authoritarian fervor: “The windows should of course have wood casements.”

It is difficult to characterize Wurster’s work. He had no style as such; in fact, he hated the word “style.”  In an interview, Wurster said of a Lewis Mumford essay: “I wish he had never used the word ‘style’ because what counts in the Bay Area region is open mindedness more than a style.”  He favored simple, sometimes crude construction. Appearances were not as important as close contact with the outdoors, open planning, and natural light. Unpretentiousness was his approach to unassuming structures — no need to flex architectural muscles: “The freedom of living out here without any flies, with no cold, no hot, means that you have sort of an indoor/outdoor living that is possible nowhere else in the country.”

Wurster’s work often contained innovative uses of materials, like concrete block and metal siding, floor to ceiling glass, huge sliding panels, and kitchens open to the outdoors on one or more sides.  In the 1920s, he designed hundreds of direct, simple houses using indigenous designs suited to the climate.  

In 1940, Wurster married Catherine Bauer, renowned author of the book “Modern Housing” (1934), a classic in the field of social housing practices. In 1945 he was appointed dean of architecture at MIT.   Subsequently, he was appointed head of the School of Architecture at UC Berkeley (1950) and the founding dean of the College of Environmental Design (1959). In the late 50s Wurster, always distrustful of unanimity, selected three architects from the school’s faculty with totally different points of view to design the college’s new campus building: Vernon DeMars, Donald Olsen, and Joseph Esherick. When Wurster retired in 1963, UC’s “Brutalist” Wurster Hall was named for both him and his wife Catherine. To this day he remains a renowned, if somewhat enigmatic, architect in the San Francisco Bay Area.