The records of the William Turnbull Jr./MLTW collection span the years 1952-1997. The collection is organized into eight series: Personal Papers, Professional Papers, Faculty Records, Office Records, Project Records, Major Projects, Artifacts, and Additional Donations. Within these series, original order has been maintained wherever evident. Where an original order was not evident, records have been arranged either chronologically or alphabetically as noted in the Series Description.

The majority of the collection documents William Turnbull Jr./MLTW projects between 1958-1997. The small amounts of Personal Papers consist of documentation related to Turnbull’s Army service, student work including his Master’s thesis at Princeton, personal financial records, and correspondence. The Professional Papers series contains extensive coverage of Turnbull’s involvement in various local and professional associations, including the Community Appearances Advisory Board in Sausalito (where he lived for most of his adult life), the American Institute of Architects, his fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, and his involvement in the Sea Ranch Design Committee. This series also documents the numerous awards that the firm received, as well as the lectures given by Turnbull across the globe and the juries on which he served in order to honor other members of his profession.

The Faculty Papers are a record of the time Turnbull spent teaching at various institutions around the country, including significant appointments at the architecture schools of UC Berkeley and Yale (during Charles Moore’s tenure as chair and dean). Most of the papers in this series are course materials: syllabi, reading lists, and lecture notes. Office Records primarily document the public relations efforts of the firm through brochures, photographs, correspondence, and (when the efforts were successful) tearsheets from publications in which the projects were featured. This series also contains the partnership and dissolution documents from each of the firms in which both Charles Moore and Turnbull were partners. The correspondence in this series is evidence of the close relationships that evolved between Turnbull’s firm and the vendors it worked with closely to achieve its vision, including photographer Morley Baer and the principals of the Finnish textile design firm Marimekko Oy. This series also includes documentation of the various exhibitions at museums and galleries in which the work of the firm was displayed.

While the office records document the firm’s official correspondence, most of the correspondence that brings the work of Turnbull’s firm to life is located in the Project Records series. Along with construction photographs, meeting and telephone notes, “napkin sketches” and other quick drawings, and financial records, the project records are a rich source of correspondence between the architects and their clients, contractors, vendors, and (in some instances) lawyers. Occasional clippings may also be found among the records. Through this series one comes to know the other major partners and associates in the firm, including Robert Simpson, Gerd Althofer, Richard Garlinghouse, Karl G. Smith II, Hildegard (Heidi) Richardson, and Turnbull’s sister, Margaret Turnbull Simon (who, with Wendy Libby, ran the firm’s interior design division). Later principals, including Mary Griffin and Eric Haesloop, appear in the series after 1980. The correspondence documents Turnbull’s relationships with other architects and design professionals, including the landscape architects Lawrence Halprin and Mae and David Arbegast; Turnbull’s former partners and their successor firms including Charles Moore’s Urban Innovations Group and Moore Ruble Yudell; and Donlyn Lyndon’s later firm of Lyndon/Buchanan. It is also not an overstatement to call “collaborators” Turnbull’s main Northern California contractor Matt Sylvia (who constructed most of the buildings at Sea Ranch and in Napa and Sonoma Counties), renderer Bill Hersey, photographers Morley Baer and Roger Sturtevant, and structural engineers Peter Culley, Steven Tipping, Fook Z. Lee, and the firm of Rutherford & Chekene. Much correspondence with them is represented in these records.

The projects themselves are all the richer for their clients, who were, almost to a person, warm, intelligent, opinionated people who came to Turnbull not because he was a “name architect,” but because his vision of lightly but intentionally inhabiting a space and the surrounding landscape rang true to their own. Most of Turnbull’s residential architecture is worthy of mention here, but of particular note – those projects where, in the process, the clients became close friends – are the houses commissioned by the Hoopers, the Swifts, the Phelans (in association with Richard Whitaker, Turnbull’s former partner), the Zimmermans, Gerald Hines, the DiGiorgios, the Allewelts, the Davidows, the Fishers, the Witherspoons, the Cakebreads, the Sandlers, the Budges, the Tatums, the Spencers, and above all, Reverdy and Marta Johnson, who later became Turnbull’s partners in the Johnson/Turnbull Winery.

Turnbull’s larger projects for corporate or governmental entities display much of the same reverence for both space and surroundings that his residential architecture does, but on a larger scale. The Sea Ranch development, commissioned by Oceanic Properties, is the development that put Turnbull on the architectural map, as well as influenced the look of developments on the Pacific coastline for decades to come. After Sea Ranch, one of Turnbull’s earliest corporate clients was Golden West Savings and Loan (later World Savings), owned and operated by Herbert and Marion Sandler. Turnbull’s firm created a signature design for each of the branches in northern California, and later served as a design advisor to the savings and loan when it began to build in other states across the country. Some other commissions of note – there are many more than those on this list – include Conifer Housing in Tacoma, Washington, several prototype houses for Weyerhauser, Kresge College at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the Design|Research Store at Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, Beaver Creek condominiums in Vail, Colorado and Woodrun Place in Snowmass, Colorado, the Biloxi Library and Cultural Center in Mississippi, the Embarcadero Promenade in San Francisco, Cakebread Cellars in the Napa Valley (among many wineries in the area), the American Club in Hong Kong, Mountain View Civic Center in California, and residence halls at Arizona State University. Turnbull’s larger projects also include a number of unbuilt projects wherein he served as an advisor for large nonprofits or governmental entities seeking expert land-use planning advice. Among his clients were the Oregon State Coastal Commission, the California Coastal Conservancy, the State of California Attorney General’s Office, and the Nature Conservancy.

Also of note in the Project Records are those projects that were either entirely the work of Charles Moore or were instigated by Moore. Many Moore projects in this series do not have job numbers, but are listed with Moore as a “contributor.” Other Turnbull projects in which Moore played a major design role were the Hines residence, the Louisiana World Exposition, the Faculty Club at the University of California, Santa Barbara, several early residences, and the Sea Ranch Condominium #1.

The Major Projects series consists of only one project: Foothill Housing at the University of California, Berkeley. The project consists of three elements: Hillside Housing and Commons, La Loma Housing, and a parking lot. William Turnbull Associates was the associate architect for this project, partnered with Ratcliff Architects as the executive architect. Due to time constraints, the records in this series were processed and inventoried, but not appraised.

The two other series in the collection are Artifacts, which consists of eleven models of various Turnbull projects, and Additional Donations, which consist of Turnbull’s student work and some early personal papers.

All series in this collection have been appraised and processed, except the Foothill Housing in Major Projects, which was processed and inventoried, but not appraised. The Project Records have been processed and appraised through the year 1986; from 1987 on, the records were processed and inventoried, but appraised. Certain project records absent from the collection may have been retained by the successor firm, Turnbull Griffin Haesloop, in order to complete projects begun while Turnbull was alive.