Three (actually four) Departments
The opening of Wurster Hall in 1964 would be the first time the departments that currently make up the College of Environmental Design would share a physical space. Indeed, the departments of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning had only come together administratively a few years earlier in 1959, primarily through the efforts of Jack Kent, a city planner and close associate of William Wurster and Catherine Bauer, a nationally renowned housing policy expert, who had come to teach City Planning at UC Berkeley in 1940 and subsequently married William Wurster.
The forces that drew the three disciplines together had been germinating for at least two decades. The tumultuous time of the Great Depression had brought together architects, landscape architects, and planners in efforts to address the era’s dire social conditions, first in New Deal federal agencies such as the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later in a self-organized group called Telesis. The members of Telesis espoused a comprehensive multidisciplinary planning approach dedicated to addressing social problems. The name of the newly formed College, too, came from the Telesis group. Although both Bill and Catherine Wurster initially protested the name as too pretentious, “Environmental Design” eventually stuck because no better alternatives materialized.
Prior to their union the departments were physically dispersed across campus. Most were housed in intimate, domestically scaled, wood-shingled buildings. Since soon after its founding in 1903, Architecture had occupied its beloved “Ark” building (now called Northgate Hall). The Department of City and Regional Planning, established in 1948, occupied what was then the Engineering Design Building (now part of Blum Hall) just north of the Ark. The Decorative Arts department—which joined the College shortly after its formation—had its own brown-shingle building (now demolished). Landscape was the only department housed in a formal Classical Revival building, Agriculture Hall (now Wellman Hall).
Coming together into a new building would offer great benefits, but each department had some reservations about leaving their current location. The smaller departments feared they could be outnumbered by the much larger department of Architecture, and all regretted the potential loss of connection to other allied fields. Landscape would be further from its associates in forestry and conservation. Planning would lose some of its immediate connections to non-design colleagues in the social science. Architecture would be further from Engineering.
Planning for the new College commenced in 1957 with each department creating a detailed inventory of their spatial and programmatic needs. Based on these reports, the university assigned 137,932 square feet for the new Environmental Design Building and appointed a faculty building committee to advise the architects. In 1958 the design team began devising schemes for departmental allocations and adjacencies, producing this series of diagrams to explore and explain the various possible relationships.
Decorative Arts Department
The Decorative Arts Department formed from the Departments of Household Arts and Household Sciences within the College of Arts and Letters in 1939. The program emphasized crafts and methods of making with strong ties to the Department of Anthropology. The department was housed in the Decorative Arts Annex, a building designed by John Galen Howard on Pepper Tree Way.
In 1957, Chancellor Clark Kerr asked William Wurster to consider absorbing Decorative Arts into the new College of Environmental Design. Wurster concurred, citing among other reasons a need for training architects in color, furniture design, and interior design. Space in the new Environmental Design Building was reserved, and in 1964 Decorative Arts relocated both physically and programmatically to the College of Environmental Design.
By 1970 Decorative Arts was rebranded as the Department of Design. It offered courses on weaving, glass blowing, and ceramics. However, difficulties followed as clashes of pedagogy and personality led to its quick demise. Ultimately, the department was reduced and reconfigured as the program in Visual Studies in the late 1970s.