Architects In Review - William Wurster
Frank Lloyd Wright called William Wurster "that shanty architect." However, Wright lacked a skill that Wurster had, perhaps better than any other 20th-century architect: how to build well without ego.
Wurster designed hundreds of warmly modernist houses in Northern California from the 1920s to the 1960s, and is the subject of a retrospective opening this month at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art.
Wurster's secret was that he never saw his houses as any more than a backdrop for well-lived lives and good views. "The picture frame, and not the picture," he said often; and on that frame, the best detail was "the unlabored thing, that looks as inevitable as something that comes out of a frying pan just right, like an omelette in France." In his day, people agreed; House Beautiful praised his designs for "not only convenience of plan, but charm of composition in no small degree," and architecture magazines were calling him "preeminent."
However, Wurster has been forgotten for many years. His houses, lacking the flamboyance of many of his contemporaries, became places to live, rather than places to visit and admire. But his houses, designed in an earlier age, have started to gain new attention.
Wurster's style doesn't look all that unfamiliar now. At the exhibit in San Francisco, entitled "An Everyday Modernism: The Houses of William Wurster," some of his trademark design touches look like thay could have been designed in the last five years. Houses that are mostly decks, terraces, and patios predated the California leisure style that would become so prevalent in the suburban world, while his attention to using summer shade and winter sun for natural heating and cooling predated most environmentalists.
Wurster was one of the few architects to prosper during the Depression. His modest and unostentatious houses were perfect for a time when conspicuous consumption was frowned upon even more than usual. He ended up designing more than 200 homes between 1927 and 1942 alone, taking comissions for homes as cheap as $4500, and even outhouses and toolsheds.
Wurster ended up becoming the dean of the architecture department at first the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and later at his alma mater, UC-Berkeley, but he is remembered best for the way that people look at his homes and ask, "so, where's the architecture?