11 Facts About William Wurster

William Wilson Wurster was an American architect and architectural teacher at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, best known for his residential designs in California.

William Wurster's 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.

This, William Wurster later reflected, was to show him the workings, rather than the structures of the city.

William Wurster designed hundreds of California houses in the 1920s through the 1940s using indigenous materials and a direct, simple style suited to the climate.

In 1930, William Wurster hired his first long-term employee, Floyd Comstock, setting the trend of the William Wurster office serving as the training ground of many generations of architects who worked within the firm during its life.

In 1940, William Wurster married Catherine Bauer, an influential figure in her own right in the field of public housing.

William Wurster met Bauer while both were attending the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where they took classes from the German Socialist city planner Martin Wagner.

William Wurster served as its dean until his retirement in 1963 for health reasons.

Bauer William Wurster Hall was completed in 1964 on the Berkeley campus, designed by faculty members Joseph Esherick, Vernon DeMars, and Donald Olsen; Bauer William Wurster Hall, in which the college is housed, is named in his and his wife's honor.

William Wurster died on September 19,1973, from complications of Parkinson's disease.

William Wurster was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1954.