Catherine Bauer Wurster, Housing Advocate: A Thoroughly Modern Woman

The Kitchen Sisters Present

A pioneer in her field, Catherine Bauer Wurster was advisor to five presidents on urban planning and housing and was one of the primary authors of the Housing Act of 1937. During the 1930s she wrote the influential book Modern Housing and was one of the leaders of the "housers" movement, advocating for affordable housing for low-income families.

Catherine Bauer’s life divided into two names and two geographies: her urban east coast youth, and her later life in the Bay Area. She hobnobbed with the bohemian elite of the interwar years….brilliantly charming the big architect names of the Weimar Republic, Paris cafe society, and the International Style: Gropius, Mies, Corbusier, Oud, May, and her lover, Lewis Mumford.

Her glamour and charismatic presence endeared her to trade unionists, labor leaders, and politicians—who she tried to turn to her vision of housing as a worthy responsibility of the government—sexier and leftier during the Depression. Her arguments were a harder sell in the red scare fifties and ran into a dreary deadlock in the suburban sixties, as she later wrote from her west coast stronghold at the University of California, Berkeley. In the Bay Area she developed an academic career that also included her husband architect William Wurster, a daughter, and a house on the bay – all surrounded by the nature she quickly grew to love. Her legacy lives on to this day, as even the latest of housing legislation echoes the progressive ideals she was advocating for in her prime.

Produced by Brandi Howell for the New Angle Voice podcast from the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation. Editorial advising from Alexandra Lange. Thanks to host Cynthia Phifer Kracauer. Special thanks in this episode to Barbara Penner, Gwendolyn Wright, Sadie Super, Matthew Gordon Lasner, Katelin Penner, and Carol Galante. Archival recordings are from the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library. Funding from the New York State Council on the Arts.

The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva & Davia Nelson) with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of Radiotopia from PRX.