Introduction

For better or worse, Bauer Wurster Hall is unlike any building on the UC Berkeley campus.

Completed in 1964, it has since confounded many a tour-group leader trying to reconcile its stark appearance with its identity as the architecture school. While many have a love/hate relationship with this concrete monolith, fewer likely know that this tension was in part intentional. This exhibit aims to tell the story of Bauer Wurster Hall’s design: how it came to be and how it was imagined to persist into the future.

Pivotal in the building’s design was William Wilson Wurster, the founding dean of the College of Environmental Design (CED). Although Wurster had a flourishing architectural practice, he was not the architect of record. Nonetheless his philosophy set the tone for the design team, a committee of three architecture faculty members handpicked by Wurster and charged with the seemingly impossible task of creating a building for their deeply opinionated boss, their new CED colleagues, the campus, and the design world at large.

Wurster’s order to the architects, Joseph Esherick, Vernon DeMars, and Donald Olsen, was characteristically direct: create “a ruin that no regent would like,” a building that was intentionally “imperfect,” and a place that was neither finite nor absolute. While this may sound contrarian, Wurster’s intent was idealist. He was adamant that the designers eschew the precious, the stylistically trendy, and the self-consciously avant-garde. Instead, he demanded they create a timeless building, a place that would support, not define, the evolving identities of the departments and students that would call the building home.

In turn, the designers imagined the building as an infrastructure rather than an inspiration. It would be anonymous, utilitarian, and non-egotistical, a building that would encourage its occupants to define their own spatial experiences and, more importantly, their own self-expression. They likened the design to an industrial loft building with large unbounded spaces open to limitless possibilities. Ultimately, they left the building in what they called a ‘finished-unfinished’ state. The finishing would be left up to the inhabitants, the building was simply an open invitation to develop, as DeMars explained, their “own expression of environmental needs”

Bauer Wurster Hall is indeed a building full of contradictions, but according to William Wurster, it met his high expectations. Upon its completion Wurster proudly declared the building “absolutely unfinished, uncouth, and brilliantly strong.”  

Note on Building Name

The first name for the new College of Environmental Design building was simply the “Environmental Design Building” or EBD. As dean, William Wurster considered several names during the building’s design, including John Galen Howard and Bernard Maybeck, both of whom had deep connections with the campus and the Architecture department.

In 1963 the building was ultimately named Wurster Hall in honor of both William and Catherine Wurster. In 2020 the building was renamed “Bauer Wurster Hall” to more consciously recognize the accomplishments of Catherine Bauer Wurster.