Wartime Housing

Catherine Bauer’s first years at Berkeley coincided with the construction of housing for war workers in California’s defense centers. Like Bauer’s slides of FSA housing, the Kodachrome slides of wartime housing in her and her husband William Wurster’s collection show colorful views that contrasted with the predominantly black and white images circulating in contemporary architecture magazines.

After the war, Bauer returned to photograph sites of former wartime housing developments like Hunters Point in San Francisco and Channel Heights at San Pedro.

Selected bibliography:

“Channel Heights.” California Arts and Architecture, August 1944.

Crawford, Margaret. “Daily Life on the Home Front: Women, Blacks, and the Struggle for Public Housing.” In World War II and the American Dream: How Wartime Building Changed a Nation, edited by Donald Albrecht, 90–143. Washington, DC: National Building Museum, 1995. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title, organized by and presented at the National Building Museum, Washington, DC, November 11, 1994–December 31, 1995.

Dillon, Lindsey. “Race, Waste, and Space: Brownfield Redevelopment and Environmental Justice at the Hunters Point Shipyard.” Antipode 46, no. 5 (November 2014): 1205–1221.

Hise, Greg. “Building Design as Social Art: The Public Architecture of William Wurster, 1935–1950.” In An Everyday Modernism: The Houses of William Wurster, edited by Marc Treib, 138–163. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999 [1995]. Published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by and presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, November 16, 1995–February 11, 1996.

Howard, Amy L. More Than Shelter: Activism and Community in San Francisco Public Housing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Kelley and VerPlanck Historical Resources Consulting. Bayview-Hunters Point Area B Survey, San Francisco, California: Historic Context Statement. San Francisco: Kelley and VerPlanck Historical Resources Consulting, 2010. https://bvoh.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/BVHP_Historical-Context.pdf.

Museum of Modern Art. “Wartime Housing: An Exhibition in 10 Scenes.” Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 9, no. 4 (May 1942): 2–22.

Persitz, Alexandre. “‘Channel Heights,’ 1942.” L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 16, no. 6 (June 1946): 63–70.

Wilson Moore, Shirley Ann. “Traditions from Home: African Americans in Wartime Richmond, California.” In The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness During World War II, edited by Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch, 263–283. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Wright, Gwendolyn. “A Partnership: Catherine Bauer and William Wurster.” In An Everyday Modernism: The Houses of William Wurster, edited by Marc Treib, 177–203. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999 [1995]. Published in conjunction with an exhibition organized by and presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, November 16, 1995–February 11, 1996.