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XIV Wurster Hall--an Interview by Georg Buechi

12. Georg Buechi interviewed Vernon DeMars, Don Olsen, and others in the course of doing research for a Ph.D. dissertation in architecture, Interpreting Buildings as Interpretation: towards a hermeneutics of building, University of California, With his permission the DeMars interview, conducted March 22, , was transcribed verbatim for inclusion in this oral history.

Buechi

Vernon, could you please give a short chronological account of the planning process of Wurster Hall, highlighting those steps which merit, in your eyes, special attention?

DeMars

Chronologically, to say how did the architects get selected? Now, that is covered, I believe, in the account that Sally Woodbridge has given.

13. CED News, Fall .

I've probably told the whole story right there, and maybe what I should do is sort of move on into the architects starting work on it. Then, we might flash back, and I'll take a quick review of Sally's thing to see if she covered all the bases.

It was the experience, when Wurster was dean at MIT, that they had an association of several members of the faculty to do an important building for the campus at MIT. (That's the apartment building for faculty housing.) This is all detailed, I think, and it tells about some of the advantages and disadvantages of that thing, in Sally Woodbridge's article.

Buechi

What is going to be especially interesting is kind of leading us a little bit to the whole planning process, more in detail, at what points certain decisions were made.

DeMars

I guess I was chairman of the Department of Architecture at the time, or a little before. What is the date that we were working on this? Sixty-two or something like that, wasn't it? [pause] Well, let me jump back so as not to waste your tape, unless you want to turn it off a minute. I'll try to touch on a little bit of what happened before the architects started planning, because

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I'm sure that our knowledge of the process of planning of the college itself had definitely some influence on it.

I'm sure that our knowledge of the process of planning of the college itself had definitely some influence on it.

Now, I would say that Esherick was really probably not involved in that, because I was involved as chairman of the department, and maybe even before that, by Wurster, who made a committee of Kent, representing city planning, Violich, from landscape architecture, and myself from architecture, to start discussing how bringing together these departments could be made into an operational unit, in which, as Sally quotes Wurster, "At least the professions can learn to work at cross purposes together."

But here again, it had these overtones of our experience in Farm Security, where we had been working closely enough with engineers and so forth that we learned to respect them, and they learned something about how we worked. I mean typically, the professions are taught so separately that they don't even know how the other people were taught, why they have these predispositions to certain kinds of things, or certain assumptions about the way the other department, the other professions work. Engineers had a way in Farm Security of really feeding directly into some of our design concepts, because they were right there. We didn't finish something, send it to the engineers for them to fill it out, or vice versa, which sometimes happens, where the engineers engineer something, and you're supposed to put the architecture on it.

And then, of course, we also knew that these professions are separate. In the 19th century, I think a city planner was an architect, wasn't he? A Beaux Arts architect could also do landscaping, couldn't he? Those great schemes, and so forth. And there were landscape architects, and great ones, but don't you think that many of the Beaux Arts architects felt quite competent to do the paths and the things?

Buechi

Oh, sure.

DeMars

Because they'd seen it so often, and so forth. And then maybe you got these other guys to really do it later. But each--there was an inclination for the architect to think he knew it all about all these other things.

Well, it had become quite evident, even by this time, that architects, certainly in this country, were not doing much city planning. That often would be done by engineers. And site planning was almost unknown as an art form, you might say. People like Olmsted--of course, he was a landscape architect--did great parks. But those are always thought of as separate design objects themselves, weren't they?

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And to be able to plan a whole city was something just outside of the American experience, almost, except the very early ones. Some of the early ones, from Philadelphia to Savannah, were actually purposely planned in a certain way to create a certain kind of lifestyle. It went quite a bit beyond a gridiron plan in which anything could happen. And of course, the Greeks used the gridiron; so did the Romans, and so on. So it has its merits, but to use it creatively was a little bit outside the general American experience, as well as the training.

So anyway, Wurster's experience of being close to Harvard--he'd gone from here to Harvard during the first part of the war, where he took an advanced degree at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, which he always thought as a name sounded like a place where they work on women's hats. [laughter] We had to find a name for this out here. And why didn't we call this the same? The "California School of Design," or whatever? At first, it was called ACPLA--Architecture, City Planning, Landscape Architecture. Well, that's a terribly clumsy thing. We had an awful fight to find something that didn't include the word "architecture," and I think that story is probably told in here someplace.

Buechi

It is, yes.

DeMars

We were conscious of the hope to form both academically and administratively a structure that made these into one college, and that they had a relationship to each other. And then also recognize the fact that these disciplines, these professions, were different professions that practiced as separate professions, and were very jealous of it. What they [landscape architecture] really did professionally was a whole kind of thing different than what the other two professions did, architecture or city planning. And yet, they were growing apart, because of the specialization. We felt that it wasn't necessary to make a general environmental designer. Though that's come back as a preliminary sort of a thing, as a background for more specialization.

But we were hoping that by the proximity to rub elbows, to see each other's exhibits, to have joint lectures, and this kind of thing, they would begin to see what the other professions did. Whether you had overlapping curricula was a hope at first. Well, we know what the story has been, that some of that's happened, and some hasn't. In fact, in some ways they've almost gotten more frozen into their separate parts.

I'm going into this once more in some detail because this obviously had an influence in our minds on the planning. This was a very definite thing we were trying to accommodate. I know that

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in some place you're going to ask the question about all of the architecture studios stacked up here [referring to the north tower-like element of Wurster Hall]. Well, it was because the drafting is a long-time, space-consuming activity, and to stack those up seemed logical. You could have the professors more accessible down at the entrance level. Certainly the offices are more accessible, the staff and other things. Farther and farther up are people who are going to be spending more and more time, in blocks of time, using the elevators. The design studios are typically four hours, plus many more at their drafting boards. So, you can see this rationale--it makes sense so far, I think.
Buechi

in some place you're going to ask the question about all of the architecture studios stacked up here [referring to the north tower-like element of Wurster Hall]. Well, it was because the drafting is a long-time, space-consuming activity, and to stack those up seemed logical. You could have the professors more accessible down at the entrance level. Certainly the offices are more accessible, the staff and other things. Farther and farther up are people who are going to be spending more and more time, in blocks of time, using the elevators. The design studios are typically four hours, plus many more at their drafting boards. So, you can see this rationale--it makes sense so far, I think.

Yes, absolutely.

DeMars

We were hoping for a sense of really quite separate identity, both for each department or profession, and for the building itself, that they not be just three doors in a row, or something, but that they have a little bit of an area around them separated from the others, and yet that there would be kind of a joint thing that would come together. I must have recited the same thing before, that as we worked on it I was trying to get a more--I think Sally calls it "romantic" here--.

Buechi

Picturesque.

DeMars

Yes. Well, it wasn't just to be picturesque. It was because I wanted the lobby to have more of an open well feeling, very much like the big hotels do now where they have an atrium, and planting and so forth, and it's the place where you go to have cocktails and everybody's there. I was trying to get a hole in the middle of this where both city planners and architects and others would hang over the rail and look down and see who's coming and going, and this in itself would be kind of a heart to the building.

Well, you can see it got kind of squeezed in on. I was the one that insisted on that court that's on the main level there--and it got meaner and meaner as time went on.

Buechi

Oh, you mean the small court?

DeMars

Yes, not the big court. The small one. I thought that should be a bit bigger, and it should be a definite thing you'd go and sit in, and so forth. Maybe doors should open out into it, kind of a patio, obviously on a different scale than the big court. The big court in the old Ark building on the north part of the campus, that courtyard there was what we'd call a patio, but not really, because it wasn't enclosed.

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Howard Moise had been the architect for that new wing of the Ark.

14. Walter Steilberg was the architect for the library wing, and Moise did the connecting wing of faculty offices. VDM.

It had to be fire-proof, because that housed the library, and they were worried about some valuable books that were stored in this very flammable building. So it made quite a nice court, with everything opening into it. And then the students bricked over the courtyard, and that's where we held our commencement exercises--not really, it was an annual ceremony of the architecture department, and they gave out awards and prizes and all that. At first, the commencement exercises were held in the Greek Theatre. Then later the student body got so big, they held it in one end of the stadium, with a backdrop halfway in. At some point, they felt that a football-sized crowd had lost its appeal to individuals and families; you couldn't see your son going up there to get his diploma--or daughter (have to say that quietly). So then is when they broke it down to having each college have its own commencement exercises.

But back to Wurster Hall. We assumed a brick court, and we tried in whatever schemes we were working on with the thing always to wrap around that court. But I was trying in this little additional court to get some identity at the entrance to the building that made you feel that this was where it was happening. My colleagues apparently didn't quite agree with that.

Buechi

And that leads into my second question. Who were the people involved in it?

DeMars

Let's see if I've finished the chronological account of the planning process. At first we simply gathered information. There were subcommittees of the different departments, including design, which was assumed by us was going to have an equal role in the whole thing. I still think it should have, well not equal in dimensions, but it seemed to me it's one of the inputs. Because we're really talking about the man-made environment. That was a term that got to be used later, and it's rather a good comprehensive term. Part of the man-made environment is interior architecture, and interior furnishings and so forth. It is very much related.

I really think that typically in the architecture curriculum you're not getting exposure to the specialties that go into interior architecture even. Taking you through a typical problem, I don't think students now get as much experience as we got when we had the Beaux Arts system design. We'd be given an interior ballroom to do now and then, or the interior of a such-and-such,

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as a complete problem. Of course, now they say, "How can you have an interior if you hadn't designed the exterior, and how can you even think of it without studying the sociological problem--" and so forth. Students now barely get a plan worked out; they hardly have time for interior design!
Buechi

as a complete problem. Of course, now they say, "How can you have an interior if you hadn't designed the exterior, and how can you even think of it without studying the sociological problem--" and so forth. Students now barely get a plan worked out; they hardly have time for interior design!

Can you remember a few of the basic schemes which led to the realized scheme? Were there very different proposals at first in the design book?

DeMars

I guess what I wanted to say was that each of the programmatic parts of it, square footages and so forth, had been fed in by these separate committees. Our first thing was to digest this, and I would say, as a team, we were working very much together on this, as a brainstorming kind of a thing.

Of schemes that we got into, I think that the planning office at the University was using us as a somewhat--I wouldn't say "free," we were being paid fees by the University--but I think they were trying out a whole number of different uses of the area around the building, and here they had some paid staff, presumably talented, capable architects, to see where this and other buildings could go. So we were working on pieces of site clear up to Piedmont Avenue, as I recall, and were even encouraged--parts of the building could extend into where the parking lot is now.

But when it finally began to come down to reality, they began lopping off chunks of square footage which you weren't going to be allowed to have. That was one of the things that took place in the planning process. There were several of these earlier schemes.

And then, a couple of other things. I had an office, and Joe Esherick had an office, and Don Olsen had an office. We didn't have a central office. I had a bigger office than the other two because we were deep into the student union building and so on, so we would meet in my conference room, which was down on Shattuck and Center Street. This is where the joint sessions would take place.

Then we'd take these packages back to our separate dens like a bunch of spiders, you see, and work on various problems or concepts. As I say, during the first analytical parts there was pretty general agreement. You had floor areas, functions, and activities to accommodate, and what would be possible dimensions, and you stacked these up, and you began to get a three-dimensional bunch of floors, and so forth. Then we began to get down to the final square footages that were being permitted and we began to work a bit on possible schematic expressions, you might say, and

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here again, Don Reay was working very--are you talking to Don Reay? You haven't met him yet?
Buechi

here again, Don Reay was working very--are you talking to Don Reay? You haven't met him yet?

No, I haven't met him.

DeMars

I'll have to have you meet him. He had a very important role in the Student Center competition. Then, as the buildings developed, and I was pretty busy with a number of things--.

Don was sort of project architect in our office. It was just the two of us at first, doing work on the new college building. I think any plans being done, Don was doing. Then we would discuss things. Don had done--and I wish we could find this someplace in either of our two archives--some very imaginative free-hand sketches, almost in Mendelsohn's manner, very free, a shoe factory, a building for such-and-such, conceptual, no plans or anything, but a couple of such things which are really very interesting, and very sculptural.

I would say at that time Don Olsen was doing very Miesian things, very much gridiron of steel, and so on. I don't know what Joe's earlier things were like. They were probably more in that direction, but probably thought of as in concrete. Maybe Don's might have been intended in concrete, but it seems to me they were expressing almost an exposed steel structure.

Well, if you want to stay chronological, there was a long period of time in which it all sort of came to a halt. It wasn't progressing much, and Wurster got really sore. He got us and knocked our heads together one time, and said, "This is an important job, and you guys don't get very many of them this big," and so forth. He said, "When are we going to get on with this?"

That was about the time that Don Hardison volunteered to leave the group.

15. By the time we got to Wurster Hall I had an office of quite some size, maybe fifteen people or something. We had then done the Student Center. But I think they still thought that the combination of another big office with ours could do a thing like the--or that they deserved to part of it. So, it was still DeMars and Hardison, Esherick, and Olsen, a four-member architectural team, and we hadn't really worked out the details of a joint venture yet, but that's what we were going to do.

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moving, and we would have our input and so forth." I said I agreed, to get it off dead center. Have you heard this before?
Buechi

"Would it help if he did?" he said. Shortly after that Don Olsen said, "You know, we seem to have three totally different directions we're working in here." He didn't quite say that, but he said, "Joe doesn't seem to like what you and I do, and I think that if we just said that we're going to have Joe do the working drawings, maybe the whole thing would getmoving, and we would have our input and so forth." I said I agreed, to get it off dead center. Have you heard this before?

Not exactly like that, but yes.

DeMars

I think he even said, "If we go on like this, we're going to lose our shirts, or we won't get a chance to, because Wurster's going to take it away and give it to some architects who will get it done." [laughs]

Buechi

Who were the main players in this project? Here I mean not only the designers, but also people from the University who would have to be named as important for that project. I'd like to know what their respective impact was on the building as it stands today.

DeMars

I've touched a bit on the departmental people pulling it together. George Simonds was the one in architecture who headed the committee that pulled together the actual floor areas after the sort of programmatic concept, and so forth, and the program writing.

We had been picked to be the architects at an early stage. Well, it was DeMars, Esherick, and Olsen--D, E, and O. That had nothing to do with talent or whatever. Alphabetical is always the safe way to get over those things. And this is why Alvar Aalto leads the book on the architects. [laughs] For other reasons, I think he should, too.

Some of the other people: Louis DeMonte was very important. He was the campus architect [head of the Office of Architects and Engineers]. He was in I think a stronger position than I see at the moment of anyone that would be called the campus architect. He had a really strong role, and he met on the committees that were proposing new buildings, and their siting, and really, I'd say, got his way. He was an architect, graduated from here. He respected us, knew us all very well, but this didn't keep him from calling a spade a spade, as we say.

Buechi

In the Wurster Hall building, could you trace something completely back to DeMonte's impact?

DeMars

Well, the first thing would have been leading us into doing the site planning, with pieces of the building extending up into other parts and so on, and then lopping them off, which I think he probably knew from the beginning he might have to do. [laughing]

The main players from landscape architecture, and city planning? I can't even remember--well, maybe it was Jack Kent.

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Buechi

Did they have any impact on design, or were they all involved with individual programming?

DeMars

Well, programming, and then reviewing and meeting. This was not popped on them, you know, they saw it develop, and it was presented to them periodically. They all are part of--guilty in the crime. [laughs]

All right, Wurster came out in to be the dean. I had come here the year before him. I was hired by the former dean [Warren Perry]. I had heard that Wurster was interested in being dean here. He brought the ideas from both Harvard and MIT of getting these departments together. He started off in that, although at first he was made dean of a college of architecture. Because a dean has to have a college, it was called the college of architecture. I think that's the way it worked.

"College" means a gathering together, really, and that didn't happen until later, but it was in his plan. I think this had already been discussed. I know it had been discussed with Jack Kent, and it had been discussed with the chancellor who brought them on. One of his purposes in getting Wurster to do that, bring these department together, was because, among other things, city planning was what we now call a loose cannon, reporting directly to the chancellor, and they wanted to get all departments to report to a college. City planning was going to have to join up with engineering, or with political science. I think those were the options. Jack Kent opted to go this way. I know that he and Bill Wurster had talked about this before.

Buechi

What was Wurster's impact on the building, per se?

DeMars

Well, one reason for the building was the fact that architecture was bursting at its seams. We used a couple of those temporary buildings that are down in the glade there. In fact, we held some classes in what is now the dance studio of Zellerbach Hall, which was a little Unitarian church. We had classes in free-hand drawing over there, clear across the campus. A lot of classes were scattered around. Architecture alone needed a new building, or it needed to expand, and it really wouldn't have made sense to expand it right there.

Buechi

How much do you think that the building of Wurster Hall really was influenced by Wurster's ideas?

DeMars

Well, Wurster's firm's office--it was always in that North Beach area of San Francisco. The first time it was on Jackson, catty-corner from the Golden Gateway. That building was where Thomas Church had an office; they shared an office together in that

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building. Then they moved a few blocks up the street, and I think bought the building and owned it, on Sansome Street.

building. Then they moved a few blocks up the street, and I think bought the building and owned it, on Sansome Street.

The next thing was this larger building, which was literally right under the brow of Telegraph Hill, in what had been a quarry for filling the bay. It is a concrete building, a really rough exterior with no pretense at architectural expression, which some other industrial buildings of brick in the same area definitely have.

16. Wurster's firm did one of the first examples of "retrofitting" industrial buildings when they turned two handsome brick, ice warehouses a few blocks away into quite elegant interior decorator showrooms. [VDM, September ]

This was a building type known as "slow-burning," probably responding to the earthquake and fire of . The exterior would be masonry, fireproof, and the interior completely framed in heavy timber construction, all detailed according to code: wood columns were 16" square with all corners champhered off so fire can't get started. This went for any beams and girders as well. Then the top of the column had a cast iron cap with a U-shaped socket for the heavy girders. Finally, the floor was of 2 x 16s slapped side by side. You had a solid wood floor 16" thick with no edges for fire to catch onto. In a bad fire, the surfaces would char, a little. A bit of wire-brushing, a coat of paint, and it was good as new.

This had been a cable warehouse, to handle the roughest kind of work. There was a railroad siding right up against the building, and the unloading platform where they rolled off the huge cable drums was, and still is, paved with half-inch steel plates.

Little by little it got gentrified. They whitewashed the inside. By this time, Halprin had quite a bit of work, and they were using a couple of lower floors. Here was this rough--I'm leading into the idea of the ruin, you see--I think he [Wurster] saw this as a place where the building was not imposing its architecture on the designers inside of it, because it was simply this found object, a neutral background, if whitewashed and modified completely.

It was capable of being modified. You could put in new partitions, or you could tear them out. You could put some bright objects in, you colored things, you built some new stairs, you put an elevator where there wasn't one. But it still was this rough ruin of a building that you saw. Even now it looks like one [a

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ruin] on the outside, even though they've given it paint jobs. You'll have to go see the building sometime.

ruin] on the outside, even though they've given it paint jobs. You'll have to go see the building sometime.

I think his imagery all the way along was that--and it worked well for his firm--you broke through a wall and worked some more space in, and you kept renting out to different tenants. Very flexible, because the whole space was open floors. (That led into the open floors of the drafting rooms here, though I thought they'd end up being whitewashed inside, or something. Well, there are parts of it that sort of have.)

Then here we were over near the art building, and he thought that--. He was a very good friend of Gardner Dailey, who did the music building and the whole art complex. Of all the buildings artists shouldn't work in! Artists are messy, aren't they? They spill paint and clay, and stuff gets around. A building so nasty-neat, like the art building, it just seemed--. And it's rather precious, in a way, in its detailing. I think it's a less successful building than the music building. That seemed very fine. You don't make messes in the music building, you make tunes. Hertz Hall is a handsome hall. But even that I think he felt was almost an effeminate building.

This place [Wurster Hall] should be rough--not anti-feminine, not anti-women's participation in architecture and planning and so forth, but just simply the building--. You're going to build things that should be capable of being knocked about without showing it badly. So this had an influence. The obvious only choice was concrete, because that was a logical way to build a medium-high building in our time.

Buechi

Is there anything about the building today which you could trace back to a specific demand of one of the departments?

DeMars

Oh, yes. Did you know that there was a glass-blowing factory in the--?

Buechi

The decorative arts.

DeMars

The decorative arts. There's a bronze factory, a complete operation to make castings. So that is an obvious part.

That whole end wing I've been a little bit out of touch with. All the workshop things are in that one wing. That's a logical grouping, isn't it? And the workshops above, and so on. In my day, in the Beaux Arts curriculum, we had no such a thing. We had sculpture; we modeled in clay. Later that was gotten rid of and taken over by the art department. They did have a workshop where

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there was some rudimentary use of carpentry tools, which now, you see, is an important part of the earlier training.
Buechi

there was some rudimentary use of carpentry tools, which now, you see, is an important part of the earlier training.

New question. What were the major constraints in terms of costs, program, site, and also campus plan, formal elements, which were imposed on the design team?

DeMars

Yes. Glad you asked that.

Buechi

It seems to be important, that specific.

DeMars

Yes. Wurster was on a committee called the Campus Planning Committee. This had representatives from other departments, and they were doing long-range planning. You could see the pressure of building programs coming up and so forth. One of Wurster's goals was to rescue open space by forcing some buildings to go up in the air. This was being applied to this campus, because it has a very beautiful natural area. And I agree with this myself.

Well, where was it appropriate to put a high building? Usually pulled apart from other high buildings, again on that general theory. (I hope they're still observing that.)

Then, back before the decision to group it with city planning and so forth was the question of whether architecture should be grouped with engineering, which the early building was. The test laboratories--. The facilities that had to do with building and construction don't have to do with city planning, and they don't have to do with landscape architecture, in a way.

I think it was finally decided that it was more important that the conceptual phase of this should decide the grouping. And that grouping might have been in the engineering area, but it came at a time when some of the sociologists and others said that there was more reason to have architecture and anthropology, the study of man, grouped together. And here's anthropology with its museum, and the art museum, and music. Maybe that makes sense. Right now, I'm not sure. I don't know how much exchange there has actually been between the art department and architecture.

Buechi

That ties into the whole question, how much human exchange can you determine by spacial determination?

DeMars

Surely. Unless they were literally taking a number of courses in the art department. An architect has to know how to draw. Okay, you took drawing in the art department. Freehand drawing. We had life class. You had a course in art anatomy in the Beaux Arts system. After all, how did you learn to draw these angels holding up swags, and all this kind of thing? Then we had a term of life

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class, drawing from the unclothed model, and that was always a course you could get a unit for.

class, drawing from the unclothed model, and that was always a course you could get a unit for.

Well, then there was less and less of that, and we got our own people teaching drawing, and so forth, it was a specialty. And by then I think also they had less art drawing in the art department. Who needs drawing from the model to do abstract expressionism?

But anyway, that was Wurster's very definite input on the location, site point of view.

Buechi

And the tower, you were saying?

DeMars

The tower. It was quite evident early that this [architecture] would be a logical department to stack up into a tower. Now, the only argument you could make about that is maybe the elevators are a problem. I mean, not maybe they are, they are. If it were four floors high, you might get a lot of them to walk up and down, or even five, although I think you'd have to have an elevator for five, but then they would start using it. Of course, a lot of these buildings are four stories high. They have an elevator for wheelchairs, but you're expected to walk up and down.

Buechi

Well, actually you end up walking in that tower, because the elevator's way down, so--.

DeMars

Yes, that's another one. They thought that the first few floors they'd walk up to. But the lazies come in there at the bottom floor, and they'll take the elevator to get up to the next floor, practically.

I wanted a grander stair in that entry area that didn't look so much like a utility facility. The kind of stair I would have would be in the kind of space I would think where there would be a rail around that you can lean on and look down and see people from all sides, some of the kind of ambiance you get in Zellerbach Hall. People love to lean on the rail there and see who's down below. You don't see much of that in Wurster Hall, because the only people down below are walking up the stairs.

Buechi

Okay, what about the courtyard? Was that imposed?

DeMars

The courtyard was kind of imposed. In the first place, we knew we held our graduations in there, and also, over there [the Ark] it was very much used as a place for outdoor--you take models--even classes sit out there. We thought it was an appropriate thing to do, to make a court and have it one that would be paved, not just a garden court.

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The courtyard was a kind of historical residual from the courtyard of the Ark. I talked about that. So when it came to Wurster Hall I always assumed it was going to be brick paving too. Joe and Don, I don't even know that they ever even said, "No." They just saw to it that it was not going to be brick. That's a very sentimental material, you see. Picturesque, regressive, all the wrong things. They wanted honest asphalt. [laughs] Even if it cost more to have asphalt, asphalt is what we'd have. We could have afforded brick in the first place. But we didn't have it. I like a little bit of humanism worked in among my modernism.

Let's see [referring to Buechi questions]: cost. There were restraints on cost. They never tell you how much you've got to work with, quite. They just tell you how much square footage you're allowed, you see. But I do understand that it came out as really a very economical building. The structural thing was quite unique. Now, I'd say that was purely through Esherick's input; I think he had a determining thing with the particular engineer that we used, Izadore Thompson. But this was a very important aspect of the building construction.

Buechi

We have a question about the structural system.

DeMars

Okay, let's leave that until later.

"Cost, program, the campus plan--"I think you've got that.

The formal elements: in the front you had the music building making one part of a quadrangle, that open space with the court. The face to the west certainly gave a setting for the western exposure of the building. And I think that's quite a successful thing from a distance.

As you see it across that play field, from the far side where you can't see the cracked, crazing concrete, and the fact that it looks like an old sidewalk, from there on a bright sunlit day I think the building is quite successful. And when you come through the little arcade of the music building on a sunny afternoon, and you see all these shadows and things, it really has a rich texture. But on a gloomy day, when it's wet, and with all the water getting in the cracks, it looks like hell!

And I can say that because I really disclaim personal input on the actual textural detailed form of the outside. Although I think both Don Olsen and I had a deal to do with the geometry; all three of us pretty well agreed on the geometry and the general location of the thing. So in the campus plan this was one kind of

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a setting, and it's not unlike, you might say, the setting of the forecourt of Versailles, for one thing.

a setting, and it's not unlike, you might say, the setting of the forecourt of Versailles, for one thing.

The garden side is quite another thing, isn't it? That was really the private side. The other side was the public side. I think that is really the effect here, that you can mess up the court, and clean it up, and it can be used for things. The other side has a public presence that has one kind of a character, and I think the inside character is sufficiently differentiated from that. Is that enough?

Buechi

I think so.

The sixties were a time when the design professions underwent heavy criticism from outside and inside. New approaches surfaced everywhere, ranging from the strictly scientific to the formalist approach. Was the planning of Wurster Hall guided by a coherent concept of design and design-education? Which one? And how does it manifest itself in the building?

DeMars

Well, let's see. Of the architects that were really involved in the design, probably Don Olsen was the one with the most nearly transitional approach to architecture. He studied with Gropius and the group at Harvard, so he was getting that viewpoint.

My professors were John Galen Howard, who was the planner of the campus, did the Campanile, and so forth. He was one of my professors. The others were all Beaux Arts-trained, graduated from the Ecole des Beaux Arts. And our ideal in those days was that you won the Paris prize by competition in the United States and were sent for a year to Paris, you see. Otherwise, you really didn't have much of a future in this country as an architect. That was what we believed.

Halfway through my training, modern architecture hit the fan, as we say. [laughs] We were converted rather quickly--not totally, you see, but--. And also, we had people like Wurster doing work in this area which showed the influences of the modern movement. The students knew about this. Professors knew about it too. In fact, the dean of the school thought Wurster's work was awful. He just was against it.

Do you know much of Wurster's buildings around?

Buechi

I've seen some of them, yes.

DeMars

His was always a regional kind of approach. He knew about the international style; we all did. We thought it was kind of factory stuff. Anyway, that was my trend.

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Esherick had a combination of the two, because he claims that he had a Beaux Arts training at first. But I think he studied with Lou [Louis] Kahn. He had some of the people who were definitely the early transitional movers in this direction, who had themselves probably had a Beaux Arts training. And being in Philadelphia, he saw the buildings going up around there, and in New York.

So those were our backgrounds. And then, of course, no one is more of a purist, or let us say more unbending, than a confirmed--or no, a born-again sinner? [laughter] Anything that Beaux Arts did, you couldn't do. It even happened in our Farm Security work where it would have been nice to have nailed some little shutters on the houses for outside decoration, even if they wouldn't work. Well, our poor farmworkers--we would give them a trellis, because you could grow a vine on it. That was functional. But even if it didn't look like home without shutters--. So that's how purist I was at this early stage of my career, you see.

Joe Esherick was really quite a confirmed modernist in the houses he was doing in this area. Don Olsen was rather a strict constructionist, in the term that they used for the supreme court, speaking of the constitution. You hue to the actual construction of the original constitution, not what their intent might have been had they been living today, you see. I would go part-way along. Zellerbach Hall I think represents some development on my part. The dining commons itself, that's totally different, that's not frame construction. The enclosing walls are mostly glass, and true curtain walls, since they are not the supporting structure.

I think that Joe was really responding to the local influences of frame building. He doesn't pretend to make the walls artificially thick, like the adobe presumed to be. But I think his heart is in Miesian solutions.

Buechi

So that was really kind of your common ground in approaching the design of Wurster Hall? A rather strict modernist view?

DeMars

Oh, I think that. No question about that. It would be a modernist view.

And with Bill Wurster's willingness to accept a ruin--. And by this he meant a thing which is just a quite literal translation of the problems of the case, and its function. Functionalism, but I would like to carry it a few steps farther than mere functionalism, see. I think Joe Esherick took functionalism, carried it a little bit farther structurally. I think it has a sculptural movement in the outside which many modern buildings

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lack; it has some depth. Using these pre-cast columns with the necessary structural element projecting out, not being in the way on the inside, and getting some of its lateral forces taken care of by that, it's all a perfectly logical thing. You don't have to apologize for any of those elements, really.

lack; it has some depth. Using these pre-cast columns with the necessary structural element projecting out, not being in the way on the inside, and getting some of its lateral forces taken care of by that, it's all a perfectly logical thing. You don't have to apologize for any of those elements, really.

The only thing, if it had been my decision I probably could not have conceived of making a bunch of awnings out of stuff six inches thick just to make a shadow on the window. I would have felt--I would say that was unfunctional. You see, the functional thing would be to have a series of awnings, I guess. Canvas wears out too soon. I would have tried to find a material that wouldn't wear out as fast. I remember seeing a building in Berne, I think a chemical factory, where the awnings were a continuous strip, and if a cloud came over the awnings all pulled back up, according to a photoelectric cell; when the sun came out, they ran down again. Do you know this one?

Buechi

Not exactly that building, but I know the system, yes.

DeMars

I think the Swedes were doing this too, where you used awnings, just the simplest, but it became decorative, a note of color. Well, if we'd done that it might look like a resort hotel or something. So there's a certain strength, and unity, the way it is.

Sculpturally speaking, that thickness is probably correct, because with the vertical elements of the pre-cast elements, and so on, these horizontals need to be about that thick so they didn't look too papery. I can see that making it all of the same material gives it a sort of classic impact, like the Parthenon, or whatever. The early great marvelous classic buildings were really just all carved out of one piece of stone. There was a unity. In this case, it does that.

My main complaint is that the quality of the finish, when you're right up close to it you'd never mistake it for travertine! I was very much conscious, when we were doing the Student Center, of trying to get textures and finishes that right up close had a tactile and pleasant effect. The thing that I feel about Wurster Hall is that it has all the charm of an old sidewalk sitting around Berkeley. We get so we don't allow ourselves to see those things.

I remember one of the things that impressed me in Europe was that sidewalks might be made of pre-cast elements, with a certain regularity in the way they were laid down. Streets were cobblestone paving. Here a street is asphalt, and is patched, and has oil stains. The sidewalk is various squares lined up, with

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cracks across the squares. We don't see that, we just walk by. But when you think of the area that streets and sidewalks fill in the compositions of buildings, it's like if you had some old dirty carpets in a room, and all the rest is beautiful architecture. So that would be my concern about the building, that it did not need to have been quite so crudely specified. Is that enough on that?

cracks across the squares. We don't see that, we just walk by. But when you think of the area that streets and sidewalks fill in the compositions of buildings, it's like if you had some old dirty carpets in a room, and all the rest is beautiful architecture. So that would be my concern about the building, that it did not need to have been quite so crudely specified. Is that enough on that?

We were aware, in the sixties, of some of the experiments going on and some of the people. Now, I swear that Esherick--because this wasn't really the kind of stuff he did, typically--I think he was caught up in what the British call the new brutalism. [roars] You know. No nonsense! In fact, he went out of his way that he wasn't going to design any lighting fixtures, or have anybody design them. You got them out of a catalogue, the way if you were doing a gymnasium or an underpass, an industrial fixture, it's already made, and that's why you see these around.

Well, that's an aesthetic in itself, isn't it? He didn't want any designers monkeying around designing a fixture.

Buechi

Were you guided by a concept of how to teach design too?

DeMars

Well, I think conceivably. My criticism with students was to lead them along: "What was it you were trying to do?" Sort of help them in that direction, if it made a certain kind of sense. If I thought it was too illogical too early on, and it was going to waste his time, I tried to explain why I thought this was so. If it was just a question of not my preference, you see, whether he wants to do it this way or that way--we probably weren't that far in early planning.

One of the things I found, with the breakthrough out of the Beaux Arts system the students wanted to spend all their time on the plan, to make it work, you see. That's something you could know, whether it's working or not. The architecture, they don't know that, so they got less and less experience in dealing with the aesthetic of the architectural solution, with what the building is going to look like. There were students with projects due in three days, and they'd just finally almost gotten the plan, if they could only get these toilet seats to work out in here! To hell with the toilet seats at this time, you see! And when you cut off with a flat roof, that took care of the rest of the things.

I think that Joe had a definite aesthetic that was emerging out of that. By this time we had handed it over to Joe to do the work and drawing in his office, and we would meet weekly and he would show us what they'd been developing. And at this time he paid a lot of attention to what we said. Before, when we'd show

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him our things, he [laughs] would--. (If he hears this, or reads it at sometime, he'll probably agree. He may not have known he was doing this.) His way of being a critic was simply not to agree with what you were showing him, not to either say yes or no, you see, but simply, "Hmm," and then he would go work on his thing. This is forgivable, I guess. Now, I don't know what he tells his students in his critiques.

him our things, he [laughs] would--. (If he hears this, or reads it at sometime, he'll probably agree. He may not have known he was doing this.) His way of being a critic was simply not to agree with what you were showing him, not to either say yes or no, you see, but simply, "Hmm," and then he would go work on his thing. This is forgivable, I guess. Now, I don't know what he tells his students in his critiques.

I think Don Olsen would be leading them along his direction, a rather purist interpretation of things. I would hope to get them to deal a little bit, manipulate their things a bit more, and not simply let the engineering and other necessities dictate the scheme, and say finally, after this plan, you erect some verticals and cut it off at some height, and you've got the building.

Buechi

Is that what you would say Wurster Hall is about?

DeMars

No, I wouldn't. I say it because I think that Esherick's--. And then, of course, have you seen some of the schemes that Don Olsen did?

Buechi

A few.

DeMars

Yes. His very much go up the number of stories it takes for this, and he cuts it off, and then pretty much the same treatment. Of course, it ends up with the same treatment on the outer walls, but they are sort of applicable. And the modifications, there are still little modifications in that that express what goes on inside. I think the engineer's input gave it its final textural form, which I think is good.

And then, the fact that the inside was a kind of an unfinished thing, the notion of the ceiling form seemed logical. It could be an acoustical form also, and those acoustical pads are in there, but also the actual shape is somewhat acoustical. And it also has a certain richness--it has like a coffered ceiling. To me, it's more interesting than having a bunch of flat ceiling hiding the lighting fixtures.

Also, and as Joe points out, to get all this duct work criss-crossing over, which happens, the place where the fattest one has to cross establishes how much lost space you have in there, waste space, in a sense, and you could gain that additional sense of spaciousness, which I think it does. And then, why shouldn't the students, while they're in a place like this, begin to learn what goes behind those flat ceilings?

Joe did this in his office. He had quite a bit of input on reorganizing the duct work that the engineers were putting in, not

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just where they put them. I can see that. It seems to me that in the tower I can't imagine running them anyplace else than down the center aisle, and having them diminish as they go out. But that expresses itself. But other places, I think he was able to get them to modify the engineering layouts.
Buechi

just where they put them. I can see that. It seems to me that in the tower I can't imagine running them anyplace else than down the center aisle, and having them diminish as they go out. But that expresses itself. But other places, I think he was able to get them to modify the engineering layouts.

The concept of design as an interdisciplinary process, what we've been talking about, where the sciences and the arts meet, has been pioneered in the Bauhaus. How does this College of Environmental Design relate to the Bauhaus? Does it? How does Wurster Hall relate to the Bauhaus ideas?

DeMars

I think there was more give and take between all of the faculty in the Bauhaus, almost trying to do each other's things. I think that the painters and designers got influenced by the architects, and vice versa. If there was drama and dancers, they made costumes that looked like cubism--isn't this so? I think they were all talking about the same revolution. The revolution has passed, sort of, here, and I don't see either the students or the professors in the different departments exchanging many ideas with each other.

Buechi

But could one say that the Bauhaus in some way was kind of the ideal of Wurster Hall, maybe in Wurster's mind, which unfortunately wasn't entirely realized? Is that fair to say?

DeMars

I think so. But after all, Gropius coming to Harvard, I think even there it was already more departmentalized, don't you think?

Buechi

Absolutely.

DeMars

No question about it. In fact, he was not the dean at Harvard. Whereas at the Bauhaus, wasn't he the head of the Bauhaus?

Buechi

For a while he was head of the Bauhaus. Then Meyer, the Swiss architect, was in the early twenties head of the Bauhaus. Meyer was the latest of the Bauhaus directors who introduced a very strongly socialist bent to their work, and an extremely rationalist and pragmatic approach.

DeMars

I think in Europe, with the destruction of World War I and the great need for housing, the Bauhaus approach made mass housing more possible than the kind of housing that might have been done, even for similar purposes, in the 19th century with more time, maybe.

When you think about it, the Bauhaus, Gropius, Harvard, Wurster going to Harvard--. Harvard and MIT both had faculties and curricula rather similar in some ways. Wurster, having been

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deeply involved in both of them, saw what was different about that than the training he had, and what he saw was still going on in Berkeley. It's really a pretty straight linkage, I think. I hadn't thought of it that closely before.
Buechi

deeply involved in both of them, saw what was different about that than the training he had, and what he saw was still going on in Berkeley. It's really a pretty straight linkage, I think. I hadn't thought of it that closely before.

A last question: an integrated College of Environmental Design cannot escape the conflict between unifying and separating the different design specialties. How did this conflict affect Wurster Hall as a building?

DeMars

I don't know that it affected the building, except with a degree of ignorance, maybe, out of not realizing their impact. But I think we were aware of those factors, of these two tensions.

Buechi

Yes. But the building, for instance, from the outside, does not show a separation of departments. It's a pretty continuous building, and the articulation of the building does not necessarily indicate the different departments inside.

DeMars

Yes. That's true; oh, yes. Except that if you were standing outside and wanted to point it out to someone, you'd say, "That block there is mostly a city planning block," which is true. The tower is mostly architecture. This middle piece here is faculty, and rooms. That links the two together. The south end is all of the workshop things, the decorative arts and so on.

Remember that bi-nuclear house, or whatever, you complete a building, you have a linkage. Well, like I've got right here, you see. You can't expand that kind of a thing. Supposing there's a need that grows. Maybe landscape architecture needs changes--in fact, it is changing, and they're getting into more things. They might have needed another floor to move up into the highrise building of architecture. City planning could expand and take over parts of this.

So, the fact that the same building flows around, and they do have points where they touch in the structure, they could very easily simply expand into some extra space in the other section. I think that flexibility is there. I think we had that somewhat in mind, rather than in any way trying to express that. And I suppose maybe we were trying to express the unity of the concept of environmental design. But I don't think so, because if it were one building, one material, you had some deep indentations that said, this is this wing, and that. I think we felt that the amount of space these places needed shouldn't be frozen, and it could have the flexibility of expanding or contracting a bit, which has proven itself in what's happened in decorative arts, hasn't it, in a sense?

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Buechi

Yes.

DeMars

Which I think is too bad.

[interruption]

Buechi

April 18, , interview with Vernon DeMars on Wurster Hall, continued. Last time, we stopped at a question where you discussed the conflict between the unification of and the distinction between the different design specialties within the College of Environmental Design, and how that conflict or non-conflict was resolved, and how it affected or did not affect the building. We were talking a little bit about how much the building responds to kind of a unified concept of the college, and also one can kind of distinguish certain parts of the building as more or less belonging to a department. You pointed out how at the same time, within the shell of the building as a whole, each department to some extent has the possibility to expand and to change, following its needs. That was kind of where we left off the discussion last time.

So the next question is the following: a part of the rethinking of the design practices in the sixties was questioning the drawing side of the designer's work. Does the fact that in Wurster Hall the design studios are stacked away in the tower have anything to do with it?

DeMars

I don't think that when this was planned that the de-emphasis on drawing had occurred yet. This came along with the counter-culture, and you might say over-emphasis on social problems and so forth of the late sixties. I believe you could legitimately say that. Even the Free Speech Movement was `64. The building had been built by then, hadn't it?

Buechi

Yes.

DeMars

So I don't think that there was the feeling yet that architecture had abandoned drawing as one of the tools of the trade.

Buechi

It was pointed out, I don't remember right now by whom, that somehow the book, the library, became kind of the center of the building, maybe responding to a view of the design professions as becoming more theoretical or more having to deal with that whole set of other information, which presumably can be seen in book form, as opposed to putting the emphasis of the designer's work on the drawing side.

DeMars

In the Beaux Arts days, the library was an extremely important part. What do you copy these things out of? So I think that was

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inherited right from the earlier Beaux Arts system, all the great volumes on Versailles, or full page drawings of details.

inherited right from the earlier Beaux Arts system, all the great volumes on Versailles, or full page drawings of details.

Now, I would almost say there might have been, with the sort of modern movement coming in, a little less reference to the classic library things, and more to the current magazines. But even then, there's a full collection of the important magazines going clear back to I'm sure the twenties and even earlier. And then, of course, it was thought that the library was the one joint thing that without question would be used by all of the departments. In other words, each department wouldn't have its own library.

I would say that the studios are simply reflecting the fact that because the studio classes take place usually twice a week for a four-hour period--two to six is the typical studio time--it's assumed the students are there during that period. That's what goes on in the tower, depending on the pressures of which classes and so forth.

Buechi

What would you then say was the main reason behind deciding to put the studios in the tower, as opposed to putting administration there, for instance.

DeMars

The administration is something that students go to, to pick up mail before they go to the class. In other words, the fact that they're going to go to that floor level and pretty much for that period of four hours in the afternoon, they are there. They're not going up and down the elevators, and running in and out. Whereas, running in and out is what goes on in the administration sections. There's logic in that being central to the whole, those parts taking fewer people using them, not a whole class of thirty people descending on the office, and so forth, the professors coming in one at a time. There might be a dozen, as far as the pressures on the space needed. It seemed like a logical arrangement of demand. Does that answer that one?

Buechi

I think very well. With the following questions, I want to go back to the ways the design was done, so we kind of go back in time a little bit. How did the work evolve within the design team? Which parts of the work were done individually by the individual members of the design team, and which ones were done collectively?

DeMars

The analysis of the needs, the space needs and this kind of thing, was all done collectively. Then individually people might go back and, with the programmatic elements decided on, square footages and general location, I think everybody took a crack individually

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at what it might go together into, what kind of a geometric thing might occur.

at what it might go together into, what kind of a geometric thing might occur.

Olsen came up with a very blocky kind of thing at one point. In fact, it was kind of a square. I think Esherick mentions that Bill Wurster looked at this and said, "A square tower is ugly." Period. [laughs] And so, Esherick says, "We dropped that one." [laughter] I'm not sure that we always took the master's word at face value, but we thought it was a little--[laughter]. Wurster was a guy with a very definite opinion on things. Usually he could arrive at this very quickly, and it was very often a matter of principle, just like that statement. "A square tower is dumb." So we'd struggle some more with the thing.

Progressive plans showing the development it went through may be available. Between Esherick and me, we may be able to find those.

Buechi

[I understand] the design was done individually by the design members, and when it went into the production phase, most of the work moved to Joe Esherick's office, and that's then where the meetings were held. I don't get from Don's information an indication that at any point there was anybody central working for the design team as such.

DeMars

Yes, I think that's right.

I think the final form and the detailing and all that has very much the imprint of Esherick's role in the whole thing. There was pressure to get on with the job, and we were determined to not just be coming in and being a monkey wrench in the system. Okay, we decided that, "Joe, here's the paintbrush; you paint the picture. We've all decided what it's going to be." That's the analogy I often use. The three artists get together, decide they're going to do a mural or a painting of such-and-such, and we may even decide a whole number of things about the painting. But finally, only one guy can hold the paintbrush.

Buechi

So that leads us, really, right into the next question. How do you personally judge the team approach in this particular case, from today's vantage point, and from the vantage point of the time when you were directly involved in it? Was it positive, was it a negative experience, positive, negative results?

DeMars

I think that the team approach allowed--or kind of guaranteed--that, again, the form would have more than one opinion creating that form. I'm talking about the geometry of the building. I don't know what alternative might have emerged if only one person had done the entire thing from the beginning. I'm inclined to

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feel myself that I don't know that I would have done it any differently in the shapes and parts, but I think I've already mentioned that I was trying to get certain other things to happen in it which simply didn't happen. They were simply quietly not agreed to by my colleagues, one way or the other.

feel myself that I don't know that I would have done it any differently in the shapes and parts, but I think I've already mentioned that I was trying to get certain other things to happen in it which simply didn't happen. They were simply quietly not agreed to by my colleagues, one way or the other.

As I said, I pushed for that court. As a practical thing, it is a light well, you see. But I thought it could have been a little more generous, and really made more of. Being near the landscape department, I thought that they could take over. If the Danes were doing it, it would have been a luscious little thing: the light would come through the greenery of trees and things. You would have participated in it to a greater extent and it would have made an indoor-outdoor room on that level.

It was almost as though they had as little window looking into it as possible, and for a long time it was just a cement floor, nothing in it at all. Finally, they had to raise some funds, and Don Olsen did the treatment of some tiles, which I didn't think was exactly a piece of exceptionally moving landscape [laughs]. There could have been some more interesting sculpture. It still seems meager. It was thought that it would have been a place you could have walked in and sat on the bench. Now they're afraid that you might have something dropped on you from above.

So there was a case where I suppose that my thoughts were considered romantic, and Esherick was determined that the word romantic was not going to be allowed into the concept at all.

Buechi

We are getting into that in the next question. Sally Woodbridge labels Vernon DeMars' approach to this building as picturesque, Don Olsen's as anti-romantic and formalist, and Joe Esherick's assumedly as somewhere in between. (Although I might be wrong in that interpretation, because she doesn't attach a label to Joe in that article. You might be able to fill in.)

Could you describe the three designers' approaches to the project, highlighting differences and congruences? To some extent, you have already done that. How did they affect the building? Their different approaches, I mean.

DeMars

I suppose I don't mind the word picturesque too much, my interpretation of it, but I think it suggests someone who isn't very realistic or practical, or functional and so forth, which is not true in this context. I would say that Alvar Aalto is picturesque, but I don't think that anyone would accuse him of being nonfunctional. At times he introduces bits of irrationality just when the whole thing is beginning to be too rational!

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There's usually that thing that puts the little twist on the art that Aalto managed. And art isn't always explainable.

There's usually that thing that puts the little twist on the art that Aalto managed. And art isn't always explainable.

Picturesque, I would accept in the sense of forming an interesting picture, that if you were taking postcards, you'd take a picture of that, whereas another composition, no one ever bothered to take pictures of it because it was such an uninteresting composition. Which is kind of true: why do they take travel pictures of certain kinds of groupings of buildings and things? Because they're picturesque. Well. So, in that context, I would perhaps accept the definition. I think so-called post-modernism is getting back into this, which is a release from the puritanism that went along with the modern movement.

Don Olsen has always been very much a kind of purist. His making of his artistic statement is very much in the manner of Gropius and Mies, and the other rather strict interpreters of the early functional movement. And, with great art. Don Olsen used to do one or two houses a year, it was sort of his thing, and he would always get a national award on them. They were very well studied, as the house up here shows. There's hardly any little angles that have not been perfectly--. All problems are perfectly resolved. (And they do make handsome photographs, but on the other hand, I don't think we'd call them picturesque.)

In my case--well, I like to think that I do resolve all the functional problems. Again, what is the definition of functionalism? I think at an early stage there was a great deal of concern that had more to do with just mere physical function. Another one of the functions is the psychological impact on a person, and not only on one who knows all the in-jokes and all the in-bits of aesthetics that a particular group is working on. I think that a work of architecture, which occurs in the midst of the citizenry of all stripes and so forth, ought to be capable of being understood by more than just a very precious group of people who are familiar with the ongoing aesthetic problems.

I think Charles Moore a little bit has sort of fallen into that. He will do things which his little group of people who know what Charles Moore does all appreciate.

Buechi

What about Joe Esherick's position, maybe at the time of Wurster Hall? How would you describe his position? You mentioned earlier that he was very pragmatic, rational about Wurster Hall, right?

DeMars

Yes.

Buechi

Anti-picturesque?

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DeMars

Yes, anti-picturesque. But even more so than most. It was kind of a purist aesthetic thing. Corbu would branch into little bits of ugliness here and there, because they had a strong emphasis, and he was also sort of experimenting--he was doing large-scale sculptures, too. I think Joe would deny that: [he would say] if you think you're going to try to do something beautiful, you're going to fail. So you don't do it beautiful, you just do it the way it wants to be, or needs to be. In fact, this is I think very much quoting Lou Kahn.

I respond very much to that particular statement: what does the building want to be? I'm not a mystic exactly, but there are times when I've been involved in things in which I can almost feel what it wanted to be. You can sort of steer it in that direction.

Well, Joe was following that, and it would come out what it wanted to be, whether you liked it or not, in a sense. The cannery [Monterey Aquarium] at Monterey is a very good example of that. He would deny almost any effort to do anything other than--I mean, he wouldn't modify anything for so-called aesthetic reasons, in quotes, you see. You just go ahead and do it. You want a lot of glass here? You have a lot of glass.

But I really think that there is a character to the building that has its own aesthetic, and I think that Joe, although he might deny this, was steering it in that direction.

Buechi

Would you say that Wurster Hall the way it came out was in its material, physical, visual impact, mostly the result of Joe's aesthetic?

DeMars

Oh, I would say so, because I don't see Don Olsen doing the sculptural configuration of the facades in that way at all. And I have already said what I felt about the facade.

Buechi

What are the main considerations behind the choice of the building materials and construction systems? I'm especially interested here in the choice of concrete as the dominant material. Why was concrete chosen? And, as another example, the choice of those plywood panels for the interior walls, which mark very strongly the impact of interior spaces. Why those?

DeMars

These are very easy. No problems. [laughter] Concrete is undoubtedly the economical material of our time.

Buechi

What about steel frame?

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DeMars

The tower might have been done in steel frame, because it's ten stories high, but that automatically is more expensive than doing it in concrete.

Buechi

Concrete is associated with the brutalist style in architecture, and was an aesthetic choice too. Was that part of that decision, or would you say it was an entirely pragmatic, rational, economic decision?

DeMars

Well, since the two followed the same path, it made it easy to make that decision. I think there was a desire to exploit the sculptural quality that concrete allows. Since there wasn't the necessity to do it as a steel frame building for any large spans or that sort of thing, I think it was assumed from the very beginning by us it would be done in concrete.

Buechi

Okay, what about the materials of the inside?

DeMars

I think I mentioned before that one of the images that I had that made me accept this approach--and I think maybe both Joe and I were thinking in this direction, and I'm sure we discussed it several times--was the old loft buildings so many architects moved into because the space was cheap.

17. See p. 360.

The exposed ducts and all that--I talked about that before--that was Joe's idea. The students could see what the building was made of. So all of that was going to be exposed.

Smooth concrete walls were very unforgiving for architects who need to pin stuff up all the time. That was really the main reason for the plywood walls, to be able to staple stuff to them, pin things to them. However, you need almost a jackhammer to drive a thumbtack into that plywood, because the plywood had to be fire-proofed. This solidified it into something like rock! But you can see how useful it is in the upper floors, the main floor of the professors' offices, with all the history illustrations tacked on there. I think that's a very useful device. And then, of course, you clean it up now and then, not like the breezeway on campus where anything that's soft enough to drive staples into remains that way; no one ever takes it off. I think those are the two things: the plywood is a little warmer visually, and thus gave you a chance to mount things on it.

Buechi

Another question about the concrete: like you already mentioned, the concrete has a very smooth, untextured surface, unlike other ways of treating exposed concrete. Was there a conscious decision about the surface treatment of the concrete structure made here?

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DeMars

I suspect it was, and it was made by Joe. I don't know whether this was discussed with us. Again, Joe would almost think of this as monkeying around with it, you see. What's typical form work? Okay, whatever the industry uses, that's what we'll do, see. No sissy stuff of coming in and sandblasting it, or jackhammering it, or stuff like that.

Buechi

What was the material for the form work used there? There's no indication in the concrete structure about what kind of form elements were used.

DeMars

Oh, it was probably the plastic-faced--what's it called? For the form work, you have a waterproof plywood with a plastic surface, so that it's perfectly smooth, like a plate.

Buechi

He could have used just the plywood without the plastic.

DeMars

Well, you would have gotten a little texture of the plywood, right? In fact, I think that's what we did on Zellerbach Hall. It's waterproof form plywood, but a slight texture left in it. However, by the time it was sandblasted, most of that disappeared. Then, we used color, and we used a special aggregate which is actually a granite aggregate, which--and I learned this from our engineer--is non-shrinking. I didn't know aggregate shrank, but maybe that's the definition they used. Actually, Zellerbach is really quite free of cracking. There are a few little places, but there's very little evidence of crazing, you know the kind of thing that does this.

Buechi

Yes. Okay, let's go to the next question, because there's more about the same general topic. The outside of the building is dominated by the pre-cast columns and sun-shades you already mentioned earlier, at the expense of other forms of facade treatment. How did the design team settle on this approach? Why were the sun-shades made the main expressive element of the facades?

DeMars

Well, you have to ask that of Joe Esherick.

I think the column is a very interesting thing. If the column were allowed to be inside the building it would take up floor space, interfering with the arrangement of tables and so forth. And they're more interesting on the exterior than they are on the interior. I think the device, the way the floor connects into the column and so forth, is quite interesting. It's all, you might say, absolutely functional--the aesthetic is totally dependant on the way it was articulated.

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Buechi

It has been also said that in the Bay Area you don't need sun-shades, because it never gets really hot, and you want to have the sun inside. After all, it's not a tropical climate.

DeMars

And besides, we have venetian blinds. [laughs] But actually they are not completely, 100 percent effective as sun-shades. In the winter-time, of course, the sun comes in, which you can use. But if your desk happens to be in that area, you really can't have a bunch of stripes across the drawing!

No, I think that the sun-shades were an aesthetic as well as semi-practical matter. Without them, the building would have a different character, certainly. Well, you can see it on the north side. But that expresses the fact that on the north you're not supposed to get any sun. It comes horizontally when it gets in in the summer-time.

Buechi

Much emphasis has been placed on the fact that Wurster Hall is an unfinished, open, flexible building. What is open about this building, considering the fact that its structure, its shell, as well as its appearance are extremely permanent? Was it to be temporary, i.e. was the building thought to be finished by later generations?

DeMars

To the extent that it would be adaptable to change. Look what's happened already. Ramona's Cafe was originally an exhibition hall. And that piece of the corridor down there that's being used for exhibitions now, I think there are plans somehow to find a way of semi-enclosing that, so that you can lock it up. But there are problems with fire, and so forth.

And the painted elevator lobbies--one of the first ones was on that level that had the great wave, that Hiroshigi Japanese thing, you know, the fishermen in this great boat, and a huge wave--that was painted on the wall, and very beautifully done. Now, of course, it's degenerated into a place where you slop a bunch of graffiti and so forth, which is too bad, I think, because it suggests that architects really prefer slums.

I'm a little off all our La Raza business, all the ethnic business of putting their imprint on everything. You've got to hate Cortez, and the oppression of the Anglos to the Indians, and all this. Well, you know, that gets kind of ground in after a while. They live with it. I think they begin to think art has nothing to do with anything else other than politics, and how terrible it is to be a Latino, or some such a thing, or the joy of overcoming the white man. [laughs] But again, that can be painted out.

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Buechi

Maybe the next question is the more original one. Wurster Hall has a decidedly "hard" aspect about itself, due to the abundance of industrial materials, the lack of articulation of spaces and surfaces at a small scale, something you have already pointed out as well, and the absence of decoration. To the outside, it shows a close, walled-in attitude softened only recently by the installation of Ramona's Cafe. Do you agree with this description? Was it intended?

DeMars

I think the large aspect is from the west, the main image there. The west is a difficult--if you have a lot of plate glass, for instance, to have it seem open becomes a problem. The entrance to the building is set back for this purpose, to some extent, and gives a loggia effect. It's filled with glass there.

And then you'll notice on the court side it opens out. Almost all the available areas that have no other, you might say, restraints on them, are all glazed in. All of the east sides of the lower part of the building, public spaces, you might say, are really as much glass as you could get for the openings. Is that true? In the courtyard, what you see as you look back at the building on the courtyard side, the public spaces are glazed from wall to wall and floor to ceiling.

Buechi

But at the same time, on the south outside of the building, you have all these walls.

DeMars

On the very south side?

Buechi

On the very south side. I mean, there's a practical reason behind it, the sort of outside areas for the studios. But, they really make a wall between the public space and the building, and again, if you speak about the building without Ramona's Cafe, even that approach is an extremely closed one to the building. Now, it's true, at the courtyard you have that big open face towards administration, but as a courtyard, the other two sides are extremely closed. The library has no connection whatsoever with the courtyard.

DeMars

Sure. Well, they didn't want that. In fact, you notice the library has doubled up on the lids to keep light out. So, in a sense, it's responding in each case to the actual orientation and so forth, and letting the chips fall where they may.

Again, on the south side it keeps the entrances to the building sort of central, anyway, so again, it makes people pretty much all use the same entrances. Maybe by accident they'll meet each other, you see. I'm not sure that that was exactly the idea, but rather than having too many ways of getting in and out of the

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building, for instance another one across that whole south facade, where the sculptural and other studios are, you see, down in the ground level, there are ways of getting through that, but I'm not sure that there would have been any particular point in making another entrance to the building down there, or even a spread opening out entrance.

building, for instance another one across that whole south facade, where the sculptural and other studios are, you see, down in the ground level, there are ways of getting through that, but I'm not sure that there would have been any particular point in making another entrance to the building down there, or even a spread opening out entrance.

As messy as those things are--. For instance, that sculpture court on the north side, where the pottery stuff is, it usually looks like a disaster area there. I think they've got them to sort of keep it a little bit less messy currently. But as far as an open effect--well, from my point of view, I don't know whether I would have done anything differently in this if I'd been in charge.

You notice the student union building is completely glass, floor to ceiling, completely around. There was an image that we were trying to get at that time that this was open thing to the community, and that's had its problems in recent years. At this earlier time, students who lived off-campus who were out of school for a while, or whatever, were sort of welcome to participate, if they behaved themselves. It wasn't until a whole generation of young people decided the thing to do was to trash things--. Anything that was made by the establishment was a fit target to be trashed. They really wrecked the big lounge area in there, the group that lived in--would come in there and slash the furniture, and pee on the furniture. I had managers talk about it, tell about this. Just dedicated to show your anger.

Buechi

Now, that's a good comparison. Going back to Wurster Hall, at the ground level it is so closed. In the history of modernist architecture, the ground floor traditionally was an open, continuous space, and Wurster Hall is just the opposite. Was that ever an issue or a point of discussion in the design team, to really voluntarily close it down?

DeMars

I think it was just almost being too literal about the western elevation and the sun problems, and heat problems, to simply open it up. It could have been set back, but I think we were fighting floor area problems, among other things. And, maybe if I'd had--I probably wasn't paying that much attention to it. Don't quote me on that. [laughter] But, you know, here were my two capable colleagues, and I was sort of--I didn't take--.

Buechi

Okay. The next question, very important I think: who was responsible for the landscaping around Wurster Hall, and what are the considerations behind the landscaping around it?

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DeMars

Joe Esherick used to say he didn't see that landscape architects had any role in things; architects knew what they wanted in planting, they just didn't know the names of bushes. [laughs] I think I can almost hear him make that statement. I know that's the attitude of a lot of them. So there isn't really that much, you might say, design. I think that maybe between Joe and so forth they placed the olive trees in the courtyard. Those used to come up through a hole in the asphalt! After a few years, the landscape department was so infuriated by the brutality of the whole thing, I think they got out and jackhammered--or had it done--so those little lawn areas around the trees were revealed, to get a little bit of something else happening.

On the other [west] side, I think that [Tommy] Church did that landscaping. There are huge areas of path and landscape and stuff there which--they seem all right now, I think. It would have seemed earlier that it could have had a little more--well, those big block things the trees come out of, I think those were added later. I think the original landscaping was just huge path areas that went across, and then lawn and so forth between. It was rather bleak.

Buechi

Every building stands in a history, better in several histories. It carries on certain traditions, and breaks with other traditions. It repeats and innovates. What is Wurster Hall's place in the history of the UC campus, American architecture, 20th century architecture?

DeMars

Well, technically, I believe it was the highest building to be done in pre-cast structural elements at the time. I think that's mentioned in that Italian article. So, technically and conceptually, I think it's an interesting piece of structural architecture. It's high for a concrete building, nowadays as it's seen, and particularly in an earthquake area. Although at roughly the same time, when we were doing the buildings in the Golden Gateway in San Francisco with Wurster's firm, those are twenty-two stories in concrete, without a steel frame. San Francisco does not allow that height anymore without a steel frame.

I think it represents a phase in exploring both technology and the aesthetic, derived from simply a very direct approach to the way a problem is seen. For all the reasons I've said where I have a digression of opinion about the final product or the texture and so forth, the material, I doubt that it would be repeated in that form by anybody. Joe says it has nothing to do with brutalism, so-called.

Buechi

What's your opinion about that?

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DeMars

I think it qualifies very nicely for that description. [laughter]

Buechi

There were buildings going up on the East Coast--the Boston City Hall was roughly the same time, wasn't it? Then Paul Rudolph's work.

DeMars

I think a little after. True, that's right, I think one has to say that those were all in that same context. The Boston City Hall, there the use of the other material, the brick down where people are, and this other thing sort of emerging out of it, it has enough scale to justify that. I think aesthetically it's a more satisfactory totality, but it's also evident that they were working on aesthetics to a greater extent. It was very conscious modeling of the thing, in a way that I think Joe was simply not--I mean, he rejected monkeying around with it, in other words. Let it come out the way it's coming out. Now, that isn't quite true, because certain things are not allowed to come out the way--but that's fine. I think that's defendable.

What's the rest of that question?

Buechi

What is the building's place within the tradition of modernist architecture?

DeMars

Well, maybe those are good places for it to fall: the Rudolph version, the Boston City Hall--. What are any others of the time? Kahn's library building at Yale is certainly that period. Corbusier's convent, La Tourette. Who else was doing things of that sort? In England?

Buechi

Well, of course, the English brutalists, I don't know the names, but it is sort of what also is called the heroic modernism, really a modernism with a very expressive, aggressive attitude.

DeMars

Right, heroic. I would say that the building has a heroic quality.

Buechi

Or really an aggressive one that can't be denied.

DeMars

Yes, right. Aggressive, heroic. And even putting the virtue on what some people would call ugliness.

Buechi

Right. There's that quote from Wurster that he wanted "a building every regent would hate."

DeMars

Yes, and it achieved it.

Buechi

If you look at the building today, what would you point out as its most important successes, and as its most important failures?

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DeMars

I've probably covered these already by touching on them, in a sense.

There are various definitions of openness, and the open floors of the tower building for the drafting rooms are always susceptible to being further subdivided. That has taken place to some extent. I think Joe was relating to the main drafting room at Penn, which is a single great hall with a high ceiling. It would be like the Doe Library's great reading room, though I don't think Penn's is that big. But I think that was a certain image that he liked, that you could see whatever else was going on, people weren't all separated. But at Penn that meant the whole school could be housed in that one room.

The old Ark, too, it was very useful to walk through the building. The freshmen and so forth were up at one end, and as you came down you could bypass the studios, but you were sort of permitted to walk through and see what the seniors were doing, and what the others were doing. You saw the work in progress. And this was useful. Now, of course, you don't see it because even if you walk through this one room, it's only the one level. There are so many of the floors, and I don't know to what extent students purposely go down to another floor and walk through among the architects. It may happen; you see more in here among the landscape architects, and they have pretty much the one-room thing, don't they? The drafting room.

But some of the rooms have already been partially divided. I thought it was difficult at times; if you wanted to talk to the whole class, then you had to go someplace without disturbing the rest of the group. Like a Japanese house, you have to speak in low tones, because otherwise it's heard throughout the whole floor, and I think that after the war, one of the things that some generations of Japanese wanted was their own room.

I have said I don't know why the grand stair coming up from the lobby has to be quite what you would put into a shipyard! Why couldn't it have a little bit of more graciousness to it. There was one incident. On the east wall from that stair there was a gap between the stair itself and the wall of about two or three feet, which is covered in plywood--and it isn't merely covered with plywood, it's furred out a little bit, because of a lot of plumbing that came down that wall. Esherick and Olsen, so help me, they wanted to leave the plumbing show! Louis DeMonte said, "No, that's the end!" [smacking table vigorously, emphasizing each word, rattling dishes] "That wall's got to be covered up!" [laughter] I don't know if you have to reveal everything.

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Buechi

Well, would you like to add anything else to the interview?

DeMars

I don't know quite what more there is to add. I do hope that there would be a solution to that lower exhibition space, so that one could afford to have valuable things on exhibit there most of the time. This is one of the things that you need, to see what's going on, what students have been doing. It's a shame that you can't.

We were aware, in the sixties, of some of the experiments going on and some of the people. Now, I swear that Esherick--because this wasn't really the kind of stuff he did, typically--I think he was caught up in what the British call the new brutalism. [roars] You know. No nonsense! In fact, he went out of his way that he wasn't going to design any lighting fixtures, or have anybody design them. You got them out of a catalogue, the way if you were doing a gymnasium or an underpass, an industrial fixture, it's already made, and that's why you see these around.

Well, that's an aesthetic in itself, isn't it? He didn't want any designers monkeying around designing a fixture.

Buechi

Were you guided by a concept of how to teach design too?

DeMars

Well, I think conceivably. My criticism with students was to lead them along: "What was it you were trying to do?" Sort of help them in that direction, if it made a certain kind of sense. If I thought it was too illogical too early on, and it was going to waste his time, I tried to explain why I thought this was so. If it was just a question of not my preference, you see, whether he wants to do it this way or that way--we probably weren't that far in early planning.

One of the things I found, with the breakthrough out of the Beaux Arts system the students wanted to spend all their time on the plan, to make it work, you see. That's something you could know, whether it's working or not. The architecture, they don't know that, so they got less and less experience in dealing with the aesthetic of the architectural solution, with what the building is going to look like. There were students with projects due in three days, and they'd just finally almost gotten the plan, if they could only get these toilet seats to work out in here! To hell with the toilet seats at this time, you see! And when you cut off with a flat roof, that took care of the rest of the things.

I think that Joe had a definite aesthetic that was emerging out of that. By this time we had handed it over to Joe to do the work and drawing in his office, and we would meet weekly and he would show us what they'd been developing. And at this time he paid a lot of attention to what we said. Before, when we'd show

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him our things, he [laughs] would--. (If he hears this, or reads it at sometime, he'll probably agree. He may not have known he was doing this.) His way of being a critic was simply not to agree with what you were showing him, not to either say yes or no, you see, but simply, "Hmm," and then he would go work on his thing. This is forgivable, I guess. Now, I don't know what he tells his students in his critiques.

him our things, he [laughs] would--. (If he hears this, or reads it at sometime, he'll probably agree. He may not have known he was doing this.) His way of being a critic was simply not to agree with what you were showing him, not to either say yes or no, you see, but simply, "Hmm," and then he would go work on his thing. This is forgivable, I guess. Now, I don't know what he tells his students in his critiques.

I think Don Olsen would be leading them along his direction, a rather purist interpretation of things. I would hope to get them to deal a little bit, manipulate their things a bit more, and not simply let the engineering and other necessities dictate the scheme, and say finally, after this plan, you erect some verticals and cut it off at some height, and you've got the building.

Buechi

Is that what you would say Wurster Hall is about?

DeMars

No, I wouldn't. I say it because I think that Esherick's--. And then, of course, have you seen some of the schemes that Don Olsen did?

Buechi

A few.

DeMars

Yes. His very much go up the number of stories it takes for this, and he cuts it off, and then pretty much the same treatment. Of course, it ends up with the same treatment on the outer walls, but they are sort of applicable. And the modifications, there are still little modifications in that that express what goes on inside. I think the engineer's input gave it its final textural form, which I think is good.

And then, the fact that the inside was a kind of an unfinished thing, the notion of the ceiling form seemed logical. It could be an acoustical form also, and those acoustical pads are in there, but also the actual shape is somewhat acoustical. And it also has a certain richness--it has like a coffered ceiling. To me, it's more interesting than having a bunch of flat ceiling hiding the lighting fixtures.

Also, and as Joe points out, to get all this duct work criss-crossing over, which happens, the place where the fattest one has to cross establishes how much lost space you have in there, waste space, in a sense, and you could gain that additional sense of spaciousness, which I think it does. And then, why shouldn't the students, while they're in a place like this, begin to learn what goes behind those flat ceilings?

Joe did this in his office. He had quite a bit of input on reorganizing the duct work that the engineers were putting in, not

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just where they put them. I can see that. It seems to me that in the tower I can't imagine running them anyplace else than down the center aisle, and having them diminish as they go out. But that expresses itself. But other places, I think he was able to get them to modify the engineering layouts.
Buechi

just where they put them. I can see that. It seems to me that in the tower I can't imagine running them anyplace else than down the center aisle, and having them diminish as they go out. But that expresses itself. But other places, I think he was able to get them to modify the engineering layouts.

The concept of design as an interdisciplinary process, what we've been talking about, where the sciences and the arts meet, has been pioneered in the Bauhaus. How does this College of Environmental Design relate to the Bauhaus? Does it? How does Wurster Hall relate to the Bauhaus ideas?

DeMars

I think there was more give and take between all of the faculty in the Bauhaus, almost trying to do each other's things. I think that the painters and designers got influenced by the architects, and vice versa. If there was drama and dancers, they made costumes that looked like cubism--isn't this so? I think they were all talking about the same revolution. The revolution has passed, sort of, here, and I don't see either the students or the professors in the different departments exchanging many ideas with each other.

Buechi

But could one say that the Bauhaus in some way was kind of the ideal of Wurster Hall, maybe in Wurster's mind, which unfortunately wasn't entirely realized? Is that fair to say?

DeMars

I think so. But after all, Gropius coming to Harvard, I think even there it was already more departmentalized, don't you think?

Buechi

Absolutely.

DeMars

No question about it. In fact, he was not the dean at Harvard. Whereas at the Bauhaus, wasn't he the head of the Bauhaus?

Buechi

For a while he was head of the Bauhaus. Then Meyer, the Swiss architect, was in the early twenties head of the Bauhaus. Meyer was the latest of the Bauhaus directors who introduced a very strongly socialist bent to their work, and an extremely rationalist and pragmatic approach.

DeMars

I think in Europe, with the destruction of World War I and the great need for housing, the Bauhaus approach made mass housing more possible than the kind of housing that might have been done, even for similar purposes, in the 19th century with more time, maybe.

When you think about it, the Bauhaus, Gropius, Harvard, Wurster going to Harvard--. Harvard and MIT both had faculties and curricula rather similar in some ways. Wurster, having been

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deeply involved in both of them, saw what was different about that than the training he had, and what he saw was still going on in Berkeley. It's really a pretty straight linkage, I think. I hadn't thought of it that closely before.
Buechi

deeply involved in both of them, saw what was different about that than the training he had, and what he saw was still going on in Berkeley. It's really a pretty straight linkage, I think. I hadn't thought of it that closely before.

A last question: an integrated College of Environmental Design cannot escape the conflict between unifying and separating the different design specialties. How did this conflict affect Wurster Hall as a building?

DeMars

I don't know that it affected the building, except with a degree of ignorance, maybe, out of not realizing their impact. But I think we were aware of those factors, of these two tensions.

Buechi

Yes. But the building, for instance, from the outside, does not show a separation of departments. It's a pretty continuous building, and the articulation of the building does not necessarily indicate the different departments inside.

DeMars

Yes. That's true; oh, yes. Except that if you were standing outside and wanted to point it out to someone, you'd say, "That block there is mostly a city planning block," which is true. The tower is mostly architecture. This middle piece here is faculty, and rooms. That links the two together. The south end is all of the workshop things, the decorative arts and so on.

Remember that bi-nuclear house, or whatever, you complete a building, you have a linkage. Well, like I've got right here, you see. You can't expand that kind of a thing. Supposing there's a need that grows. Maybe landscape architecture needs changes--in fact, it is changing, and they're getting into more things. They might have needed another floor to move up into the highrise building of architecture. City planning could expand and take over parts of this.

So, the fact that the same building flows around, and they do have points where they touch in the structure, they could very easily simply expand into some extra space in the other section. I think that flexibility is there. I think we had that somewhat in mind, rather than in any way trying to express that. And I suppose maybe we were trying to express the unity of the concept of environmental design. But I don't think so, because if it were one building, one material, you had some deep indentations that said, this is this wing, and that. I think we felt that the amount of space these places needed shouldn't be frozen, and it could have the flexibility of expanding or contracting a bit, which has proven itself in what's happened in decorative arts, hasn't it, in a sense?

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Buechi

Yes.

DeMars

Which I think is too bad.

[interruption]

Buechi

April 18, , interview with Vernon DeMars on Wurster Hall, continued. Last time, we stopped at a question where you discussed the conflict between the unification of and the distinction between the different design specialties within the College of Environmental Design, and how that conflict or non-conflict was resolved, and how it affected or did not affect the building. We were talking a little bit about how much the building responds to kind of a unified concept of the college, and also one can kind of distinguish certain parts of the building as more or less belonging to a department. You pointed out how at the same time, within the shell of the building as a whole, each department to some extent has the possibility to expand and to change, following its needs. That was kind of where we left off the discussion last time.

So the next question is the following: a part of the rethinking of the design practices in the sixties was questioning the drawing side of the designer's work. Does the fact that in Wurster Hall the design studios are stacked away in the tower have anything to do with it?

DeMars

I don't think that when this was planned that the de-emphasis on drawing had occurred yet. This came along with the counter-culture, and you might say over-emphasis on social problems and so forth of the late sixties. I believe you could legitimately say that. Even the Free Speech Movement was `64. The building had been built by then, hadn't it?

Buechi

Yes.

DeMars

So I don't think that there was the feeling yet that architecture had abandoned drawing as one of the tools of the trade.

Buechi

It was pointed out, I don't remember right now by whom, that somehow the book, the library, became kind of the center of the building, maybe responding to a view of the design professions as becoming more theoretical or more having to deal with that whole set of other information, which presumably can be seen in book form, as opposed to putting the emphasis of the designer's work on the drawing side.

DeMars

In the Beaux Arts days, the library was an extremely important part. What do you copy these things out of? So I think that was

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inherited right from the earlier Beaux Arts system, all the great volumes on Versailles, or full page drawings of details.

inherited right from the earlier Beaux Arts system, all the great volumes on Versailles, or full page drawings of details.

Now, I would almost say there might have been, with the sort of modern movement coming in, a little less reference to the classic library things, and more to the current magazines. But even then, there's a full collection of the important magazines going clear back to I'm sure the twenties and even earlier. And then, of course, it was thought that the library was the one joint thing that without question would be used by all of the departments. In other words, each department wouldn't have its own library.

I would say that the studios are simply reflecting the fact that because the studio classes take place usually twice a week for a four-hour period--two to six is the typical studio time--it's assumed the students are there during that period. That's what goes on in the tower, depending on the pressures of which classes and so forth.

Buechi

What would you then say was the main reason behind deciding to put the studios in the tower, as opposed to putting administration there, for instance.

DeMars

The administration is something that students go to, to pick up mail before they go to the class. In other words, the fact that they're going to go to that floor level and pretty much for that period of four hours in the afternoon, they are there. They're not going up and down the elevators, and running in and out. Whereas, running in and out is what goes on in the administration sections. There's logic in that being central to the whole, those parts taking fewer people using them, not a whole class of thirty people descending on the office, and so forth, the professors coming in one at a time. There might be a dozen, as far as the pressures on the space needed. It seemed like a logical arrangement of demand. Does that answer that one?

Buechi

I think very well. With the following questions, I want to go back to the ways the design was done, so we kind of go back in time a little bit. How did the work evolve within the design team? Which parts of the work were done individually by the individual members of the design team, and which ones were done collectively?

DeMars

The analysis of the needs, the space needs and this kind of thing, was all done collectively. Then individually people might go back and, with the programmatic elements decided on, square footages and general location, I think everybody took a crack individually

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at what it might go together into, what kind of a geometric thing might occur.

at what it might go together into, what kind of a geometric thing might occur.

Olsen came up with a very blocky kind of thing at one point. In fact, it was kind of a square. I think Esherick mentions that Bill Wurster looked at this and said, "A square tower is ugly." Period. [laughs] And so, Esherick says, "We dropped that one." [laughter] I'm not sure that we always took the master's word at face value, but we thought it was a little--[laughter]. Wurster was a guy with a very definite opinion on things. Usually he could arrive at this very quickly, and it was very often a matter of principle, just like that statement. "A square tower is dumb." So we'd struggle some more with the thing.

Progressive plans showing the development it went through may be available. Between Esherick and me, we may be able to find those.

Buechi

[I understand] the design was done individually by the design members, and when it went into the production phase, most of the work moved to Joe Esherick's office, and that's then where the meetings were held. I don't get from Don's information an indication that at any point there was anybody central working for the design team as such.

DeMars

Yes, I think that's right.

I think the final form and the detailing and all that has very much the imprint of Esherick's role in the whole thing. There was pressure to get on with the job, and we were determined to not just be coming in and being a monkey wrench in the system. Okay, we decided that, "Joe, here's the paintbrush; you paint the picture. We've all decided what it's going to be." That's the analogy I often use. The three artists get together, decide they're going to do a mural or a painting of such-and-such, and we may even decide a whole number of things about the painting. But finally, only one guy can hold the paintbrush.

Buechi

So that leads us, really, right into the next question. How do you personally judge the team approach in this particular case, from today's vantage point, and from the vantage point of the time when you were directly involved in it? Was it positive, was it a negative experience, positive, negative results?

DeMars

I think that the team approach allowed--or kind of guaranteed--that, again, the form would have more than one opinion creating that form. I'm talking about the geometry of the building. I don't know what alternative might have emerged if only one person had done the entire thing from the beginning. I'm inclined to

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feel myself that I don't know that I would have done it any differently in the shapes and parts, but I think I've already mentioned that I was trying to get certain other things to happen in it which simply didn't happen. They were simply quietly not agreed to by my colleagues, one way or the other.

feel myself that I don't know that I would have done it any differently in the shapes and parts, but I think I've already mentioned that I was trying to get certain other things to happen in it which simply didn't happen. They were simply quietly not agreed to by my colleagues, one way or the other.

As I said, I pushed for that court. As a practical thing, it is a light well, you see. But I thought it could have been a little more generous, and really made more of. Being near the landscape department, I thought that they could take over. If the Danes were doing it, it would have been a luscious little thing: the light would come through the greenery of trees and things. You would have participated in it to a greater extent and it would have made an indoor-outdoor room on that level.

It was almost as though they had as little window looking into it as possible, and for a long time it was just a cement floor, nothing in it at all. Finally, they had to raise some funds, and Don Olsen did the treatment of some tiles, which I didn't think was exactly a piece of exceptionally moving landscape [laughs]. There could have been some more interesting sculpture. It still seems meager. It was thought that it would have been a place you could have walked in and sat on the bench. Now they're afraid that you might have something dropped on you from above.

So there was a case where I suppose that my thoughts were considered romantic, and Esherick was determined that the word romantic was not going to be allowed into the concept at all.

Buechi

We are getting into that in the next question. Sally Woodbridge labels Vernon DeMars' approach to this building as picturesque, Don Olsen's as anti-romantic and formalist, and Joe Esherick's assumedly as somewhere in between. (Although I might be wrong in that interpretation, because she doesn't attach a label to Joe in that article. You might be able to fill in.)

Could you describe the three designers' approaches to the project, highlighting differences and congruences? To some extent, you have already done that. How did they affect the building? Their different approaches, I mean.

DeMars

I suppose I don't mind the word picturesque too much, my interpretation of it, but I think it suggests someone who isn't very realistic or practical, or functional and so forth, which is not true in this context. I would say that Alvar Aalto is picturesque, but I don't think that anyone would accuse him of being nonfunctional. At times he introduces bits of irrationality just when the whole thing is beginning to be too rational!

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There's usually that thing that puts the little twist on the art that Aalto managed. And art isn't always explainable.

There's usually that thing that puts the little twist on the art that Aalto managed. And art isn't always explainable.

Picturesque, I would accept in the sense of forming an interesting picture, that if you were taking postcards, you'd take a picture of that, whereas another composition, no one ever bothered to take pictures of it because it was such an uninteresting composition. Which is kind of true: why do they take travel pictures of certain kinds of groupings of buildings and things? Because they're picturesque. Well. So, in that context, I would perhaps accept the definition. I think so-called post-modernism is getting back into this, which is a release from the puritanism that went along with the modern movement.

Don Olsen has always been very much a kind of purist. His making of his artistic statement is very much in the manner of Gropius and Mies, and the other rather strict interpreters of the early functional movement. And, with great art. Don Olsen used to do one or two houses a year, it was sort of his thing, and he would always get a national award on them. They were very well studied, as the house up here shows. There's hardly any little angles that have not been perfectly--. All problems are perfectly resolved. (And they do make handsome photographs, but on the other hand, I don't think we'd call them picturesque.)

In my case--well, I like to think that I do resolve all the functional problems. Again, what is the definition of functionalism? I think at an early stage there was a great deal of concern that had more to do with just mere physical function. Another one of the functions is the psychological impact on a person, and not only on one who knows all the in-jokes and all the in-bits of aesthetics that a particular group is working on. I think that a work of architecture, which occurs in the midst of the citizenry of all stripes and so forth, ought to be capable of being understood by more than just a very precious group of people who are familiar with the ongoing aesthetic problems.

I think Charles Moore a little bit has sort of fallen into that. He will do things which his little group of people who know what Charles Moore does all appreciate.

Buechi

What about Joe Esherick's position, maybe at the time of Wurster Hall? How would you describe his position? You mentioned earlier that he was very pragmatic, rational about Wurster Hall, right?

DeMars

Yes.

Buechi

Anti-picturesque?

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DeMars

Yes, anti-picturesque. But even more so than most. It was kind of a purist aesthetic thing. Corbu would branch into little bits of ugliness here and there, because they had a strong emphasis, and he was also sort of experimenting--he was doing large-scale sculptures, too. I think Joe would deny that: [he would say] if you think you're going to try to do something beautiful, you're going to fail. So you don't do it beautiful, you just do it the way it wants to be, or needs to be. In fact, this is I think very much quoting Lou Kahn.

I respond very much to that particular statement: what does the building want to be? I'm not a mystic exactly, but there are times when I've been involved in things in which I can almost feel what it wanted to be. You can sort of steer it in that direction.

Well, Joe was following that, and it would come out what it wanted to be, whether you liked it or not, in a sense. The cannery [Monterey Aquarium] at Monterey is a very good example of that. He would deny almost any effort to do anything other than--I mean, he wouldn't modify anything for so-called aesthetic reasons, in quotes, you see. You just go ahead and do it. You want a lot of glass here? You have a lot of glass.

But I really think that there is a character to the building that has its own aesthetic, and I think that Joe, although he might deny this, was steering it in that direction.

Buechi

Would you say that Wurster Hall the way it came out was in its material, physical, visual impact, mostly the result of Joe's aesthetic?

DeMars

Oh, I would say so, because I don't see Don Olsen doing the sculptural configuration of the facades in that way at all. And I have already said what I felt about the facade.

Buechi

What are the main considerations behind the choice of the building materials and construction systems? I'm especially interested here in the choice of concrete as the dominant material. Why was concrete chosen? And, as another example, the choice of those plywood panels for the interior walls, which mark very strongly the impact of interior spaces. Why those?

DeMars

These are very easy. No problems. [laughter] Concrete is undoubtedly the economical material of our time.

Buechi

What about steel frame?

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DeMars

The tower might have been done in steel frame, because it's ten stories high, but that automatically is more expensive than doing it in concrete.

Buechi

Concrete is associated with the brutalist style in architecture, and was an aesthetic choice too. Was that part of that decision, or would you say it was an entirely pragmatic, rational, economic decision?

DeMars

Well, since the two followed the same path, it made it easy to make that decision. I think there was a desire to exploit the sculptural quality that concrete allows. Since there wasn't the necessity to do it as a steel frame building for any large spans or that sort of thing, I think it was assumed from the very beginning by us it would be done in concrete.

Buechi

Okay, what about the materials of the inside?

DeMars

I think I mentioned before that one of the images that I had that made me accept this approach--and I think maybe both Joe and I were thinking in this direction, and I'm sure we discussed it several times--was the old loft buildings so many architects moved into because the space was cheap.

17. See p. 360.

The exposed ducts and all that--I talked about that before--that was Joe's idea. The students could see what the building was made of. So all of that was going to be exposed.

Smooth concrete walls were very unforgiving for architects who need to pin stuff up all the time. That was really the main reason for the plywood walls, to be able to staple stuff to them, pin things to them. However, you need almost a jackhammer to drive a thumbtack into that plywood, because the plywood had to be fire-proofed. This solidified it into something like rock! But you can see how useful it is in the upper floors, the main floor of the professors' offices, with all the history illustrations tacked on there. I think that's a very useful device. And then, of course, you clean it up now and then, not like the breezeway on campus where anything that's soft enough to drive staples into remains that way; no one ever takes it off. I think those are the two things: the plywood is a little warmer visually, and thus gave you a chance to mount things on it.

Buechi

Another question about the concrete: like you already mentioned, the concrete has a very smooth, untextured surface, unlike other ways of treating exposed concrete. Was there a conscious decision about the surface treatment of the concrete structure made here?

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DeMars

I suspect it was, and it was made by Joe. I don't know whether this was discussed with us. Again, Joe would almost think of this as monkeying around with it, you see. What's typical form work? Okay, whatever the industry uses, that's what we'll do, see. No sissy stuff of coming in and sandblasting it, or jackhammering it, or stuff like that.

Buechi

What was the material for the form work used there? There's no indication in the concrete structure about what kind of form elements were used.

DeMars

Oh, it was probably the plastic-faced--what's it called? For the form work, you have a waterproof plywood with a plastic surface, so that it's perfectly smooth, like a plate.

Buechi

He could have used just the plywood without the plastic.

DeMars

Well, you would have gotten a little texture of the plywood, right? In fact, I think that's what we did on Zellerbach Hall. It's waterproof form plywood, but a slight texture left in it. However, by the time it was sandblasted, most of that disappeared. Then, we used color, and we used a special aggregate which is actually a granite aggregate, which--and I learned this from our engineer--is non-shrinking. I didn't know aggregate shrank, but maybe that's the definition they used. Actually, Zellerbach is really quite free of cracking. There are a few little places, but there's very little evidence of crazing, you know the kind of thing that does this.

Buechi

Yes. Okay, let's go to the next question, because there's more about the same general topic. The outside of the building is dominated by the pre-cast columns and sun-shades you already mentioned earlier, at the expense of other forms of facade treatment. How did the design team settle on this approach? Why were the sun-shades made the main expressive element of the facades?

DeMars

Well, you have to ask that of Joe Esherick.

I think the column is a very interesting thing. If the column were allowed to be inside the building it would take up floor space, interfering with the arrangement of tables and so forth. And they're more interesting on the exterior than they are on the interior. I think the device, the way the floor connects into the column and so forth, is quite interesting. It's all, you might say, absolutely functional--the aesthetic is totally dependant on the way it was articulated.

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Buechi

It has been also said that in the Bay Area you don't need sun-shades, because it never gets really hot, and you want to have the sun inside. After all, it's not a tropical climate.

DeMars

And besides, we have venetian blinds. [laughs] But actually they are not completely, 100 percent effective as sun-shades. In the winter-time, of course, the sun comes in, which you can use. But if your desk happens to be in that area, you really can't have a bunch of stripes across the drawing!

No, I think that the sun-shades were an aesthetic as well as semi-practical matter. Without them, the building would have a different character, certainly. Well, you can see it on the north side. But that expresses the fact that on the north you're not supposed to get any sun. It comes horizontally when it gets in in the summer-time.

Buechi

Much emphasis has been placed on the fact that Wurster Hall is an unfinished, open, flexible building. What is open about this building, considering the fact that its structure, its shell, as well as its appearance are extremely permanent? Was it to be temporary, i.e. was the building thought to be finished by later generations?

DeMars

To the extent that it would be adaptable to change. Look what's happened already. Ramona's Cafe was originally an exhibition hall. And that piece of the corridor down there that's being used for exhibitions now, I think there are plans somehow to find a way of semi-enclosing that, so that you can lock it up. But there are problems with fire, and so forth.

And the painted elevator lobbies--one of the first ones was on that level that had the great wave, that Hiroshigi Japanese thing, you know, the fishermen in this great boat, and a huge wave--that was painted on the wall, and very beautifully done. Now, of course, it's degenerated into a place where you slop a bunch of graffiti and so forth, which is too bad, I think, because it suggests that architects really prefer slums.

I'm a little off all our La Raza business, all the ethnic business of putting their imprint on everything. You've got to hate Cortez, and the oppression of the Anglos to the Indians, and all this. Well, you know, that gets kind of ground in after a while. They live with it. I think they begin to think art has nothing to do with anything else other than politics, and how terrible it is to be a Latino, or some such a thing, or the joy of overcoming the white man. [laughs] But again, that can be painted out.

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Buechi

Maybe the next question is the more original one. Wurster Hall has a decidedly "hard" aspect about itself, due to the abundance of industrial materials, the lack of articulation of spaces and surfaces at a small scale, something you have already pointed out as well, and the absence of decoration. To the outside, it shows a close, walled-in attitude softened only recently by the installation of Ramona's Cafe. Do you agree with this description? Was it intended?

DeMars

I think the large aspect is from the west, the main image there. The west is a difficult--if you have a lot of plate glass, for instance, to have it seem open becomes a problem. The entrance to the building is set back for this purpose, to some extent, and gives a loggia effect. It's filled with glass there.

And then you'll notice on the court side it opens out. Almost all the available areas that have no other, you might say, restraints on them, are all glazed in. All of the east sides of the lower part of the building, public spaces, you might say, are really as much glass as you could get for the openings. Is that true? In the courtyard, what you see as you look back at the building on the courtyard side, the public spaces are glazed from wall to wall and floor to ceiling.

Buechi

But at the same time, on the south outside of the building, you have all these walls.

DeMars

On the very south side?

Buechi

On the very south side. I mean, there's a practical reason behind it, the sort of outside areas for the studios. But, they really make a wall between the public space and the building, and again, if you speak about the building without Ramona's Cafe, even that approach is an extremely closed one to the building. Now, it's true, at the courtyard you have that big open face towards administration, but as a courtyard, the other two sides are extremely closed. The library has no connection whatsoever with the courtyard.

DeMars

Sure. Well, they didn't want that. In fact, you notice the library has doubled up on the lids to keep light out. So, in a sense, it's responding in each case to the actual orientation and so forth, and letting the chips fall where they may.

Again, on the south side it keeps the entrances to the building sort of central, anyway, so again, it makes people pretty much all use the same entrances. Maybe by accident they'll meet each other, you see. I'm not sure that that was exactly the idea, but rather than having too many ways of getting in and out of the

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building, for instance another one across that whole south facade, where the sculptural and other studios are, you see, down in the ground level, there are ways of getting through that, but I'm not sure that there would have been any particular point in making another entrance to the building down there, or even a spread opening out entrance.

building, for instance another one across that whole south facade, where the sculptural and other studios are, you see, down in the ground level, there are ways of getting through that, but I'm not sure that there would have been any particular point in making another entrance to the building down there, or even a spread opening out entrance.

As messy as those things are--. For instance, that sculpture court on the north side, where the pottery stuff is, it usually looks like a disaster area there. I think they've got them to sort of keep it a little bit less messy currently. But as far as an open effect--well, from my point of view, I don't know whether I would have done anything differently in this if I'd been in charge.

You notice the student union building is completely glass, floor to ceiling, completely around. There was an image that we were trying to get at that time that this was open thing to the community, and that's had its problems in recent years. At this earlier time, students who lived off-campus who were out of school for a while, or whatever, were sort of welcome to participate, if they behaved themselves. It wasn't until a whole generation of young people decided the thing to do was to trash things--. Anything that was made by the establishment was a fit target to be trashed. They really wrecked the big lounge area in there, the group that lived in--would come in there and slash the furniture, and pee on the furniture. I had managers talk about it, tell about this. Just dedicated to show your anger.

Buechi

Now, that's a good comparison. Going back to Wurster Hall, at the ground level it is so closed. In the history of modernist architecture, the ground floor traditionally was an open, continuous space, and Wurster Hall is just the opposite. Was that ever an issue or a point of discussion in the design team, to really voluntarily close it down?

DeMars

I think it was just almost being too literal about the western elevation and the sun problems, and heat problems, to simply open it up. It could have been set back, but I think we were fighting floor area problems, among other things. And, maybe if I'd had--I probably wasn't paying that much attention to it. Don't quote me on that. [laughter] But, you know, here were my two capable colleagues, and I was sort of--I didn't take--.

Buechi

Okay. The next question, very important I think: who was responsible for the landscaping around Wurster Hall, and what are the considerations behind the landscaping around it?

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DeMars

Joe Esherick used to say he didn't see that landscape architects had any role in things; architects knew what they wanted in planting, they just didn't know the names of bushes. [laughs] I think I can almost hear him make that statement. I know that's the attitude of a lot of them. So there isn't really that much, you might say, design. I think that maybe between Joe and so forth they placed the olive trees in the courtyard. Those used to come up through a hole in the asphalt! After a few years, the landscape department was so infuriated by the brutality of the whole thing, I think they got out and jackhammered--or had it done--so those little lawn areas around the trees were revealed, to get a little bit of something else happening.

On the other [west] side, I think that [Tommy] Church did that landscaping. There are huge areas of path and landscape and stuff there which--they seem all right now, I think. It would have seemed earlier that it could have had a little more--well, those big block things the trees come out of, I think those were added later. I think the original landscaping was just huge path areas that went across, and then lawn and so forth between. It was rather bleak.

Buechi

Every building stands in a history, better in several histories. It carries on certain traditions, and breaks with other traditions. It repeats and innovates. What is Wurster Hall's place in the history of the UC campus, American architecture, 20th century architecture?

DeMars

Well, technically, I believe it was the highest building to be done in pre-cast structural elements at the time. I think that's mentioned in that Italian article. So, technically and conceptually, I think it's an interesting piece of structural architecture. It's high for a concrete building, nowadays as it's seen, and particularly in an earthquake area. Although at roughly the same time, when we were doing the buildings in the Golden Gateway in San Francisco with Wurster's firm, those are twenty-two stories in concrete, without a steel frame. San Francisco does not allow that height anymore without a steel frame.

I think it represents a phase in exploring both technology and the aesthetic, derived from simply a very direct approach to the way a problem is seen. For all the reasons I've said where I have a digression of opinion about the final product or the texture and so forth, the material, I doubt that it would be repeated in that form by anybody. Joe says it has nothing to do with brutalism, so-called.

Buechi

What's your opinion about that?

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DeMars

I think it qualifies very nicely for that description. [laughter]

Buechi

There were buildings going up on the East Coast--the Boston City Hall was roughly the same time, wasn't it? Then Paul Rudolph's work.

DeMars

I think a little after. True, that's right, I think one has to say that those were all in that same context. The Boston City Hall, there the use of the other material, the brick down where people are, and this other thing sort of emerging out of it, it has enough scale to justify that. I think aesthetically it's a more satisfactory totality, but it's also evident that they were working on aesthetics to a greater extent. It was very conscious modeling of the thing, in a way that I think Joe was simply not--I mean, he rejected monkeying around with it, in other words. Let it come out the way it's coming out. Now, that isn't quite true, because certain things are not allowed to come out the way--but that's fine. I think that's defendable.

What's the rest of that question?

Buechi

What is the building's place within the tradition of modernist architecture?

DeMars

Well, maybe those are good places for it to fall: the Rudolph version, the Boston City Hall--. What are any others of the time? Kahn's library building at Yale is certainly that period. Corbusier's convent, La Tourette. Who else was doing things of that sort? In England?

Buechi

Well, of course, the English brutalists, I don't know the names, but it is sort of what also is called the heroic modernism, really a modernism with a very expressive, aggressive attitude.

DeMars

Right, heroic. I would say that the building has a heroic quality.

Buechi

Or really an aggressive one that can't be denied.

DeMars

Yes, right. Aggressive, heroic. And even putting the virtue on what some people would call ugliness.

Buechi

Right. There's that quote from Wurster that he wanted "a building every regent would hate."

DeMars

Yes, and it achieved it.

Buechi

If you look at the building today, what would you point out as its most important successes, and as its most important failures?

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DeMars

I've probably covered these already by touching on them, in a sense.

There are various definitions of openness, and the open floors of the tower building for the drafting rooms are always susceptible to being further subdivided. That has taken place to some extent. I think Joe was relating to the main drafting room at Penn, which is a single great hall with a high ceiling. It would be like the Doe Library's great reading room, though I don't think Penn's is that big. But I think that was a certain image that he liked, that you could see whatever else was going on, people weren't all separated. But at Penn that meant the whole school could be housed in that one room.

The old Ark, too, it was very useful to walk through the building. The freshmen and so forth were up at one end, and as you came down you could bypass the studios, but you were sort of permitted to walk through and see what the seniors were doing, and what the others were doing. You saw the work in progress. And this was useful. Now, of course, you don't see it because even if you walk through this one room, it's only the one level. There are so many of the floors, and I don't know to what extent students purposely go down to another floor and walk through among the architects. It may happen; you see more in here among the landscape architects, and they have pretty much the one-room thing, don't they? The drafting room.

But some of the rooms have already been partially divided. I thought it was difficult at times; if you wanted to talk to the whole class, then you had to go someplace without disturbing the rest of the group. Like a Japanese house, you have to speak in low tones, because otherwise it's heard throughout the whole floor, and I think that after the war, one of the things that some generations of Japanese wanted was their own room.

I have said I don't know why the grand stair coming up from the lobby has to be quite what you would put into a shipyard! Why couldn't it have a little bit of more graciousness to it. There was one incident. On the east wall from that stair there was a gap between the stair itself and the wall of about two or three feet, which is covered in plywood--and it isn't merely covered with plywood, it's furred out a little bit, because of a lot of plumbing that came down that wall. Esherick and Olsen, so help me, they wanted to leave the plumbing show! Louis DeMonte said, "No, that's the end!" [smacking table vigorously, emphasizing each word, rattling dishes] "That wall's got to be covered up!" [laughter] I don't know if you have to reveal everything.

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Buechi

Well, would you like to add anything else to the interview?

DeMars

I don't know quite what more there is to add. I do hope that there would be a solution to that lower exhibition space, so that one could afford to have valuable things on exhibit there most of the time. This is one of the things that you need, to see what's going on, what students have been doing. It's a shame that you can't.

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