Tag Archives: College of Environmental Design
William Wurster designed homes are still in demand
A new book and exhibition on the architecture of William Wurster, the co-founder, in 1959, of the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley, serves as a reminder of the desirability of the homes he designed. And Wurster homes do still come up for sale in Berkeley and the Bay Area with some regularity, so becoming an owner of one is not outside the bounds of possibility.
In fact, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone lived in a William Wurster designed home in Berkeley — until he sold it in September 2009 for $550,000, the same price he paid for it in 2006.
As one would expect, Stone tweeted the news that he was putting his home on the market, writing to his then 980,000 followers (now 1.7 million): ”We loved our Wurster cottage in Berkeley but it’s time to move – if you’re into architecture, check it out.” … Continue reading »
Storied Pelican Building is considered for landmark status
The Pelican Building, situated on the UC Berkeley campus on Eshelman Road, was designed by architect Joseph Esherick, who taught at UC Berkeley for 40 years, designed Wurster Hall, co-founded Cal’s College of Environmental Design with William Wurster and Vernon DeMars, and was one of the founding designers of Sea Ranch on the Sonoma-Mendocino coast. But the design story of this pretty pavilion-style structure goes even deeper than that.
Venerable Bay Area architect Bernard Maybeck originally received the commission to design the building. In his nineties at the time, he passed the task along to Esherick who expressed his gratitude by blending some signature Maybeck touches with his own, more modernist ideas, into its design. That is why the building might bring to mind one of Maybeck’s most well-known creations, Berkeley’s First Church of Christ Scientist — and why the Pelican Building has been described as “a unique overlap of First and Third Bay Traditions”.
The client for the building is another big name in California history — Earle C. Anthony (1880-1961), whose wide range of interests included cars — he was California’s distributor of Packards and built three impressive showrooms, one of which, designed by Maybeck, still survives, on Van Ness in San Francisco – radio and television, journalism, song- and play-writing and promotion of the arts.
While an engineering student at UC Berkeley in 1903, Anthony founded the college humor magazine The California Pelican. More than 50 years later he would finance the creation of a building dedicated to the magazine — hence its name, and the pelican sculpture at its entrance. Today the building is known as Anthony Hall, or the Graduate Assembly.
Robert Johnson and Berkeley architect Gary Parsons have prepared the report supporting the application to Berkeley’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. … Continue reading »
