Abstract
This thesis examines aspects of the work of American writer and social critic, Lewis Mumford, and the domestic
buildings of architect William Wurster. It reveals parallels in their careers, particularly evident in an Arts and Crafts
influence and the regional emphasis both men combined with an otherwise overtly Modernist outlook. Several
chapters are devoted to the background of, and influences on, Mumford’s regionalism and Wurster’s architecture.
Mumford, a spiritual descendent of John Ruskin, admired Wurster’s work for its reflection of his own regionalist ideas,
which are traced to Arts and Crafts figures Patrick Geddes, William Morris, William Lethaby and Ruskin. These
figures are important to this study, firstly because the influence of their philosophical perspective allowed Mumford,
almost uniquely, to position himself as a spokesman for both Romanticism and Modernism with equal validity, and
secondly because of their influence upon early Californian architects such as Bernard Maybeck, and subsequently
upon Wurster and his colleagues.
Throughout the thesis, an important architectural distinction is highlighted between regional Modernism and
the International Style. This distinction polarised the American architectural community after Mumford published an
article in 1947 suggesting that the “Bay Region Style” represented a regionally appropriate alternative to the abstract
formulas of International Style architecture and nominated Wurster as its most significant representative. Wurster’s
regional Modernism was distinct from the bulk of American Modernism because of its regional influences and its
indebtedness to vernacular forms, apparent in buildings such as his Gregory Farmhouse. In 1948, Henry-Russel
Hitchcock organised a symposium at New York’s Museum of Modern Art to refute Mumford’s article. Its participants
acrimoniously rejected a regionalist alternative to the International Style, and architectural historians have suggested
that authentic regional development in the Bay Region largely ceased because of such adverse theoretical and
academic scrutiny.
After examining the influences on Mumford and Wurster, the thesis concludes that twentieth century regional
architectural development in the San Francisco Bay Region has influenced subsequent Western domestic
architecture. Wurster suggested that architects should employ the regional and vernacular rather than emulate
historical styles or follow theoretical models in their buildings and Mumford, upon whose work Critical Regionalism
was later founded, is central to any understanding of the importance of the vernacular, regional and historical in
modern architecture.