William W. Wurster / Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons Collection
Scope and Contents
Records of the architectural firm Wurster, Bernardi, and Emmons (WBE) span the years 1922-1974, and include the files of its parent firm, William W. Wurster (Wurster). The collection is organized into six series: Professional Papers, Office Records, Project Records 1922-1944, Project Records 1945-1974, United States Housing Agency projects, and Additional Donations. Within these series original order has been maintained wherever it is evident.
The majority of the collection documents Wurster and WBE projects. Office Records such as photographs, presentation boards, clippings and scrapbooks were most likely created and collected to promote the firm. They record not only the buildings themselves, but indicate how projects were presented, interpreted and received. The firm's Project Records and the United States Housing Authority files are quite thorough, and include extensive written records (correspondence, specifications, notes, and reports) as well as drawings and construction photographs.
Wurster's collaborative relationships and professional friendships are also documented in the Professional Papers series of the collection. Correspondence files document Wurster's communication with Alvar Aalto. Project files document the collaborative work of Wurster and WBE with landscape architects Thomas Church, Lockwood deForest, and Lawrence Halprin, among others. A number of architects who later became well-known in their own rights worked for WBE early in their careers, and it is interesting to note the signatures of architects such as Arne Kartwold and Germano Milono on various drawings and correspondence. Wurster and WBE also collaborated and consulted with other major architects, artists, and interior designers of the day, including Edward Durell Stone, Vernon DeMars, A. Quincy Jones, Pietro Belluschi, O'Neil Ford, Isamu Noguchi, Francis Elkins, Maurice Sands, and Beth Armstrong. Wurster's philosophy was that all work in the office itself was collaborative, and would not allow clients to berate his partners or associates while praising his own design sense. He routinely answered letters from clients or admirers who had erroneously assumed a design to be his, gently insisting that credit be given where due, whether it be to Bernardi, Emmons, or an associate in the firm. When designs and buildings were published, credit for every design was assigned to the entire firm, regardless of who was responsible for the main design idea.
There are some gaps in the collection. Large corporate projects, such as the Safeway stores and the Bank of America World Headquarters, are vastly underrepresented in the project files, possibly because the records were retained by the corporate clients. However, the majority of the project files contain a great deal of information about the relevant personnel, the clients, the design development, and the back-and-forth between the architects and clients over design decisions, budgets, finishes, and legal issues. Even during the years that Wurster spent at MIT, his hand is evident in the design of all of the office's projects; correspondence documents the other partners and associates in the firm mailing him their original schemes followed by his alternately scathing and encouraging comments on the best and worst features of their designs. Wurster also offered his services as a consultant on a number of large projects in Texas and other states; these projects are documented in the project files.
While appraising the project files, a large amount of non-permanent material was removed. Transmittal letters were removed almost entirely, and only a representative sample of financial records were retained. Most of the telephone notes, bid documents, consultant and engineer reports, and job notes were sampled to a large or small degree; however, a great deal of information about a project can be gleaned from informal telephone and job notes, and as such most of them were preserved. Routine job correspondence was also sampled, especially in the case of large corporate clients. When appraising residential records, care was taken to preserve all non-routine correspondence and, in some cases where documentation was scant, all material in a project file was retained.
The bulk of the collection was donated in 1976, with additional materials being transferred from the firm in 1977, 1995, 1996, and 1998. All records donated by other sources are included in series six, and primarily relate to residential projects.
Dates
- Creation: 1922-1974
Creator
- Wurster, Bernardi, and Emmons. (Architect, Organization)
- Bernardi, Theodore C., 1903-1990 (Architect, Person)
- Emmons, Donn (Architect, Person)
- Church, Thomas Dolliver, 1902-1978 (Landscape architect, Person)
Conditions Governing Access
Collection open for research.
Conditions Governing Use
All requests for permission to publish, reproduce, or quote from materials in the collection should be discussed with the Curator.
Biographical / Historical
William Wilson Wurster, born in California in 1895, earned his degree in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1919. After obtaining his license in 1922, he worked briefly in firms in Sacramento and New York, then opened the firm William W. Wurster in 1924. He gained national recognition early in his career with an award-winning design for the Gregory farmhouse (Scotts Valley, 1927), and became the most well-known modernist architect in the Bay Area.
Wurster's work, primarily residential during this time, was widely exhibited and published. The Colby house (Berkeley, 1931) and Voss house (Big Sur, 1931) were included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. At the same time, Wurster was developing friendships with landscape architects Lockwood deForest and Thomas Church. Though he worked with both men, his collaborative relationship with Church was particularly strong, and he designed a house for the landscape architect in 1931. During a 1937 trip to Europe, Wurster and Church met and befriended Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, who became an influence on both men's work.
In 1939, Wurster met the public housing and community planning expert Catherine Bauer, and the two were married the following year. At this point, the firm was involved in the design of numerous defense housing communities. Defense housing, administered initially by the Federal Works Agency and later by the National Housing Agency, was necessary to accommodate the manufacturing and production workers who had come to California to work in shipbuilding and aircraft industries. Often working with Church, Wurster completed defense housing projects that encompassed over 5,000 units in Vallejo alone.
In 1943, Wurster closed his firm so that he could study planning at Harvard. Both Yale and MIT invited him to teach, and by 1944 he had become Dean of Architecture at MIT, a post he held until 1950. Catherine Bauer Wurster taught planning at Harvard University during the same period. In 1944, Wurster formed a partnership with former employee Theodore Bernardi, and with the addition of Donn Emmons, also a former employee, in 1945, the firm became Wurster, Bernardi, and Emmons (WBE). During his years at MIT, Wurster spent only vacations in San Francisco and Bernardi and Emmons effectively ran the firm.
Bernardi earned his architecture degree at University of California, Berkeley in 1924, and obtained his license in 1933 after completing post-graduate work. He joined Wurster's firm in 1934, and within a few years became one of two chief draftsmen. He spent two years in independent practice before accepting Wurster's offer of partnership. Between 1954 and 1971 he served as a lecturer in the Department of Architecture at U.C. Berkeley.
Emmons joined Wurster's firm in 1938. Educated at Cornell University and the University of Southern California, Emmons spent four years in various architectural firms in Los Angeles before moving north to work with Wurster. He spent four years as a draftsman in Wurster's office before joining the Naval Reserves during World War II. Upon his release in 1945, he joined Wurster and Bernardi as a partner in the firm.
Wurster returned to the Bay Area in 1950 to become Dean of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, a position he held until his retirement in 1963. In 1959 he brought the departments of architecture, landscape architecture, and city and regional planning together to become the College of Environmental Design. WBE incorporated in 1963 and continued to produce award-winning designs, receiving the American Institute of Architects' Architectural Firm Award in 1965. All three partners had been named Fellows of the AIA by this time, and Wurster was later honored with the AIA Gold Medal Award for lifetime achievement in 1969.
After Wurster's death in 1973, the two younger partners continued running the firm until the mid-1980s. As of 1999, WBE continues to exist without the original partners.
Sources:
Montgomery, Roger. "William Wilson Wurster and the College of Environmental Design," in Inside the Large Small House: The Residential Design Legacy of William W. Wurster. Berkeley: The Regents of the University of California, 1995.
Peters, Richard C. "WWWurster." The Journal of Architectural Education. 33 (1979): 36-41
Treib, Marc, ed. An Everyday Modernism: The Houses of William Wurster. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Extent
400 Linear Feet: (66 cartons, 131 manuscript boxes, 22 1/2 flat boxes, 26 flat file drawers, 4 negative boxes, 1 shoebox, approximately 500 tubes, 1 artifact 125 digital images)
Language of Materials
English
Physical Location
Cartons 123 - 158 transferred to NRLF in 2024; see file for box list and NRLF numbering.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
The collection was acquired in 1976.
Colophon
The Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons Collection has benefited from the expertise of the many people whop worked on it over the years. The bulk of the collection came to the Archives in 1976, with accretions of mounted photographs in 1996 and residential project files (1945-1953) in 1998. Sometime shortly after receiving the initial donation, William W. Wurster Pre World-War II residential project drawings were foldered and stored in flat files. In 1998, the mounted photographs and pre WWII project files were rehoused. The original inventory and biographical note were created by Kelcy Shepherd in 2000, before the rest of the collection was processed and arranged according to the guidelines published in the Standard Series for Architecture and Landscape Design Records: A Tool for the Arrangement and Description of Archival Collections by Kelcy Shepherd and Waverly Lowell.
The majority of the processing work done for this collection, a result of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, took place during the period of January, 2003 through December, 2004 and focused on the firm's WBE years. The William W. Wurster papers were already in a generally processed state and the project files and drawings for most project drawings from that period had already been rehoused or flattened. Some WBE project drawings had also been flattened for an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which took place in 1995-1996.
The main challenge with this collection was dealing with its size, particularly the more than 1600 rolls of blueprints, housed in acidic cardboard boxes, that had been stored in an off-campus annex since 1976. The accompanying project files, which included folded original drawings, were stored in 30 metal 4-drawer vertical files. The primary goal was to appraise the collection in order to enhance the collection's research value and usefulness and to eliminate duplicate material and fugitive images. This would also reduce the size of the collection, thus saving limited storage space. Each roll of prints was examined, checked against original holdings, and duplicates were purged. Prints of most shop drawings as well as electrical, plumbing and mechanical drawings were also purged.
For the textual records, Betsy and I developed appraisal standards based on what we believed would be the most valuable material, then tested these standards against actual project records. The results were interesting and the standards were eventually revised to reflect the actual appraisal practice. There was a large amount of duplicate material - correspondence, especially for large public projects, often exists in triplicate (or more); inspection reports are another example of excessive paperwork - but more than that, we found that some of the guesses we'd made regarding the relative importance of a type of record were wrong. For example, telephone notes turn out to be rich sources of information. Written by architects while on the phone with clients or contractors, the notes provide records about conflicts or problems, and often are the only links and clues between pieces of more formal correspondence or decisions about the project. Originally, we had decided to retain only a small number of this type of record within each project, but after reading through several projects' worth of telephone notes, we revisited that standard and decided to retain the majority of the telephone notes. Another example was product samples, such as paint chips and fabric swatches. Wurster was extremely particular about manufacturers and the paint colors on a project, both interior and exterior, and as such we decided to save paint chips for select projects so that the researcher could clearly see Wurster's idea of the perfect green-black. The appraisal standards we developed while working on this collection continued to inform our appraisal decisions when processing other voluminous collections. By the time processing was completed, the quantity of the two project records series was reduced from 204 to 135 cartons.
We also decided to maintain two different series of project records: one for William W. Wurster's firm, and one for the Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons partnership. The records are chronologically very distinct and there is virtually no overlap between the series. The only exception to this are the very small number of records for the firm of Wurster and Bernardi - a firm that existed for only a year before Donn Emmons joined in 1945.
The photographs used by the firm for public relations - both mounted and non-mounted - were already arranged in a clear order, and that order was retained. The only work done was to reunite photographs of projects that had been listed under several different names (e.g. U.S. Housing Authority project in Carquinez Heights was listed alternately as Defense Housing, Carquinez Heights, Vallejo Housing, and U.S. Defense Housing). The photographs taken informally by the architects during the construction of the project were re-housed but left with the manuscript files. Only nitrate negatives were removed from manuscript files and housed separately in appropriate environmental conditions.
Major portions of the collection were processed by the following people:
Laura Tatum, project archivist with an MSI from the University of Michigan.
Betsy Frederick-Rothwell, an assistant archivist with an M.Arch and extensive experience in processing other Modern architecture collections at the EDA. She also processed a small, related collection of papers from Wurster's tenure as Dean of the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley.
MacKenzie Bennett, an archives assistant with a B.A. in art history, processed photographs and early Wurster material.
Dara Douraghi, an archives assistant and master's student in architecture, checked more than a thousand tubes of blueprints for duplication, and added many otherwise unrepresented projects to the master project index.
Amir Soltani, M.A. Visual Studies, worked as an archives assistant providing archival housing for the mounted photographs and pre-WWII project files.
-- Laura Tatum and Betsy Frederick-Rothwell, October 2004
- Title
- William W. Wurster / Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons Collection
- Status
- Completed
- Author
- Laura Tatum, Betsy Frederick-Rothwell, MacKenzie Bennett, Kelcy Shepherd, and Dara Douraghi
- Date
- 2004
- Description rules
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard
- Language of description
- English
- Script of description
- Latin
Repository Details
Part of the University of California, Berkeley. College of Environmental Design. Environmental Design Archives Repository